The slide that Barack Obama and Democrats are experiencing would be notable under any circumstances; it is doubly so given the enormous expectations liberals had in the aftermath of the Obama election. I was reminded of this when I came across the May 6 issue of the New Republic, whose cover story, “Liberalism’s Moment: Barack Obama’s New Theory of the State,” was written by Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber. The essay concludes this way:

Obama has groped toward a form of liberal activism that is eminently saleable in this country–both with the average voter, easily spooked by charges of creeping statism, and the constellation of political interests in Washington. Any economic program that lays out ambitious goals and actually has a chance of achieving them would have much to recommend it on those grounds alone. Better still, it may be the bold, persistent experimentation that the moment demands.

That eminently salable brand of liberal activism doesn’t look so eminently salable now in the wake of the staggering Democratic losses in Virginia and New Jersey — elections that have capped a year that has seen a historic loss of support for Mr. Obama.

Six months ago progressives were talking about “liberalism’s moment.” Silly books with silly titles — The Death of Conservatism comes to mind — were being published. Today liberals are unnerved. They see the country becoming more conservative, their agenda becoming more unpopular, Democrats losing races in states they normally own, Republican candidates winning independents by a 2-to-1 margin, and all the ingredients combining for a disastrous midterm election.

The intensity of the opposition to what Obama, Reid, and Pelosi want to do is as great and widespread as many of us have seen in politics — and it will only increase, especially if Democrats succeed in passing their terrible and unpopular health-care legislation. It will be akin to adding kindling wood and kerosene to a bonfire. I don’t think most of the political class yet understands this.

Things can, of course, change again. But there’s no question that this has been a brutal year for the hopes of liberals. Reality has shattered the mythology surrounding Barack Obama. And liberals must wonder what has brought them to this pass so quickly, after so much hope was invested in their young, elegant prince.

David Axelrod, one of President Obama’s top aides, was quoted earlier this week as saying that Obama is “not a magician. You don’t with a wave of a wand make everything different.” Mr. Axelrod is quite right about that. It’s a shame, then, that his boss gave the impression during the campaign that he was a figure with almost God-like powers. Talking about his ascension to the presidency it was Obama who said that he was –

absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. This was the moment, this was the time, when we came together to remake this great nation.

Most voters don’t want the president to pretend he is King Canute or Healer of Planets. They would settle for something a bit more modest, like getting unemployment (now over 10 percent) and the deficit and debt to go down instead of up.

1. The outcome of the New Jersey governor’s race and the magnitude of the victory by Bob McDonnell and other Virginia Republicans will have unusually far-reaching ramifications for a off-year election, including on the health-care debate. I have said before that while politicians follow polls carefully, they really follow election results carefully. And the results in New Jersey and Virginia will send a message to many Democrats: Obamaism in general – and ObamaCare in particular – can be hazardous to your political health.

To read more of this COMMENTARY Web Exclusive, click here.

Here’s a stunning development: the New York Times’s theater-critic-turned-political-columnist Frank Rich is foot-stompin’ mad. The cause for Mr. Rich’s latest outburst is the race in New York’s 23rd District, in which the liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava was challenged by the Conservative party’s Doug Hoffman, forcing Scozzafava to withdraw. (She subsequently endorsed the Democrat Bill Owens.) For most people, this is an interesting intra-party skirmish with some potentially important political ramifications. But for Mr. Rich, it’s so much more than that. It’s going to set off a “riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war.” The northern district in New York “could become a G.O.P. killing field.” What’s going on there is evidence that “the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama.” And conservatives are “Jacobins” who are “re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode.” And in case that was too subtle, they are “the Stalinists of the right.”

This is what passes for stylish and temperate discourse on the Left — references to the Civil War and to Cambodian genocide, to the French Revolution and to one of the greatest mass murders in history – all in the context of a congressional race in New York’s 23rd District, mind you.

This also comes from a man who in August wrote a column — without irony — warning about the rise of what Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and who earlier this summer castigated conservatives for their “toxic” rhetoric that is “getting louder each day of the Obama presidency.” It could lead, Rich has warned several times, to political violence. Conservatives, you see, are so terribly uncivil and so terribly indecent in their rhetoric. Coming from Rich, it is all rather comical.

But Mr. Rich’s latest tantrum is an indication that conservatism, rather than being “dead,” is actually doing quite well. After all, if conservatism were as moribund as we’re told by Sam Tanenhaus and others – and if the Left was in the ascendancy – then the latter would presumably be in a relatively cheerful and celebratory mood, ignoring conservatives because they were irrelevant. Instead Rich and others on the Left are going around the twist because they sense that the political ground is shifting beneath their feet. Their political Messiah is turning out not only to be mortal but also deeply flawed. His policies are generating widespread and intense opposition. The public seems to be rejecting what Mr. Obama is offering; and what he is offering may well cost Democrats politically.

For liberals, Barack Obama was supposed to be (take your pick) our new FDR, our new Lincoln, or “sort of God.” It wasn’t supposed to be this hard — and now that it is, people like Frank Rich are lashing out in desperation. It will only get worse. When thinking about what this all might do to poor Mr. Rich, it’s worth recalling the children’s folk rhyme and the fate of one of the three geese in a flock. One flew East, one flew West, and one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

I’ve noticed something in our political commentary that I suspect I’m not alone in. When Democrats and liberals making sweeping electoral gains, it’s based on “hope” and “change,” on “civic engagement” and reversing a “culture of corruption.” It’s all very positive, upbeat, and high-minded. They want to build up the village. But when Republicans and conservatives make sweeping gains, or appear to be on the cusp of them, it’s based on negative, downbeat, and low-minded sentiments. They want to burn down the village.

