What Will Obama's Foreign Policy Look Like?

There has been a great number of blog posts around the net expressing opinions on what Obama is doing with his national security and foriegn policy team. Keeping Gates at defense, bringing in Clinton to State, Jones as National Security Adviser with Tom Donilon as his Deputy and Susan Rice as the UN ambassador, Biden as VP. Instead of simply bitching about these people and whether they are new enough or left enough i want to get a little deeper into the weeds and see if we can sort out exactly what Obama wants to achieve with this group.

A lot of the critique of this group centers around the idea that Obama is selling out his positions that he staked out during the primaries. Many if not most of the aforementioned group were not strong backers of his exact positions across the board so questions about Obama's intent are more than ok, they are necessary. As the flotation of the Brennan nomination showed, making a strong case against someone can have an effect. Dissent is not a bad thing as long as it is reasoned. What appears to be driving the Obama picks is what appears to drive the Obama agenda in general, a broad consensus about what needs to be done,

What is interesting in my view is that what you now see forming is a broad consensus among liberals, liberal hawks and realists. There is relatively universal agreement among these groups that we need to begin withdrawing from Iraq, focus more on Afghanistan, opt for direct diplomacy with Iran, reengage with the world, improve our image, strengthen our alliances, close Guantanamo and deal with global warming and energy security.

That is a pretty broad consensus and it's one that politically was first pushed hardest by the left. On the traditional right-left spectrum, you would have to call this a solidly left of center consensus that has in fact been Obama's foreign policy platform for the last two years

It is reflected in Obama's ability to pick realists, liberals, and liberal hawks to build a coalition foreign policy team. It's unfair to typify any of Obama's picks as absolutely from one school but roughly speaking Obama campaign advisors and folks such as Susan Rice are more representative of liberals. Jim Jones and Bob Gates are more representative of the realists, and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are more representative of the liberal hawks. Although, again, none of these labels really fit perfectly.

Whats missing in that set of broad consensus but is still a critical part of Obama's ideas on foriegn policy is a focus less on the national level and more on the transnational and the subnational. Obama favors a shift to a soft power strategy that knows no boarders. Its a radical change but one that has the potential to deal with a number of our serious challenges. Back in March Salon had a piece entitled The Obama Doctrine. The central premise of this article is that Obama is centered on rettoling American foreign policy to target and fight against the potential terrorist and transnational groups. The label given to the soft power side of this is "Dignity Promotion"

This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. "I don't think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does," says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, A Problem From Hell. "Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking]," she says. "If you start with that, it explains why it's not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It's not a human way to live. It's graceless -- an affront to your sense of dignity."

During Bush's second term, a strange disconnect has arisen in liberal foreign-policy circles in response to the president's so-called "freedom agenda." Some liberals, like Matthew Yglesias in his book Heads In The Sand, note the insincerity of the administration's stated goal of exporting democracy. Bush, they observe, only targets for democratization countries that challenge American hegemony. Other liberal foreign-policy types, such as Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, insist the administration is sincere but too focused on elections without supporting the civil-society institutions that sustain democracy. Still others, like Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, contend that a focus on democracy in the developing world without privileging the protection of civil and political rights is a recipe for a dangerous illiberalism.

What's typically neglected in these arguments is the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen. Democracy, in other words, is valuable to people insofar as it allows them first to meet their basic needs. It is much harder to provide that sense of dignity than to hold an election in Baghdad or Gaza and declare oneself shocked when illiberal forces triumph. "Look at why the baddies win these elections," Power says. "It's because [populations are] living in climates of fear." U.S. policy, she continues, should be "about meeting people where they're at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That's the swamp that needs draining. If we're to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we're not [providing]."

This is why, Obama's advisers argue, national security depends in large part on dignity promotion. Without it, the U.S. will never be able to destroy al-Qaeda. Extremists will forever be able to demagogue conditions of misery, making continued U.S. involvement in asymmetric warfare an increasingly counterproductive exercise -- because killing one terrorist creates five more in his place. "It's about attacking pools of potential terrorism around the globe," Gration says. "Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I'm concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years."

The focus on an actual shift to ways of fighting counter insurgency instead of paying lip service to fighting counter insurgents would be a major step in the right direction. However the transition requires more than a shift in the civilian side of things it requires a shift in the military side too. This is where keeping Gates at defense comes in according to Slate's Fred Kaplan and promoted by Steve Benen,

In his nearly two years at the helm of the Pentagon, Gates has delivered a series of speeches on the future direction of military policy. He has urged officers to recognize the shift in the face of warfare from the World War II legacy of titanic armored battles between comparably mighty foes to the modern reality of small shadow wars against terrorists and insurgents.

More than that, he has called for systematic adjustments to this new reality: canceling weapons systems that aren't suited to these kinds of wars and building more weapons that are; reforming the promotion boards to reward and advance the creative officers who have proved most adept at this style of warfare; rethinking the roles and missions of the individual branches of the armed services; siphoning some of the military's missions, especially those dealing with "nation building," to civilian agencies.

From the start, he knew that he wouldn't have time to make a lot of headway in these campaigns -- which, within the military, represent fairly radical ideas. His intent was to spell out an agenda, and lay the groundwork, for the next administration.

Now it seems he's going to be in the next administration. And it's a good bet that President Barack Obama will be more receptive to Gates' agenda than President George W. Bush ever was. First, Obama is open to new ideas generally. Second, at his Nov. 25 press conference, Obama said he would direct his new budget director to go over every program, every line item, with an eye toward eliminating those that don't work or aren't needed -- and he pointedly included the Department of Defense among the agencies to be audited.

In short, Gates might be able to do many of the things that until now he has managed only to advocate.

So whatever Gates other thoughts this idea of shifting is in line with Obama's thoughts. As Kaplan and Benen note the advantage of keeping Gates on to carry out this shift is that he is already familiar with the shifts that need to be made and has the street cred to carry them out with Obama's backing. A new face with the same idea's would take time getting up to speed and Obama has made clear that he plans to waste no time when he can avoid it.