Conservative ascendancy is rooted in things like “rage” and “anger” and is driven by “angry white men,” as if the elections are the outworking of some kind of troubling psychological condition. The late Peter Jennings embodied this view perfectly when he described the 1994 elections as a “temper tantrum” and compared what voters did that year to what you’d see from “an angry two-year-old.” We’re seeing the same thing now, on the eve of tomorrow’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York’s 23rd District. We don’t know how those elections are going to turn out just yet — but we can tell by the coverage how much of the press thinks they’re going to turn out. Let’s just say they’re worried it’ll be a bad day for Obama and for Obamaism.

As Jennifer has pointed out, David Brooks has penned an interesting column on Afghanistan and President Obama. After interviewing many experts on Afghanistan, he reports:

Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence. But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

These are of course precisely the qualities that George W. Bush showed during the debate in late 2006 and 2007 about the so-called surge in Iraq. At the time Bush was almost alone in his advocacy. His commending generals, George Casey and John Abizaid, opposed his plan, as did most members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and some members of Bush’s own war cabinet. Virtually the entire Democratic party, most of the foreign-policy establishment, and most of the public had turned hard against the war. They were certain the new counterinsurgency plan could not work and shouldn’t be tried.

Despite opposition as fierce and sustained as one can imagine (and far worse than anything President Obama is now experiencing), Bush and a small handful of others — the most important of whom were General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker -– persisted. They displayed raw determination. They fixated on a simple conviction and gripped it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. And they were proved right. In other words, the qualities Bush displayed in wartime are now the qualities Brooks and others (including me) are hoping Obama possesses.

I will add two other thoughts, the first being that tenacity needs to be conjoined to wisdom and right action. Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty’s raw determination and enthusiasm in the Dardanelles campaign was a disaster, forced his resignation, and almost ended Winston Churchill’s career. What determines whether something qualifies as impressive tenacity or foolish obstinacy are results, outcomes, successes. And those things are unknowable at the time a decision is being debated and made.

A second related observation is that the virtues we look for in our leaders often shift like a kaleidoscope. The kind of tenacity Brooks praises was absolutely essential for the surge to succeed. But at the time, tenacity was viewed as stubbornness; a visceral and unflinching commitment to principle was seen as dogmatism; raw determination was thought to be a rigid unwillingness to adapt to changing circumstances. Top leaders of the GOP came to Bush and urged him to end the Iraq war because of the damage it was doing to his party.

Lincoln and Churchill experienced the same phenomenon during the darkest days of the Civil War and World War II. The qualities that are now widely praised as virtues — the very qualities that helped make Lincoln and Churchill the greatest political leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries — were at the time widely regarded as vices. And very few people stood with them during the moments that mattered most. Tenacity and raw determination are easy when they are garnering applause from the public and the political class; to exhibit them in the face of catcalls and derision is much harder. To hold shape against relentless attacks is evidence of admirable human character. It is a vital trait for wartime leaders to possess. But it is not, by itself, enough.

How quickly things can turn. On May 15 of this year, in commenting on the intra-Republican contest between Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio, the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne wrote, “Florida will be one of the clearest tests of whether Republican voters are more interested in doctrinal purity or in winning even if it means nominating an Obama hugger.” Yet in his most recent column, Dionne writes:

Memo to Democrats: You will be defined by President Obama whether you like it or not, so you might as well embrace him for the benefits he can bring you…  the trajectory in both Virginia and New Jersey sends a message to many moderate congressional Democrats worried about the 2010 elections: Whatever problems Obama may cause them, they almost certainly can ‘ t win without him

In the span of less than six months, then, Dionne has gone from telling Republican they need to nominate an “Obama hugger” to explaining to moderate Democrats why they shouldn’t abandon Barack Obama, despite “whatever problems Obama may cause them.”

Mr. Dionne — whose distaste for Republicans and conservatives is evident in almost every column — cannot kick his habit of instructing them about the dangers of “doctrinal purity.” But for him, like so many other Obama supporters, the cockiness is gone, the fear is a’risin’, all before the Virginia gubernatorial election (where Democrat Creigh Deeds is down by double digits in the polls) has even occurred. The task now facing liberals like Dionne is to get moderate Democrats to be “Obama huggers” — or at least not to become Obama critics.

The times they are a-changin‘.

In a story in the British paper the Independent, we find this nugget:

“Obama has created an atmosphere of no fear,” Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University and political biographer, told the National Journal. “Nobody is really worried about the revenge of Barack Obama, because he is not a vengeful man. That’s what we love about him; he is so high-minded, and a conciliatory guy, and he tries to govern with a sense of consensus – all noble goals, but they don’t get you very far in this Washington knifing environment.”

Exactly what planet is Professor Brinkley living on? The person he describes was Candidate Obama. But President Obama — you know, the one who targets news networks, the Chamber of Commerce, insurance companies, and people attending town-hall meetings; the Obama who accuses his critics of being liars; the Obama who is trying to ram through one of the largest pieces of legislation in American history without a single Republican vote and after having done virtually no outreach — is a very different person.

The curtain has been pulled back on the supposedly high-minded and noble Mr. Obama. The game is up. And the reality is that he is one of the most partisan and divisive figures we have seen, even as he tries from time to time to reach back to unifying rhetoric — rhetoric that has grown old and stale. His White House — led by Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Anita Dunn, and Robert Gibbs — is also showing a propensity to bring knives and clubs and guns to Washington’s political skirmishes. They are pulling down rather than elevating our politics. That should be obvious to anyone paying attention, to anyone not blinded by ideology. Which perhaps explains Professor Brinkley’s silly comments.

President Obama visited Dover Air Force Base early this morning and met with some of the families of the fallen. It was a dignified and appropriate act by the president. And I know from the experience of George W. Bush, who met with hundreds of family members over the course of his presidency, that it is an emotionally wrenching one as well, though nothing compared with what the families themselves suffer. In watching this, one is reminded of the awful costs of war — and of the unique place the president plays in our national life.

Barack Obama did the right thing in the right way, and he deserves credit for it.

In his column today, Richard Cohen — in a column about General Stanley McChrystal, Afghanistan, and (of course) Vietnam — repeats an oft-made assertion:

The other thing I know about generals is that they do not ask for less — less equipment or less personnel. They ask for more, just as Westmoreland did in Vietnam before reality — otherwise known as domestic politics — forced Lyndon Johnson to rein him in.

This claim is demonstrably false. I can name several generals who did not ask for more troops — beginning with General George Casey Jr. in Iraq in 2006. (In Bob Woodward’s book The War Within, we read about this exchange between General Casey, then the commanding general in Iraq: “I’m with you,” [Casey] replied [to President Bush]. “I understand that [the need to win the war]. But to win, we have to draw down.”)

This was the period when President Bush was pushing for the “surge” — which included an additional 20,000-plus troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy. General Casey, along with several others, opposed the surge in favor of a “light footprint” — as did most of the top military-brass in the Pentagon. In fact, it took a joint appearance by President Bush and Vice President Cheney at the Pentagon, in December 2006, to convince them of the wisdom in moving forward with the surge.

It’s largely forgotten now, but when then Lieut. General David Petraeus was arguing, along with retired General Jack Keane and others, for deploying at least five additional brigades to Iraq, they encountered enormous opposition — opposition that was thankfully overcome.

So generals sometimes don’t ask for more; sometimes they ask for less. The fact that Cohen doesn’t know this and would still write a column on this topic is a reminder that commentators often don’t let inconvenient facts get in the way of their arguments. The Vietnam War can still be instructive, but those who obsess over it and who reduce every war or situation we face in war to a Vietnam redux are doing us a disservice.

I have argued before that the tone and manner in which one practices politics are undervalued commodities, especially at a presidential level. The public looks for leaders who are large-minded rather than petty and peevish, who engage in public arguments rather than in personal attacks, who want to solve problems rather than settle scores. Tone and approach are important not simply for the aesthetics of politics but also because of what they reveal about a person’s predisposition and attitude, temperament and spirit. …

Click here to read the rest of this COMMENTARY Web Exclusive.

The most recent data from Gallup is quite interesting. Among the findings:

In Gallup Daily tracking that spans Barack Obama’s third quarter in office (July 20 through Oct. 19), the president averaged a 53% job approval rating. That is down sharply from his prior quarterly averages, which were both above 60%. In fact, the 9-point drop in the most recent quarter is the largest Gallup ever measured for an elected president between the second and third quarters of his term, dating back to 1953. … More generally, Obama’s 9-point slide between quarters ranks as one of the steepest for a president at any point in his first year in office. … In Obama’s first quarter and second quarter, his job approval average compared favorably with those of prior presidents. But after the drop in his support during the last quarter, his average now ranks near the bottom for presidents at similar points in their presidencies. Only Clinton had a lower third-quarter average among elected presidents. … Obama’s 53% third-quarter average is substandard from a broader historical perspective that encompasses all 255 presidential quarters for which Gallup has data going back to 1945. On this basis, Obama’s most recent average ranks 144th, or in the 44th percentile, clearly below average not just for presidents’ third quarters but for all presidents. [emphasis added]

There are, I think, several conclusions we can draw from this survey. Read the rest of this entry »

The exchange that Jake Tapper of ABC News had with Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, was significant because of the locution used by Tapper. Several commentators have criticized the White House for going to war with Fox News — but essentially on utilitarian grounds (it won’t works, it looks petty, it will backfire, et cetera). What Tapper said was this:

It hasn’t escaped our notice that in the last few weeks the White House has decided to declare war on one of our sister organizations saying it’s not a news organization and tell the rest of the news media to not treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to say one of them is not a news organization and the rest of the media should not treat them like one?

The term “sister organizations” is important because it shows solidarity with a news organization under fierce attack by the White House. This is the kind of question one would hope to see when a president and his top aides target a news organization and then, for good measure, try to dictate to other news organizations what they should do, how they should act, and which stories they should follow. But so far, stunningly, the media — including the White House press corps — have mostly been quiescent. One might have expected more in the face of these extraordinary efforts at media intimidation and media control. If the situation were reversed, and a Republican White House were targeting an entire network in a similar fashion, criticisms, condemnations, and thundering editorials would be pouring forth; terms like “abuse of power” and “chilling effect” would be on the lips of virtually every reporter in America. Instead, the reaction has been, for the most part, uncomfortable silence (with a few, like Jacob Weisberg, siding with the White House).