Assuming Obama's chief goal is actually to fight terrorists it explains one of the reasons that he has been so close to the Brent Snowcroft school of foreign policy as Josh Marshall explains in this video.



Snowcrofts WSJ piece was premised on the idea that attacking Iraq would derail our counter terrorism efforts,

But the central point is that any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism. Worse, there is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time. So long as that sentiment persists, it would require the U.S. to pursue a virtual go-it-alone strategy against Iraq, making any military operations correspondingly more difficult and expensive. The most serious cost, however, would be to the war on terrorism. Ignoring that clear sentiment would result in a serious degradation in international cooperation with us against terrorism. And make no mistake, we simply cannot win that war without enthusiastic international cooperation, especially on intelligence.

Scowcroft's thoughts do tend to go very well with what Obama has put forth. That segment of the foriegn policy establishment has been outspoken about the need to engage our enemies and stop the policy of ignoring people we dont like just as obama has. If were going to talk to people more we might want to go back to respecting the UN as an institution.

If Obama hopes to make major shifts in the way america works on the world stage he needs someone competent and important to head the UN. Susan Rice is that person. Susan Rice is someone who was with Obama during the primaries and was also a veteran of the Clinton white house. Her primary focus seems to be on Africa and she has been noted for her involvement in the lack of intervention in Rwanda. She is for intervention in Darfur. Her close ties to Obama may be taken as a signal that the US is giving that institution more respect. Obama is a big fan of multilateralism when available and if he hopes to make a major shift in the way the US combats terror world wide using the UN as an institutional vehicle is going to be very important. Obama has a history of being in the forefront of those dealing with Africa and the multitude of genocidal wars going on there and the UN spends a lot of time dealing with Africa so Susan rice seems like a good fit there.

Not much is known about General James Jones views on general foreign policy. His views on energy are one of the best understood because of his Sept 30th speech at Fort Collins Co where he came out for increased off shore drilling and increases in nuclear power. He views energy security as an important part of national security and advocated a policy of fixing our energy infrastructure that rachel maddow would be proud of. We also know that he views afghanistan/pakistan as an essential fight in defeating terrorism and is committed to a long term presence there. He shares that with obama. Jones' white paper on afghanistan is available in pdf form here.

The key to success - as in any counter-insurgency - rests on the Afghans. If enabled with effective security forces, the promise of a growing economy and legitimate institutions of government including the legal and judicial system, Afghanistan can become a functioning and secure country. This will take a great deal of time. Hence, nato and the international community must reaffirm its commitment for the long haul that will be measured in years and perhaps decades, though the form and substance of assistance will change as that nation progresses towards peace, stability and democracy.

But, if nato and the international community, together with the Karzai government, cannot put forward a coordinated and comprehensive effort that is sustainable and adequately resourced for this long-term, Afghanistan will experience only the worst of possible outcomes, and nato itself could be on the path towards irrelevancy. This need not be the case and it is still not too late to act decisively as the main foundations for solution are essentially in place. The first step is to understand that the situation in Afghanistan is grave and that immediate action and attention are needed by the United States and the international community in order to prevent a setback to regional and global security. Urgency is the watchword. The international community must act, and it must act now.

Jones and Obama clearly align on their views of what needs to be done regarding Afghanistan/Pakistan and the role they will play in combating transnational terrorist actors. Jones also has a healthy appreciation for the fact that military power alone is not close to strong enough to deal with the problems that plague Afghanistan. the paper devotes a great deal to the creation of a corruption free afghan judicial system. That is something that strikes me as an important step in fighting any group that thrives on the illegitimacy of the government. If we cannot establish the basic rule of law in that country how can we ever hope to have a people who meet the type of dignity level that obama clearly believes is important?

so far there are obvious areas of alignment between Obama's picks and his announced foreign policy ideas. Obama has always been an advocate of a strong interventionist and activist foriegn policy that places america in a firm and central role. Obama was very clear on his desire to engage John McCain on a debate about US foriegn policy during the election. It is an area he feels comfortable with despite his lack of hands on experience. The people he has picked reflect that. The only one who seems to be incongruous is Hillary Clinton.

Clinton at state just does not seem to make a great deal of sense. Yglesias sums up the first shallow impression,

I’ve been out of the country and not able to follow the Clinton for Secretary of State gossip in all the level of detail I would have liked. But surely I wouldn’t be the first to observe that this would seem like an odd pairing. Clinton and Obama are both formidable political leaders and, as we saw during the primaries, they have very similar ideas about the vast majority of public policy areas. But Obama thinks Clinton’s support for invading Iraq in 2002-2003 showed bad judgment and Clinton thinks Obama’s stated willingness to hold direct, high-level talks with Iran without preconditions is “naive and irresponsible.”

That’s not to say it’s a bad idea — what matters is ideas moving forward, not things that have been said in the past. But the specific policy area at issue seems to be one in which the two of them aren’t all that well-aligned.

On the other hand people like steve benen think it is a fine pick,

Between her Senate work and time as First Lady, Clinton has established international respect and credibility, and she's on a first-name basis with leaders around the world. She's arguably more hawkish than the President-elect, but when it comes to global diplomacy, there's no reason to think Clinton and Obama aren't on the same page.

The other worry is exactly how well she will run the agency and the overall look that the agency will take under Clinton. Clinton did not run a great campaign and the drama could be considered quite epic. Spencer Ackerman laid out the big questions,

The dispute is only partly ideological in nature. While the coterie of foreign-policy thinkers around Obama have been more liberal, in an aggregate sense — on issues like Iraq and negotiations with America’s adversaries — the Obama loyalists question the boldness of the Clintonites. They fear that Obama’s apparent embrace of Clinton represents an acquiescence to the conventional Democratic foreign-policy approaches that they once derided as courting disaster. Some wonder whether a Clinton-run State Dept. will hire progressive Obama partisans after an acrimonious primary.