What happened yesterday was an impressive display by Mr. Tapper, though not a particularly surprising one, given that he is one of the most impressive and independent journalists covering the Obama White House. But the fact that prior to Tapper’s comments the brazen attacks on Fox by Anita Dunn, Rahm Emanuel, and David Axelrod generated “only a single, tangential question at the White House’s daily briefing for reporters,” in the words of the Politico’s Mike Allen, is an embarrassment and something of an indictment of contemporary journalism. As Allen points out, “The direct attacks, if leveled at another news outlet or by another White House might have aroused a torrent of criticism, but the flow of outrage from the Washington journalistic set has been more like a trickle.”

We know all about the political orientation of most reporters — but surely this is a case when political preferences should give way to professional responsibilities and priorities. Fox News may be the immediate target under attack, but so is journalism itself. Jake Tapper seems to understand that. The question is: Does anyone else in the press corps?

Jack Shafer has just published a fascinating behind-the-scenes article, “Barack and Anita Diss Roger Ailes.” Shafer, in writing about press coverage Obama deemed insufficiently favorable, writes this:

Obama’s hatred of the conservative press fully manifested itself when he became president and immediately assigned his communications director Anita Dunn to hammer the media in a series of remarks. But there is no denying his special animus for Fox, which he regards as overtly conservative in its news coverage.

“He was convinced that Fox had it in for him,” Rahm Emanuel told Howard Kurtz for his new book, The War on Fox: The Obama White House v. a News Network. Emanuel professed not to know where Obama’s hatred came from but said whenever Fox broadcast an unfavorable story on him, he’d send e-mails prohibiting his people from talking to the network.

Obama and his people loved to make the political as personal as possible. A week after the Emanuel-Kurtz conversation, senior adviser David Axelrod warned Fox White House correspondent Major Garrett over the phone that Ailes would find his “ass in a sling” if Fox continued its negative coverage of Obama.

The account I just cited is mostly accurate, except that the original version — written by Jack Shafer for Slate in 2007 — was about Richard Nixon and his administration’s hatred for the Washington Post rather than about Barack Obama and his administration’s hatred for Fox News. The names of the key actors (and key parts of the human anatomy) have been changed — but the burning anger for and the bullying tactics aimed at a particular news organization have not.

The Obama administration has set out on an ugly and dangerous path, one we have been down before. It’s time for the Obama White House to take these words to heart:

I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. … As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, “We are not enemies, but friends … though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

So said Barack Obama on the night he was elected. They were wise words then; they are wise words now.

What a rare occurrence: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is agitated. This time the cause for his upset is that I included him in a group that, during the past eight years, was composed of commentators who suffered from Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS). Let’s see if we can untangle some of Mr. Krugman’s comments.

I don’t believe, and never said, that Bush supporters represent the “real America” (a term I dislike and have stated so here). Nor do I think that Bush supporters today represent, as they did in 2004 — when Bush won re-election — a majority of the country. Nor have I ever said that every critic of Bush suffers from this syndrome. The vast majority of them don’t. But a few, like Krugman and the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait (who also took exception to what I wrote), do.

Rather than allow Professor Krugman to define the condition that afflicts him, let’s turn to the man who coined the phrase, Charles Krauthammer. According to Krauthammer, a former practicing psychiatrist, Bush Derangement Syndrome is “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush,” a condition that “addles the brain … and can strike without warning.”

Now, how might BDS manifest itself? One way would be to write something like this (as Chait did in 2003):

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. … I hate the way he walks–shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks–blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. … And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

Another manifestation of BDS would be to describe Bush — in apocalyptic we-are-near-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it rhetoric that could easily come from the pen of the Christian-dispensationalist writer Hal Lindsey — as a “radical — the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. … What’s at stake isn’t just the fate of [the Democratic] party, but the fate of America as we know it.” These words were Krugman’s — who has also warned about Bush’s “radical domestic policy agenda” and his “radical agenda” and his “radical policy course.” Bush was a “radical who wants to undo much of the Great Society and the New Deal” and pursue a “radical right-wing agenda.” Bush was also, according to Krugman, deeply dishonest, seized with a blind drive to win, and turning America into a dictatorship. “Sometimes I have the feeling that I no longer live in one of the world’s oldest democracies, but in the Philippines under a new Marcos,” Krugman said during the Bush years.

Mr. Krugman’s columns are so routinely and reflexively splenetic and angry, so intellectually dishonest, so utterly predictable and rigidly ideological, that even as measured a magazine as the Economist wrote in 2003 that a “glance through his past columns reveals a growing tendency to attribute all the world’s ills to George Bush.” According to Krugman’s “thoughtful” critics, his “relentless partisanship is getting in the way of his argument.” That is a gentle way of saying he is a blinkered ideologue, a man whose political passions and hatreds overwhelm his reason.

(Another condition that appears to afflict Professor Krugman is a martyr complex. For example, he described himself to Die Spiegel as a “lonely voice of truth in a sea of corruption.” Krugman added, “Sometimes I think that one of these days I’ll end up in one of those cages on Guantanamo Bay” – which I gather would be worse than living in America under a new Marcos.)

Paul Krugman is, by any reasonable standard, a man who holds radical views and is prone to make radical (and monotonously repetitive) charges. He has become an almost comically unserious figure — which means he is perfectly at home in the academy today, a perfect representative of the Left in America, and a perfect columnist for the New York Times.

The White House’s effort to target a news organization like Fox is vaguely Nixonian. The case put forward by the pro-Mao political theorist Anita Dunn is filled with errors and erroneous statements. (See Chris Wallace’s comments during this segment.) And the willingness of liberal commentators like Jacob Weisberg to act as an attack poodle on behalf of the Obama White House is both predictable and discrediting. Frankly, we’re seeing “progressives” explode in outrage at Fox not only because their previous media monopoly has ended but also because Fox is so enormously popular (it’s home to the top-10-rated cable-news programs in America and 13 of the top 15).

It is one thing to set the record straight when specific false charges are made by individual reporters and commentators. But the tactic of a blanket attack against a network like Fox will, I think, end up damaging Barack Obama. The public generally wants its president to act as an adult, mature and relatively high-minded, focused on the problems of the day rather than on targeting media outlets. And it is more evidence of the fictional claim by Obama that he would “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long”; that “the times are too serious, the stakes are too high” for the same old political-attack tricks; and that he alone would elevate public discourse and serve as a unifying figure for America. Barack Obama is, in fact, turning into one of our most divisive political figures in memory – and he’s become that in less than nine months.

This whole anti-Fox gambit will come across to a lot of people as misguided and petty, the product of a White House that is unusually thin-skinned and somewhat paranoid – and, perhaps, as one that can’t be trusted with power.

I have written before why I think Glenn Beck is harmful to the conservative movement But this video that he played on his program of Anita Dunn, communications director for the White House, explaining earlier this year why Mao Zedong is one of her two favorite political philosophers, is a public service. The praise for Mao isn’t a throwaway line by Miss Dunn; she actually explains why he is one of the two people (along with Mother Teresa!) she turns to most when it comes to “fighting your own war.” Everybody has his or her own path, you see; you don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things. It’s about your choices and your path. You figure out what’s right for you. Mao did it his way, and you should do it your way. So sayeth Anita Dunn, philosopher.

In his October 2005 essay in COMMENTARY, Arthur Waldron describes the architect of China’s Cultural Revolution this way: “Mao was the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century. Much of the killing was direct, as in the torture and purges at Yan’an. After the Communist seizure of power in 1949, the practice became countrywide. Mao set his numerical targets openly, and stressed the ‘revolutionary’ importance of killing.” It is said of Mao — who was responsible for the death of some 70 million Chinese — that he derived a “sadistic pleasure” from seeing people put to death in horrible ways.

All this goes uncommented upon by Miss Dunn. Her praise for Mao — unqualified and without caveats, based on the excerpts of her speech — is quite extraordinary. For a senior member of the White House to hold these views is more extraordinary still. Perhaps Pol Pot will be the subject of Dunn’s next favorable meditation.

You might assume that the White House press corps would think this is a matter worth exploring — but you would (so far) be wrong. I won’t speculate as to why that’s the case; I will only say that its lack of curiosity and interest on this matter is, well, worth noting.

A story from Bloomberg News on the problems Democrats face in Virginia includes these two sentences:

National headwinds on health care and voter anxiety over new spending programs are playing a role in Virginia, said Senator Mark Warner, a former Democratic governor of the state. The climate in Washington is “making it harder in places like Virginia,” Warner said. “The challenge is also that the presidential-year electorate often looks different than the gubernatorial-year electorate.”

This echoes a statement made a few weeks ago by Creigh Deeds, who said, “Frankly, a lot of what’s going on in Washington has made it very tough. We had a very tough August because people were just uncomfortable with the spending; they were uncomfortable with a lot of what was going on, a lot of the noise that was coming out of Washington, D.C.” But this critique holds greater weight when uttered by Senator Warner. It’s more evidence — as if any was needed — that Obamaism is hurting Democrats and helping Republicans around the nation, even in bellwether states like Virginia.

A must-watch video on the risible hypocrisy of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. It comes to us courtesy of Mary Katharine Ham at the Weekly Standard.

Earlier today Jen highlighted a Washington Post story, which reports this:

After nine months of shuttle diplomacy by U.S. special envoy George J. Mitchell, the gap between Israeli and Palestinian leaders appears to have grown, and it now includes not only a dispute over Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, but also renewed tension over Jerusalem, disagreement over the framework for the talks and controversy over a UN report on alleged war crimes during Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter.

This report about events on the ground merits comparison to Joe Klein’s column in Time, in which he lays out his thoughts on how President Obama could earn his Nobel Peace Prize. (Even Klein admits he didn’t deserve it yet on the merits.) While acknowledging that Mitchell’s efforts seem to be “slouching toward catatonia,” Klein writes:

An opportunity for a grand gesture may be developing in the most unlikely of locales: the Middle East. . . . The moment may be at hand for a dramatic U.S. initiative, even from a no-drama President. “The two sides seem unable to make peace on their own,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. “I think it would make a lot of sense for the President to announce what he thinks a Middle East peace plan should look like.” The elements of such a plan are widely known. Bill Clinton announced a version of it in December 2000, as he was leaving office. Brzezinski cites four major components: a return to 1967 borders, with land swaps enabling Israel to keep many of its existing settlements; no right of return for Palestinians who left, or were forced off, their lands when Israel became a state; Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and Palestine; and an international peacekeeping force replacing the Israelis currently patrolling the Jordan River Valley.