In addition, some Obama loyalists wonder whether the same people who attacked Obama on foreign policy during the primaries can implement Obama’s agenda from State Dept. perches. “Look, Clinton and Obama are both smart people,” said one Democratic official who would not speak for the record, “and I’m sure their one-on-one relationship would be OK. But when you hire a Clinton, you hire more than just that one person, you get the entire package.” If Clinton becomes secretary of state, it’s possible that the fissures between her loyalists and Obama’s would be a significant undercurrent of the administration’s foreign-policy decision-making.

No one would comment for the record for this story from either the Clinton or the Obama camps. Several people were reluctant to speak even on background, whether out of an exhaustion with a dispute that has lasted for more than 18 months within the party or out of reluctance to jeopardize their own prospects for jobs with the Obama administration.

Some in the Democratic foreign-policy community worry about the implications for a cohesive diplomatic message, given the differences in substance and tone between the supporters of the two Democratic giants.

“Foreign policy is probably where Clinton and Obama differ the most,” said the Democratic official. “They just have fundamentally different instincts. On the big decisions, Obama can and will certainly call the shots, but the consistency of follow-through could really be a problem. And the instincts on the smaller decisions will be very different. Cohesion of our foreign policy could suffer.”

So Clinton seems political in nature to me. Maybe she plays bad cop to Obama's good cop or maybe she was promised something during the election season. Whatever the reason i really dont see that she was the best choice, the most logical choice for the position. Because of this i have a hard time anticipating exactly how Clinton is going to work out. That is an appointment that only time can sort out.

Generally speaking the choices for Obama's foriegn policy team represent the broad non-neocon consensus about what america needs to do in foriegn policy. When Obama speaks about ending the mindset that got us into the iraq war i think he is not talking about a huge reevaluation about the role of america's primacy on the world stage but instead a shift away from great power state level dealings to a more transnational approach.

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Palin's Clothes and Female Political Expectations

A topic making the rounds of the great and expansive internet is Sarah Palins expenditures on clothing and makeup. She has spent almost 200k on those two categories since being chosen as the vp candidate for the Republican ticket. There are a number of lines of thought on the topic including one that the entire matter is irrelevant, one that justifies her actions on the basis of expectations for female politicians and one that holds that the expenditures matter and that she should not be excused.

First the who cares argument courtesy of yahoo answers

So, she has expensive clothes. Whoopty friggin' do. I don't see Obama wearing rags. Why doesn't the media get off of her rear end about this?

So why is it important that she spent so much money on the clothes? Simply the hypocrisy of claiming to be a hockey mom, a regular gal and then running up a tab that far exceeds the amount of money that an average person makes in a year for the span of a couple months. The spending on appearances only reinforces the theme that the gop is not about substance but about appearances. Palin was picked not for her ability to govern or her policy but because she is a conservative who happens to be pretty and can filibuster a question. She is essentially a campaign ornament, a gilded VP candidate.

The other aspect of this argument that has been played up is the donor base's outrage. I think they have a decent argument here. It is not about the fact that the expenditure is totally illegitimate. Palin needs to be outfitted and a hair and makeup person could also be requires. The problem is that the McCain campaign has been getting killed in advertising. They are having to cut back in some swing states and shift those resources to formerly solid Bush States. The donors seem to think that the money spent on outfitting palin could have been better spent on ads etc. This is supported by the McCain camps reliance on robo-calls a tactic that traditionally flies under the radar and has the added benefit of being very cheap. As McCain lost a lot of the media good will during the course of the campaign he lost the free positive advertising that went with it. Now he has to fight the negative narrative with limited resources. The donors dont see the expense as justified.

There is clearly an issue here. The defense must consist of more than the terse response of McCain that she needed the clothes. The one i find most grounded in legitimate thought is this one from The Debate Link

To my mind, the burden being put on Gov. Palin is just an extreme version of the Jespersen dilemma. Jespersen was a female bartender working for Harrah's who was forced, under new grooming regulations, to wear makeup to her job. This imposed an additional hurdle to her entering the workforce: though men also had grooming requirements, they were generally less expensive to maintain than those given to women. In such a case, women are being penalized upon entering the workforce solely for being women: that second X chromosome means that they can be required to shell out more as a threshold requirement before they are allowed to compete for the same job men are going after. Likewise, Gov. Palin, because she's a woman, has to spend a lot more time and resources on her attire and appearance before she can compete as an equal in the political arena.

From a feminist perspective (which wants Gov. Palin to lose, but not because she is hobbled from competing as a woman), there are two angles of attack on this. On the one hand, you could indict the norms of appearance that require so much more out of women than men. Alternatively, one could (perhaps provisionally) accept those norms, and demand offsets so that the costs of their enforcement do not fall on women but on some other party. For example, if Harrah's Casino wants to demand women alter their appearance above and beyond their requirements for men, it could be forced to pay for the difference in value (I imagine if that requirement did exist, the gender-differential would be eliminated quite rapidly).

The Jespersen discussion is valid in this case and as it relates to politics in general. The biggest and most oft cited case is going to be that of Sen. Clinton. The constant focus on her pant suits, her laugh, her cleavage, her ankles, her hair, was all incredibly patronizing and sexist. The problem is that Sen. Clinton may not be the best example of women in political arena despite her ground breaking candidacy. She is a very unique figure in american political history having been the first lady. Her relationship with the press was formed on that basis and imo has never been a good one. Discussions of appearance and double standards between genders need to include discussions of female politicians as a class. That means including barbara boxer, kay baily hutchison, darcy burner, nanci pelosi, lois capps, kathleen sebelius etc. Are these women receiving the same type of strict scrutiny in terms of wardrobe choices? How much of the flak that clinton takes over this is directly attributable to her relationship with the press? Searching around the internet Clinton is actually synonymous with pantsuit in a way no other female politicians are. For the complete defense of the focus on female politicians appearence there is this article in the times from last august,

It is precisely because our interior selves are essentially inscrutable (most of us can’t unscramble the psychological coding of our spouses much less the machinations and motivations of public figures) that we depend so much on surface clues. The whole superficial shebang — from hairstyles (who can forget Hillary’s little-girl headband?) to accessories (remember the fuss about Cherie Blair’s pricey Tanner Krolle handbag?) — provides us with the contextual tools to read the Other, the person who is not us, be it the stranger across the room or the stranger angling for political office. Power pearls and multipurpose, dashingly knotted scarves define Nancy Pelosi’s crisply efficient approach to getting work done; a Joan of Arc white suit or starched white blouse complemented Ségolène Royal’s newly capped teeth, lending her Socialist program a purist glow (but didn’t save her from her own plodding rhetoric); and a curve-ball glimpse of cleavage on a contender who normally favors black pantsuits added a touch of coyness to Hillary’s slightly humorless demeanor.

When it comes to women who seek power, the pressure to create a recognizably consistent persona (whether authentic or fake-authentic) under the distorting glare of television close-ups and digitalized replays only intensifies. Increasingly these days, pixels tell the all-too-easily fragmented story. The trick is to make those little square-shaped microdots that appear on our various and endlessly proliferating screens cohere into a simulation of verisimilitude, into something approaching a Chuck Close portrait rather than a Seurat-like haze of Pointillist impressionism. The wrong footwear can decompose the whole picture — Ségolène clicketyclacking around the slums of Chile in stilettos or Condoleeza Rice wearing what one commentator called her “butchy boots” — leaving us stuck with unmatching pieces of a puzzle.

We study our female politicians as closely and obsessively as we do in part because they still remain something of an anomaly — we are, quite simply, less used to women standing in the spotlight demanding our close attention — and in part because their costuming is less homogenized than men, offering up an abundance of opportunities for inductive analysis: we study their shade of lipstick, we listen for a note of defensive shrillness in their voice, we infer, we project, we accept or discount official positions for reasons that are neither fully conscious nor even rational. Camille Paglia’s snide response to Hillary’s performance at an early Democratic debate focused almost exclusively on her manner of communicating by way of a facile and highly speculative reading of the family dynamics that shaped her: “In the second half, she overplayed her hand and began to intrude and domineer. What was surfacing in Hillary was the old family psychodrama of the daughter contemptuously outflanking her befuddled, resentful, mediocre brothers at the dinner table. It wasn’t a pleasant sight — and all too reminiscent of the bullying Rosie O’Donnell compulsively hogging the spotlight on ‘The View.’ ”

I recommend reading the whole article if only to see why people view sexism in the media. the entire piece is simply a series of excuses about why the media is allowed a double standard in assessing womens clothing and appearance. It might be one of the worst articles i have read in a long while. All of this seems to lend credence to the Jesperson argument and credence to Palin's choice to spend a fortune on clothing. However Palin is not dealing with the same type of preconceived notions that Clinton, Sebelius and other female politicians do.

Palin deals with the opposite end of the spectrum. Palin has played into the womens appearance stereotype. Nobody is arguing that she should not spend a decent amount on appearance, after all being on tv and in front of large crowds demands that the politician look put together. However, there was no cause to spend that kind of money on the clothes. Professional women across the country manage to outfit themselves in a style that would certainly serve a politician for far less. Palin is far too concerned about appearances. He problem is that people view her as a diva, a pretty but empty vessel.

By spending such a large amount on clothes palin only accentuates this. had she instead chosen to go the subdued route of simple navy and black pantsuits i really doubt that her appearance would have been a recurring issue. Instead the RNC chose to accentuate her looks, go with high style and a nontraditionally professional look. Palin could certainly have gotten away with a simple look to emphasize her policy skills, had she had any. The equivalent example is if male politicians went around wearing lavender or camel colored suits. Women with command of policy and who are more than competent at their jobs seem to do fine with a professional dress, for example Gov Sebelius who won Topeka's best dressed female in 2005,

Topping their lists for Best-Dressed Man and Best-Dressed Woman were Arnold Downing Sr., of Topeka, marketing and events coordinator at Harrah's Prairie Band Casino, and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

Sebelius says she does her own shopping.

"And I really like to shop, but don't get much time anymore. Most of my purchases are done in person," she said.

The one item of clothing she wouldn't give up are her running shoes.

"They must fit right and provide support, or you end up with too many aches and pains," Sebelius says.

Women all over the country win elections without spending all of their income on clothes. Palin more than any other female politician in history is being judged on her policy more than her appearance and what she wears. People did not speculate about her clothes after her couric interview, it was her train wreck answers. I think the jesperson argument has validity for many women but the simple discrepancy between what is required for other women professional women and what palin spends makes it less persuasive in this case.

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Thanking Hillary Clinton

I might have missed it but i have yet to see a diary dedicated to thanking senator clinton for her campaign tactics. I refuse to thank mark penn because, well...i still loathe him as a human being. Senator Clinton though, she gets my thanks for her campaign.

Thank you for continuing your campaign seemingly forever so that we could air out all the potential dirty smears before november. William ayers, jeremiah wright, rezco, all of them came out in the primaries and became attacks used by sen clinton against barack obama. Without that long drawn out primary they would not have been run into the ground so far that nobody cares about them anymore. The media no longer sees them as news and instead covers them as partisan attacks with dubious to non existent merit. would that have been the case without the primary the way it was?

Sen Clinton also gets a thank you because the long drawn out primary that visited every state gave us a head start in boosting voter registration and in building gotv infrastructure. Obama has learned that you do need street money in PA, something he failed to provide in the primary. Obama has also had the chance to test out his polling and demographic information in each new state. He was able to add to the voter database the dems now have.

We should also thank senator clinton for participating in all of those debates. While they became so repetitive and boring they did serve a purpose, they trained obama to be a better debater. They say practice makes perfect and he sure had a lot of that in those 20+ debates.

Hillary Clinton gets a thank you because with out her and the drawn out agonizing primary steve schmidt would never have thought to draft the little known and oh so beloved governor of Alaska to be McCain;s running mate. If they did not have those PUMAs or generally disaffected women out there, at least in theory, we would have gotten a male candidate. Instead we were blessed with, "in what respect charlie?" and numerous other moments of comedy gold. Clinton also provided the measuring stick against which palin was found wanting. So we have hillary clinton to thank for sarah palin.