I have gone on at length before about Klein’s geopolitical and national-security record and the quality of his analysis. Let’s just say he was once a fine reporter on urban issues. (Bill Clinton did announce his version of a Middle East peace in December 2000. The Israelis met almost every conceivable Palestinian demand — and in response the Palestinians declared a second intifada against Israel.)

But what of Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the architects of the many and sundry Carter calamities? I could go on at length about those, too, but perhaps it’s sufficient to draw attention to a memorandum from Brzezinski to President Carter on the topic of “Islamic Fundamentalism.” Here (found on page 564/Appendix II of Brzezinski’s paperback volume Power and Principle) is what he wrote on February 2, 1979:

The conclusion from several studies done in the intelligence community is that we should be careful not to overgeneralize from the Iranian case [the overthrow of the Shah and the ascent to power of Ayatollah Khomeini]. Islamic revivalist movements are not sweeping the Middle East and are not likely to be the wave of the future. The foreign policy consequences of this strengthening of Islamic sentiment are mixed. It is more difficult to resolve the Arab-Israeli disputes; moreover, conservative Muslims are often xenophobic. If we emphasize moral as well as material values, our support for diversity, and a commitment to social justice, our dialogue with the Muslim world will be helped.

The Iranian revolution, of course, ranks with the French Revolution in terms of its reach and influence, one of the few revolutions that actually deserves the name. And the consequences of that revolution have been harmful for America, for the Muslim world, and for civilization itself.

Apparently Dr. Brzezinski’s strategic insights and foresight were as good then as they are now.

Tony Harnden has an excellent column that appears in the Telegraph on the effort to smear Rush Limbaugh. Even for the Left, this is quite extraordinary. It’s not simply a matter of taking quotes out of context; it’s a matter of making up quotes out of whole cloth to cast Limbaugh as a racist — and then placing those quotes on Wikipedia, considered the gospel truth, and spreading them on the Internet and various television news outlets.

This behavior needs to be criticized in the strongest possible terms — including, and maybe even especially, by Limbaugh critics. If people want to take on Limbaugh on the merits, that is one thing; but to engage in libel is quite another. For Limbaugh’s critics to have to resort to this calumny is evidence, I think, of how fearful the Left is of Limbaugh and how much they want to destroy him. It is a consuming hatred.

It won’t work, of course. Rush has proved quite able to defend himself over the years and prosper even amid attacks. But the deeper point is that the truth is under assault — and that, in the Internet age, anyone can be a target. That’s why people should speak up now rather than take joy in the slander.

The media figures who spread these false charges owe Limbaugh a clarification and an apology. And the rest of us should take note of the tactics employed. It’s ugly now — and as the Left loses power, it will get uglier still.

I wanted to pick up on your post, Jen, regarding the national-security process being used by the Obama White House. The administration seems quite proud of its process, even though the results so far range from uncertain to bad. Now why might that be? Perhaps because there is a certain cast of mind that places more importance on process than on the decision itself. But, of course, the outcome of a decision matters most of all. I should add that I’m all in favor of a careful, thorough process, which can help a leader arrive at a wise decision. But an orderly process can also lead to wrong decisions, and a right decision can sometimes emerge from a less-than-orderly process. The acid test is results.

What often happens is that when a decision is judged to have been wise, people revise history to make the process look different than it was. For example, in her most recent Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan wrote, “Before the surge in Iraq, we had the Petraeus hearings, which were nothing if not informative, and helped form consensus.”

Of course, the Petraeus hearings came in September 2007, after the surge was decided and had commenced — and for months after the Petraeus hearing, Democrats were still insisting the war was lost. As a friend of mine pointed out to me, when things turn out well, commentators often go back and airbrush history so that the process fits the outcome. If the outcome is good — say, Operation Desert Storm or the surge — then, over time, the process is assumed to have been smooth and seamless. And if the outcome is bad — say, the early years after Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) — then the process is made to look chaotic.

Outcomes even play havoc with people’s memories. So, for example, Operation Desert Storm is now thought by many people to have been a war that enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support, while Operation Iraqi Freedom is assumed to have enjoyed only partisan backing. In fact, the reality is almost the opposite. The 1991 Senate vote approving Operation Desert Storm was 52 to 47 and came down to the wire; the 2003 Senate vote approving OIF was 77 to 23, with far more Democrats supporting that war than opposing it.

In the David Ignatius column Jen links to, Ignatius also quotes an Obama adviser as saying: “We don’t get marching orders from the president. He wants a debate. . . . We take the competing views and collapse them toward the middle.”

But this assumes that the “collapse them toward the middle” approach will, almost like the laws of physics, lead to the right outcome. Yet here’s how such an approach often works in practice: Some people (like the commanding general in Afghanistan) might argue we should pursue a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan that will require 40,000 or more additional troops. Others believe we should withdraw most of our combat troops and pursue a strictly counterterrorism strategy. So the answer must lie at the Golden Mean between these two positions. Or take Iraq: Before the surge, some people argued for it; others argued that we should essentially abandon Iraq, since the war was unwinnable. The “collapse them toward the middle” approach led to the Iraq Study Group (chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton). But if the Bush administration had followed the consensus approach, which was embodied in the study group’s report, it would have led to failure in Iraq. And if President Obama chooses the Biden approach instead of the McChrystal approach, it will lead to failure in Afghanistan.