Senator Clinton also helped to set the health care agenda by making that a central issue of her campaign. Obama and his health care plan have been out there forever at this point and have managed to stand the test of time. McCain was forced to respond to this and put forth his craptastical health care plan. Forcing him to defend this plan gave us the gems like cutting medicare and destroying the employer based health system. Obama would have had a health care plan but it would not have been such a prominent issue without the effort made by sen clinton.

Although you hired Mark Penn we did get to expose him for the scum he is and hopefully make sure he never gets a job in democratic politics again. true, we had to spend millions of dollars against you long after you lost a chance of winning and you tried the whole michigan and florida stunt that nearly drove me insane I say thank you hillat clinton.

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Clinton's Speech

My first reaction to the Clinton speech was that it kicked ass. I will not pretend that i was a big fan of the way Clinton ran her campaign or the people she employed to do it. I thought her campaign was cynical and against the ideals the Democratic Party stands for. That being said her speech did enough to wash away much of the personal dislike i felt for her. Here is the speech:



There were many highlight lines.

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

...I haven't spent the past 35 years in the trenches advocating for children, campaigning for universal health care, helping parents balance work and family, and fighting for women's rights at home and around the world . . . to see another Republican in the White House squander the promise of our country and the hopes of our people.

And you haven't worked so hard over the last 18 months, or endured the last eight years, to suffer through more failed leadership.

No way. No how. No McCain.

...It makes a lot of sense that next week John McCain and George Bush will be together in the Twin Cities, because these days they're awfully hard to tell apart.

All of those along with her retelling of the Harriet Tubman anecdote made for a memorable speech.

Clinton did enough and her speech will be hailed as a success, and it was. There were several drawbacks that people will be more than happy to point out. Clinton did not go down the list of her primary attacks on Obama and repudiate them. Some people may have liked to here her telling of Obama's personal abilities vis a vis the presidency. Clinton saying unequivocally that Obama can handle the duties of Commander in Chief would have been a big plus.

Clinton will now go out and hit the trail for Obama in Penn and Ohio and other states where she performed really well. If she continues to support Obama and work tirelessly for his election then there is no reason she cant be the next liberal lioness of the Senate.

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Mark Penn Strikes Back

You thought he was gone didn’t you? Well it appears that it is tough to keep a good story down. By good, I mean a story of high drama, back stabbing, and discord. Just as the wounds of the primary have apparently healed the behind the scenes story of the Clinton campaign threatens to revive them. The article in question is by Atlantic Senior Editor Joshua Green and will be forthcoming in the magazines September issue. A sneak-peak was written by Politico's Mike Allen Most of the talk regarding the Clinton camp revolved around Mark Penn and the fact he was universally loathed. This article we be interesting for reasons beyond Penn though.

Let us get one thing out of the way, Penn’s desired strategy. What people are going to be talking about as the focal piece will be the strategy articulated by Penn for portraying Obama as Un-American.

Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

Snip…

The Penn memo suggesting that the campaign target Obama’s “lack of American roots” said in part: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

“Save it for 2050. ... Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back

“Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.”

This sounds very familiar does it not? McCain’s first ad of the general election contained the line “The American President Americans have been waiting for”. Throw out America all the time make people believe that Obama is not patriotic, not a “real” American. As a strategy, it has far more potential for McCain than it ever did for Clinton. Clinton was dealing with a Democratic electorate who share many of the same views that Obama holds and who, unlike the right, do not view a multicultural world view as something to denigrate. That Penn was eager to use this shows how much like Karl Rove he is. I would not call Penn a racist but I believe he has no morals. He is willing to take whatever position he believes will get more votes. Penn is not interested in using a principled position out of the belief that position is right.

In Mike Allen’s preview of the article he does give Penn some positive words. He credits him with an unheralded memo outlining,

the importance of appealing to what he called “the Invisible Americans,” specifically “WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS” — exactly the groups that helped Clinton beat Obama in key states nearly a year later.

If Clinton had focused solely on those groups from the very beginning would she have beaten Obama? Probably not. I do not believe she would have increased her support among those groups by any significant margin. In addition, I do not believe that the middle class can be called overlooked. Everyone was right when they bagged on Penn. He does suck. Now we should move beyond Penn.

What are the wider implications of the piece and what do they reveal about Clinton? There are several implications for Clinton, one is that the piece coming now might revive some of the animosity towards her and reduce the chance she is named as the VP nominee. Two, it appears to reveal a weak executive. The third implication is the potential resurfacing of Democratic strife apparently buried.

The potential for Clinton as VP is not very great. She still carries the baggage that led many people to vote against her in the primaries. She does not represent “Change”, the central theme of the Obama candidacy. In addition, Clinton would have to take back all that mean stuff she said about Obama and that would be rather awkward. There is a great deal of resistance among the Obama base to giving Clinton the VP slot after the events of the primary and it seems like a pick that would not bring a whole lot to the table without offsetting those positives.

The second implication is something I would consider more serious on a personal level for Clinton. From what is revealed the implication is that Clinton was an ineffective and poor executive. There are three pieces of evidence for this in the article.

1. Atlantic Senior Editor Joshua Green writes that major decisions during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination would be put off for weeks until suddenly Clinton “would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.”

2. “The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men,” Green writes. “[H]er advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. ... [S]he never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel.

“What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make.”

3. The famous 3 a.m. ad, written by Penn and approved by Clinton, almost didn’t run: “In the days leading up to Ohio and Texas, the campaign kept arguing over whether to air the [3 a.m.] ad. With the deadline looming, Bill Clinton, speaking from a cell phone as his plane sat on a runway, led a conference call on Thursday, Feb. 28, in which he had both sides present their case. As his plane was about to lift off, it was Bill Clinton — not Hillary — who issued the decisive order: ‘Let’s go with it.’ ”

The picture painted is of a leader with trouble taking decisive action. Clinton was unable to make the decisions when required leading to trouble down the road. If true, it appears that one of the most important decisions, whether to run the 3am attack ad, was made by Bill and not Hillary. It is really a decision that Clinton herself should have made. She mishandled her personnel allowing the infighting and internal politicking to get in the way of the campaign.

The impact on her legacy is hard to gauge. As a groundbreaking candidate, she will be venerated by history. However, the postmortem analysis may change the story of her loss to be one not of a superior unstoppable Obama but a flawed Clinton. That is not really the story that she wants to have.

There is another story contained in the preview. The story of the 3am ad. It appears that Bill Clinton made the final decision about the ad in full knowledge that the wins in Ohio and Texas were not going to be enough to turn the campaign around.

On Feb. 25, a pair of Clinton advisers began sending a series of increasingly urgent memos, which were given to me by a recipient sympathetic to Solis Doyle as a way of illustrating that strategic mistakes continued even after her dismissal [announced Feb. 10]. The first memo, from Philippe Reines and Andrew Shapiro, worried that Clinton’s anticipated wins in Texas and Ohio on March 4 would not meaningfully narrow Obama’s delegate lead — a fact sure to sap momentum once the initial excitement of victory passed.”

She was not going to win without some type of game changing development. The 3am ad appears to have been the attempt at that game change. You can decide if you think it was required from the Clinton point of view but I am not inclined to judge it too harshly.

I believe that the reason this is coming out now to try and break Dem cohesiveness before the convention and hopefully provide some ugly scene for the camera. Otherwise it is a story that will answer some questions while raising new ones. There is one thing everyone can agree on though and that is that Mark Penn should never be hired by anyone ever again.

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Can McCain Win Using Clinton Campaign Strategy?

In many ways, I think McCain is running the campaign that Clinton wishes she could have run. Clinton’s personal opinion of Obama at the end of the primary was, from all appearances, not very high. Clinton’s strategy was to paint Obama as an elitist, as someone too inexperienced to handle the job, as someone without substance. Just speeches, choir of angels, change you can Xerox, remember those? That was the original Obama mockery. Except in that case the demographics, the electorate was different. Can McCain win running the same race that Clinton ran?

Sadly, I am not the first to recognize the similarities of the two campaigns. John Heilemann who has gained some fame as the author of the Blog wide hit, The Low-Road Warrior, writes for New York Magazine in an earlier piece on the similarities between the two campaigns;

Yet it’s hard not to see the similarities between the chaos afflicting McCain-land now and what went on in Clinton-world during the primaries. In the former, like the latter, you have an outfit with no clear lines of authority, rife with elephantine egos and feuding factions that have been at each other’s throats for years, none with the slightest compunction about bearing their animosities (albeit anonymously) in the press. And in McCain, like Clinton, you have a candidate who not only tolerates but seems to encourage an atmosphere of anarchy—and who finds it difficult to fire anyone, no matter how incompetent.

If the commonalities ended here, they would hardly be worth noting. In presidential races, personnel and mechanics matter, but only on the margins. Yet in ways large and small, strategic and tactical, temperamental and attitudinal, the McCain campaign strikes me as having been cut from the same cloth as Hillary Clinton’s. Same story with the candidates themselves, in particular when it comes to their jaundiced perceptions of their rival.

… That Clinton and McCain would run similar races might seem odd. Their ideological differences are severe, and no one sane would ever call Clinton a maverick or McCain a feminist. But it’s also true that they share a view of politics and policy. They venerate the Senate as a noble institution, not as the imagination-deadening, soul-destroying hellhole that it is. They regard legislative experience, forging compromises in the trenches, as formative and indispensable. They see having national-security chops as a sine qua non for sitting in the Oval Office.

I think that that pretty much captures it. In many ways, I think it is a generational thing. Both Clinton and McCain have fought the same battles, if on opposite sides, for most of their lives. They endured the partisan wars of the 90’s and if there is a convergence in the tactics of the campaign it is for a very good reason, they use the same playbook. Clinton and the strategists who are running the McCain campaign operate on the same system of framing. They have the same attack based philosophy and desire to drive the election at the opponent putting them on the defensive.

Both the Clinton and McCain campaigns were Atwater School campaigns. Set the frame and then pound on it until it might as well be true. Given the similarities in the types of candidates, that they are it is not surprising to see McCain reprising the Clinton role. Clinton was setting herself up just like the Republican archetype character wise in order to neutralize the frames that were used against Kerry to great effect. Clinton actually burned out some of the attacks that McCain is using against Obama which is why we see few “empty suit” arguments. Instead, McCain has shifted to questioning Obama’s humbleness and modesty.

The arrogant attack is something that the Clinton camp was actually hinting at except in their case it usually was expressed as a notion of sexism. Gender politics came into play and whenever Obama did something that could be interpreted as an attack against the character of Clinton is was labeled by many as sexist. Against McCain those same types of actions are considered arrogant or patronizing because of McCain’s age and experience on the national stage. The same type of actions but interpreted through different lenses.

When there are two campaigns that are essentially trying to do the same things and the are both being similarly thwarted you would expect to see similar reactions. This is the case with the McCain and Clinton campaigns as the McCain campaign expresses similar grievances with Obama,

As was the case with Clinton, McCain’s dismissiveness of Obama often seems to cross the line into resentment—and seems to have two primary sources. The first revolves around Obama’s rock-star status, around the size of his crowds, which McCain’s aides are forever prone to mock. “Yeah, he’s got his ‘mine is bigger than yours’ thing, but when does that get to be too much?” one said to me recently. They point to his plans to deliver his nomination-acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in the Broncos’ stadium rather than the arena in Denver—along with the possibility that he might orate at the Brandenburg Gate this summer—as signs of raging hubris.

The second source of resentment owes to Obama’s treatment by the press, which the McCain people, as did the Clinton people, regard as slavishly biased. “Hillary got worse treatment from the press than anyone since Nixon,” says one McCain strategist. “Now it’s happening to us.”