Sometimes — in fact, much of the time — the “third way” is a road to failure. Consensus opinions are often wrong; in Ignatius’s column, for example, he writes that the “collapse them toward the middle” process produced a consensus on Iran and missile defense — which, as I argue here, have been, so far, failures.

In the first volume of his brilliant memoirs, The White House Years, Henry Kissinger writes this:

Before I served as a consultant to [President] Kennedy, I had believed, like most academicians, that the process of decision-making was largely intellectual and that all one had to do was to walk into the President’s office and convince him of the correctness of one’s views. This perspective I soon realized is as dangerously immature as it is widely held. . . . Almost all his callers are supplicants or advocates, and most of their cases are extremely plausible — which is what got them into the Oval Office in the first place. As a result, one of the President’s most difficult tasks is to choose among endless arguments that sound equally convincing. The easy decisions do not come to him; they are taken care of at lower levels.

Earlier, Kissinger writes:

The complexity of modern government makes large bureaucracies essential; but the need for innovation also creates the imperative to define purposes that go beyond administrative norms. Ultimately there is no purely organizational answer; it is above all a problem of leadership. . . . Statesmanship requires above all a sense of nuance and proportion, the ability to perceive the essential among a mass of apparent facts, and an intuition as to which of many equally plausible hypotheses about the future is likely to prove true.

That is a sophisticated, thoughtful account of how decisions ought to be made. And most of the time, taking an assortment of competing views and collapsing them toward the middle is not.

What a difference a few weeks make. On September 24, the New York Times reported this:

President Obama, in his first visit to the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, made progress . . . on two key issues, wringing a concession from Russia to consider tough new sanctions against Iran and securing support from Moscow and Beijing for a Security Council resolution to curb nuclear weapons. The successes came as Mr. Obama told leaders that the United States intended to begin a new era of engagement with the world, in a sweeping address to the General Assembly in which he sought to clearly delineate differences between himself and the administration of President George W. Bush.

One of the fruits of those differences — although White House officials were loath to acknowledge any quid pro quo publicly — emerged during Mr. Obama’s meeting on Wednesday afternoon with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, the first between the two since Mr. Obama decided to replace Mr. Bush’s missile defense program in Eastern Europe with a version less threatening to Moscow.

With a beaming Mr. Obama standing next to him, Mr. Medvedev signaled for the first time that Russia would be amenable to longstanding American requests to toughen sanctions against Iran significantly if, as expected, nuclear talks scheduled for next month failed to make progress. ”I told His Excellency Mr. President that we believe we need to help Iran to take a right decision,” Mr. Medvedev said, adding that ‘’sanctions rarely lead to productive results, but in some cases, sanctions are inevitable.”

White House officials could barely hide their glee. ”I couldn’t have said it any better myself,” a delighted Michael McFaul, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser for democracy and Russia, told reporters after the meeting. He insisted nonetheless that the administration had not tried to buy Russia’s cooperation with its decision to scrap the missile shield in Europe in favor of a reconfigured system. Privately, several administration officials did acknowledge that missile defense might have had something to do with Moscow’s newfound verbal cooperation on the Iran sanctions issue.

Today in the New York Times we read this:

Denting President Obama’s hopes for a powerful ally in his campaign to press Iran on its nuclear program, Russia’s foreign minister said Tuesday that threatening Tehran now with harsh new sanctions would be “counterproductive.” The minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said after meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton here that diplomacy should be given a chance to work, particularly after a meeting in Geneva this month in which the Iranian government said it would allow United Nations inspectors to visit its clandestine nuclear enrichment site near the holy city of Qum.

“At the current stage, all forces should be thrown at supporting the negotiating process,” he said. “Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive.”

Apart from the fact that White House officials are presumably able to hide their glee today, what ought we to make of these developments?

The first is that President Obama looks to have been taken to the cleaners by the Russians. The United States bowed before Russian demands when it came to retooling a missile-defense system for Poland and the Czech Republic. We gave up something tangible and important — and in return we got a vague promise that Russia might be amenable to tougher sanctions against Iran. Now that vague promise appears to be inoperative — but the decision to scrap the Bush-era missile-defense program remains in place.

This episode captures Obama’s approach to international affairs and underscores its dangers. The president is weak and flaccid when it comes to our adversaries, and unreliable and unsteady when it comes to our allies. America’s enemies don’t respect us, and our allies increasingly don’t trust us. President Obama garners praise from the man attempting to lead a Marxist revolution in Latin America, Hugo Chavez, and is criticized by the hero of Solidarity, Lech Walesa. We pressure friends like Israel, Honduras, Poland, and the Czech Republic, and place our hopes in the goodwill and reasonableness of regimes like Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And in the process, some of the world’s foremost spokesmen for democracy publicly express their concern that Obama is “softening on human rights.”