“Enough with the speeches and the big rallies”, those were the words of Clinton before the Wisconsin Primary. Clinton also resented Obama’s ability to draw large crowds. The reason I ascribe to this is that both Clinton and McCain feel like it is finally their time to shine on the Big Stage of Presidential politics after being forced to linger in the shadows, McCain behind Bush and Hillary behind Bill. There is one glaring difference though and that is that this is not the Primary.

In the Democratic Primary the negative behavior and Republicanesque tactics were widely condemned. Clinton needed to cut into Obama’s solid base of support and the attacks she was trying to use were not allowing her to do this. She was limited in her other options though as she could not afford to alienate Obama voters lest she reenact the dreaded 1980 scenario. Clinton needed those voters in the future. McCain has no such restrictions placed on him. He is targeting a small group of non-affiliated voters in a few select states. Those voters are very different from the ones in a Democratic Primary and while they might say they do not like negative campaigning, they understand the practicality of it. The center voters are not idealists and if the contest gets dirty, they can easily rationalize it away as simply a function of how the world works.

Heilemann does try to convey a similarity that I disagree with and I think it is important to discuss it. He links the type of campaign that both Clinton and McCain have run as not the ones that they should have run. He talks about a projected McCain campaign that would have been about a reformer, about a maverick who would only seek one term.

…the idea had been to run on a handful of sweeping reformist goals—entitlement reform, ethics reform, immigration reform, spending reform, etc.—and position McCain as willing to put country ahead of personal political ambition

That would have been a tough McCain to beat so hopefully that guy is gone for good. What is not being distinguished here is that in Clinton’s case she did not run a campaign according to the conventional wisdom. As Heilemann notes about the Clinton campaign,

The emphasis on résumé, the willful avoidance of grappling with the desire for change so evident in the electorate, and, perhaps most problematic, the eschewal of big, bold, animating ideas and grand thematics.

The CW at the time was that Clinton needed to do those things and should have been doing them all along. By following Mark Penn and his lead, she was bucking the cw leading an unorthodox campaign. This is not the case for McCain. McCain is actually following the GOP conventional wisdom. He is doing it in such lockstep that it has damaged his brand. People recognize the familiar and worn patterns of his attack because they are the same ones trotted out against Kerry and Gore. McCain has fallen victim to CW where Clinton did not.

Both the Clinton and McCain camps made the race about Obama. When you attack constantly that tends to happen. The goal is to make Obama prove himself. They want to sow doubt and win as the default safe candidate just as Clinton tried to do. The McCain campaign will discover that Obama is more than up to the challenge. After all he already ran this race.

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Why Hillary Clinton Lost

It is particularly fashionable to be doing the Clinton campaign post postmortem and thought I would do one too as my first entry here. My general perception gleaned from comments spread around the tubes is that most people focus on her Iraq war vote. I do not feel that is the biggest reason for her loss. I believe that there are two things that combined to cause the Clinton campaign defeat. The first is the hiring of Mark Penn as Chief Strategist and Pollster and the second is Hillary Clinton’s choice of loyalty over results.

I should explain why I do not believe the Iraq war vote was the cause. Those in favor of this rationale believe that the vote itself opened the door for an Obama candidacy. They use John Kerry as an example of someone who was unable to overcome the war vote. I do not believe that the war vote in itself doomed Kerry but it was his inability to properly explain the vote. Clinton could have overcome this by taking the track Edwards did and apologizing profusely far in advance of her run. The war has been unpopular for a long time now and Clinton was planning her run long before that. She had more than enough time to build a foundation of remorse and anti-war credibility. Sen Clinton may never have fully won over the anti-war crowd but it would have made a much smaller opening for Sen. Obama. Her vote was not cast out of consideration for a presidential run, that is just her political and foreign policy style but she is more than capable of making a political choice to position herself as against the war. The long planning that went into her run is what allows the blame to fall on the two causes I chose.

“Mark Penn has run this campaign,” said Ickes in a brief phone interview this morning. “Besides Hillary Clinton, he is the single most responsible person for this campaign.- Harold Ickes, NYO Feb 28, 2008.

Mark Penn has been with the Clinton’s for a long time. He is credited with getting Bill reelected in ’96, although Doles age probably helped. He was also in charge of Sen. Clinton’s 2000 senatorial campaign. This first senate race is where Penn mapped out the strategy for Hillary Clinton that he would later repeat during the presidential campaign. In 2000, Penn forsook big themes and relentlessly focused on poll-tested pothole politics, such as suburban transit lines and dairy farming upstate. This is the core of his philosophy, all politics is local. He is known for breaking groups down into micro-categories and trying to target them with programs and policy that he thinks appeal to them.

The NY times quotes a source discussing Penn from his time during Clinton’s Senate run:

For months now, a dispute has preoccupied Hillary Clinton's campaign. Put crudely -- as it often is -- it centers on whether the campaign should primarily be about personality or issues.
snip...
''Mark's attitude is the issues, the issues, the issues,'' one exasperated Clinton adviser said. Penn's view has been that Hillary needs to keep talking about things like the Westchester County Bee-Line and Suffolk County beach erosion."

It was Penn’s idea to avoid the humanization of Hillary Clinton. He was determined to show that she was tough enough to be commander in chief and in doing so he over extended on that issue. People never doubted her toughness. Instead, they thought she was a poll driven robot. It was obvious to many of her aides and supporters that she needed to be humanized and show her personality. She played into the exact negatives she needed to overcoming not reinforcing. Against seemingly everyone else in the campaign, Penn has bet the house on his strategy. He has been using the same ideas for the past 12 years. He needs them to work, it is his life. Given this, it is not surprising that he was slow to change or adopt new messaging in response to Obama.

It should also be obvious Penn was never going to change his beloved strategy if he could avoid it. Another point is that once Penn was forced to change he would no longer be in his element. Remember he worked his micro-targeting for his entire political life. He was just unable to properly adapt to a new way of thinking. Batting right handed your entire life and then trying to switch to lefty is not usually going to work out so well either. That is why after the March 4 victories the campaign was unsure what to credit for the victory. Some were sold on the simple demographic advantage others on the red phone.

Many of her advisers are waging a two-front war, one against Sen. Barack Obama and the second against one another, but their most pressing challenge is figuring out why Clinton won in Ohio and Texas and trying to duplicate it. While Penn sees his strategy as a reason for the victories that have kept her candidacy alive, other advisers attribute the wins to her perseverance, favorable demographics and a new campaign manager. Clinton won "despite us, not because of us," one said.

Sifting through the data yesterday, her divided circle offered other theories. Some credit field operatives who set up organizations in record time. Others cite strong Hispanic outreach in South Texas that held off a late Obama push. And even some Penn opponents grudgingly cite his television commercial that asked which Democrat is more prepared for a 3 a.m. crisis call at the White House. Source

Penn also made the fundamental choice to set up Senator Clinton as inevitable and he made the choice about pursuing electoral strategy. The campaign message adopted by the campaign geared toward tightly focused policy without an overarching uniquely Hillary Clinton theme set up the Clinton campaign to capture certain Demographics more than others. Specifically, they were set up to capture an older population more risk adverse and a lower income population distrustful of intangible long-term vision. Her message resonated with people who felt too uncertain about Obama. However, the message locked Clinton into this group and prevented her from branching out in the campaign. She was at the mercy of demographics for the entire race.

The idea of an inevitability argument is not bad in and of itself. It might have been very effective in pushing Obama and others to the margins and causing some to practice strategic voting and avoid a vote for Sen. Obama. This is a high-risk strategy because once it is pierced it forces the campaign into a major overhaul. Instead, Penn and Clinton needed to try and turn Obama into a Kucinichesque figure. Obama needed to be painted as too liberal and as the one note antiwar candidate, someone everyone kind of likes but no one votes for. Clinton failed to define her opponents when she was defining herself as inevitable and left a large opening. The Obama candidacy needed to be pro-actively killed before it got off the ground. Clinton allowed him to establish his theme of change and a new way of doing things and it cost her putting her on the wrong side of the electorate.

Remarkably not knowing she was on the wrong side of the electorate is also Mark Penn’s fault. He was the chief pollster and responsible for testing his own message. This is not a good idea as some people in the campaign recognized.

Three times, campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle and senior adviser Harold Ickes tried to hire another national pollster so Penn would not be the one to test his own message, campaign sources said, and three times they were rejected. Source

You need an objective party to test a message. Penn was able to design and craft his questions and his interpretations so that he could justify his own beliefs. Even if this did not happen, it very well could have and never should have been allowed to happen. Penn was also very reluctant to allow his poll numbers to be seen by others and for a long part of the campaign, there was no checking is his conclusions fit the data. There are examples from Penn’s own career where he did a poor job evaluating data

Over and over, Penn told the Vice President that Bradley posed little or no threat, that Bush was not as far ahead as public polls suggested and that most voters were confusing the Texas Governor with his father. At one point, when Penn was insisting that Gore was no farther than 10 points behind Bush, a campaign official quietly asked another pollster to check Penn's work. The number came back: Gore down by 18. Source

And it was happening in the Clinton campaign too.

Unlike most campaign pollsters, he does not delve deeply into the numbers he has gathered when he makes his presentations and recommendations. "He never shows you the crosstabs," says one Democratic strategist who is familiar with Penn's work. "He does a PowerPoint, and he never shows you the data that underlies the conclusions he is presenting." A source who knows the workings of the Clinton campaign says that, after much wrangling over that issue, Penn started turning over his data to the top echelon of officials there — but that it usually came in weeks after a decision had already been made and executed on the basis of his advice. Source

Penn was also responsible for the electoral map. There is some debate over whether the Clinton camp should have skipped Iowa. I tend to side on the side that they should not have skipped Iowa because the inevitability argument only works if you do not lose. Skipping Iowa probably guarantees a loss and there would have been no way to predict how it would have affected the campaign. Winning in Iowa and then winning in New Hampshire and then in Nevada would have put Obama in a very bad position. Obama winning in South Carolina would not have been as effective without his wins in the white state of Iowa and may not have happened at all. The rest of the caucus states is another matter entirely.

The entire big state strategy was a very poor idea. Once it was known that Obama was not going away quietly, Clinton needed to reorient her strategy to a long-term one picking up delegated wherever possible. She did not and the failure to anticipate the effects of the proportional representation system has to be laid at the feet of Penn. He drew the map and decided where they needed to play. The failure to plan for not only the caucus states but post Feb. 5 states is a major strategic blunder.

"Until we got to the 6th or 7th of February, there was no Hillary Clinton campaign in Wisconsin or most other states," said Joe Wineke, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Obama outspent Clinton on the air in Wisconsin by $1.5 million to $300,000, he said, and scored a strong victory on Feb. 19. source

None of this ever should have happened. Therefore, Penn is second only in responsibility to Clinton herself. She should have fired him after Iowa or New Hampshire when it was clear his initial strategy failed. The failure to do this is all on Hillary Clinton. It was a widely held belief that he should be the one to go

When word got around, there was a "parade to the doorstep" of the candidate by other top aides urging her to keep Solis Doyle or accept their resignations, a senior adviser said. "There was virtual universal agreement that if there was fault, it should be laid at the door of Mark Penn, not Patti Solis Doyle," the adviser said. "People thought change should be made, but the wrong person was being fired. And it created enormous resentment within the campaign." Source

Clinton clung to Solis Doyle when it was clear she was not being effective at her job then threw her under the bus too late to make a real difference in the outcome of the race. Doyle had a reputation earned in the 2006 Senate race for hemorrhaging money. By now, we know that the Clinton campaign was held up only because of personal loans from Clinton to her campaign. The Clinton campaign ran a bloated operation spending money like it was going out of style and spending it in the wrong places like millions to Mark Penn and not in caucus state. When personnel decisions needed to be made at critical times before Obama really took off and won all of February Clinton stuck with Penn. Clinton made the wrong choice and it was her campaign thus she bears the ultimate responsibility with mark Penn a close second.

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