It was not supposed to be this difficult when Obama ran for president, when tyrants would bend to the will of America’s “sort of god.” But reality is turning out to be a tough task master for our young president. All around the world, Mr. Obama is increasingly seen as impotent; he is both popular and largely ignored, viewed more as a celebrity than as an imposing leader.

It is all quite alarming and dangerous.

If you want to understand how far Joe Klein has declined as a commentator, to the point of sometimes verging on incoherent arguments, you need look no further than here. It is Klein’s response to Charles Krauthammer’s extraordinary speech (later turned into a Weekly Standard essay) on American liberalism and American decline. In his blog entry, Klein writes this:

In the end, the real problem with Krauthammer’s rant is this: he really doesn’t want us to be exceptional. He wants us to be more brutal, more like other historically powerful countries, more like the Russians in Afghanistan or the British in Mesopotamia. His position on Iraq tips his hand, as he excoriates Obama for having

“. . . almost no interest in garnering the fruits of a very costly and very bloody success–namely, using our Strategic Framework Agreement to turn the new Iraq into a strategic partner and anchor for U.S. influence in the most volatile area of the world. Iraq is a prize–we can debate endlessly whether it was worth the cost–of great strategic significance that the administration seems to have no intention of exploiting in its determination to execute a full and final exit.”

A prize! Sounds sort of like Churchill in his most demented colonial moments: India, the jewel in the crown! (The fact that a duly elected Iraqi government wants us to leave is ignored.) Krauthammer’s sort of imperialism–a brutal and patronizing neo-colonialism–has never sat well with the American people.

Come again? Krauthammer’s essay is evidence that he wants us to be “more brutal,” “more like the Russians in Afghanistan”?

This charge — it is far too weak to warrant the designation of argument — can be fairly considered insane. Not only is there no shred of evidence to support what Klein asserts; for the record, Krauthammer supported the surge in Iraq when Klein opposed it. It was Klein who advocated policies that would have led to civil war and probably genocide in Iraq. It was Krauthammer who supported policies that kept those scenarios from materializing. So whose position qualifies as “brutal” in its effect?

In addition, insisting that turning Iraq into a strategic partner and anchor for U.S. influence in the most volatile area in the world is the moral equivalent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is a peculiar and twisted worldview. What Krauthammer is championing is not some kind of imperial exploitation; rather, he is in favor of the elected government of Iraq cooperating with the United States in order to fight terrorism and counteract the disorders in the Middle East. (Only a simpleton would believe that withdrawing troops means an end to bilateral relations. Lots of nations work cooperatively with each other even when they do not have combat troops deployed in each-other’s territories.) Apparently Klein believes it is “brutal and patronizing neo-colonialism” to act in a manner that advances American national-security interests, the interests and well-being of Iraqis, and human dignity in general.

I cannot help adding that for Klein to call anyone’s work a “rant,” given his splenetic and sometimes deranged postings, is fairly amusing. To make that charge against the finest columnist of his generation (and one the very best this country has ever seen) makes it all the more risible. Whatever has happened to Joe Klein over the years — whatever caused him to descend into a roiling mix of rage, bitterness, and dishonesty — it is a sad thing to witness. A mind, after all, is a terrible thing to waste — or to lose.

E.J. Dionne Jr.’s column today attempts to explain the “politics of rage” that has been inspired by President Obama. The first thing Dionne does is to helpfully explain to his readers that among the Right, “racism is part of the anti-Obama mix.” But there is a “second level of angry opposition” directed toward Obama and to which he needs to pay more attention. “It involves the genuine rage of those who felt displaced in our economy even before the great recession,” Dionne writes, “and are now hurting even more.” These folks are “angry white men,” according to Dionne, invoking the sophisticated demographic phrase used to explain the results of the 1994 midterm election (the anger of white men should not be confused with the two-year-old temper tantrum that Peter Jennings believed explained the GOP takeover of the House in 1994). Many who feel rage in 2009 “have legitimate reasons for it, even if neither Obama nor big government is the real culprit,” we learn. All this is said without condescension, of course.

I have several thoughts on Dionne’s meditation. The first is that during virtually the entire tenure of Obama’s predecessor, E.J. was part of a group, Angry White Men Inc., whose membership included the likes of Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Jonathan Alter, Jonathan Chait, Bill Maher, Michael Moore, and many others. This homogenous crew was, to a person, afflicted with a condition diagnosed as Bush Derangement Syndrome, one that has effects on its victims long after the cause of the condition has left the stage.

Second, the patronizing tone Dionne uses to explain the “rage” he detects out there — which is “legitimate” but, we learn, has nothing at all to do with either the president or big government — reminds me of the comments Barack Obama made at a fundraiser in San Francisco in April 2008. In outlining the challenges facing his presidential candidacy in the primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana — particularly persuading white working-class voters who, Obama said, had fallen through the cracks during the Bush and Clinton administrations — Mr. Obama said, “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This seems to be a popular line of argument for a certain strand of liberal opinion. They pretend to understand and sympathize with the rage and bitterness of the great unwashed masses. But they are so clumsy in their efforts to express their solidarity with hoi polloi that they give their little game away.

Very few columnists have a degree in psychology. E.J. Dionne is not one of them. He should therefore leave the psychological explanations to others who are better equipped to deal with such matters. When he engages in this kind of thing, he comes across as haughty and, at times, as angry and bitter toward the critics of Obama. Next thing you know, he’ll be clinging to guns and to God.