Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Politicizing the Arts Community: What Did the White House Do Wrong?
Posted by Hans von Spakovsky and Elliot S. Berke in Featured Story, News, Obama, Politics on October 8th, 2009
The allegations raised in “White House Creates ACORN for the Arts” and prior stories about the NEA enlisting artists who receive government grants to support President Obama’s political goals certainly raise a number of issues. Foremost among them is whether such actions violate White House policy and potentially federal law. The White House Counsel was concerned enough about the conference call that it was compelled to issue new guidelines for public outreach meetings, noting that some of the comments on the call may have been “misunderstood as seeking to inappropriately politicize activities of the NEA.” But beyond violating these White House guidelines, which could result in further forced resignations but little else, what is really at issue with the alleged conduct?
By seeking to enlist the private sector in lobbying for the President’s agenda, the alleged conduct may have violated the Anti-Lobbying Act (18 U.S.C. §1913), which as Ben Shapiro pointed out in a previous piece, explicitly provides:
No part of the money appropriated by any enactment of Congress shall, in the absence of express authorization by Congress, be used directly or indirectly to pay for any personal service, advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress, a jurisdiction, or an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation, whether before or after the introduction of any bill, measure or resolution proposing such legislation, law, ratification, policy or appropriation.
The Anti-Lobbying Act, according to government handbooks, prevents government employees from engaging in “substantial ‘grass roots’ lobbying campaigns … expressly urging individuals to contact government officials in support of or opposition to legislation …. Provid[ing] administrative support for lobbing activities of private organizations”
It is important to note that 18 U.S.C. §1913 only applies to federal officers or employees and not to the private recipients of federal grants, contracts or other federal disbursements. Thus, while the artists who responded to the NEA’s request for political help may not have violated this particular provision of federal law, Yosi Sergant, who was apparently the main person behind the NEA phone call, and other members of the White House staff who were involved in the May 12 meeting at the White House, may very well have violated §1913. Those staffers included “people very close to the President” according to Mike Strautmanis, Chief of Staff for the Office of Public Engagement. Punishment for such a violation can be severe – a civil penalty of not less than $10,000 and not more than $100,000 for each violation.
The behavior of these administration officials may have also violated 18 U.S.C. § 607, which prohibits anyone from promising “any employment, position, contract, or other benefit derived in whole or in part from an Act of Congress, as consideration, favor, or reward for past or future political activity.” Ben Shapiro’s article relates that Mario Garcia Durham, the Director of Presenting for the NEA, told the gathered artists at the White House meeting that the “government and its policies should be shaped by participants’ voices in connection with the NEA,” a pretty direct statement that the NEA considers its mission to be ensuring the president’s policies are being supported by its constituency – which are the artists who get its grants.
Whether or not the conduct of NEA and White House officials violates the Hatch Act (5 U.S.C. §7324) hinges on how broadly the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which has jurisdiction over Hatch Act violations, construes “political activity” and who specifically was involved in these calls and meetings. In general terms, the Hatch Act prohibits all federal employees (except for the President and the Vice President) from engaging in “political activity” in the workplace. While certain federal officials, such as some assistants to the President and some in Senate confirmable positions, are bound by the Hatch Act, they are exempt from the prohibition on engaging in political activity. So who was involved in the alleged conduct is the first question.
The second question goes to the underlying conduct. “Political activity” is defined as activities that are “directed toward the success or failure of a political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group.” That phrase has historically meant activities that were oriented towards campaigns or elections as opposed to simply political in the legislative sense, and the underlying intent is important. As an example, the Bush Administration came under OSC scrutiny regarding briefings that were held in federal buildings that analyzed the political landscape in the run up to the 2004 and 2006 election cycles. In this case, the alleged conduct appears to be even more forward looking – not rooted in an upcoming election cycle per se, but leveraging past campaign resources to promote a legislative agenda that may have an electoral benefit down the road. It would be a much easier analysis if comments were made about the 2010 cycle or about the need to help out in vulnerable member districts.
In the era of the permanent campaign – and the references to past support by the artists that apparently occurred on both the phone call and at the White House meeting – it remains to be seen if such conduct could be attributed to future and potential campaigns. On the other hand, the Hatch Act also prohibits soliciting or discouraging political activity by anyone with business before a federal agency – and there is no question that the artists the NEA was talking to had business (grants) before the NEA. The issue again is whether the NEA was soliciting political activity.
Another interesting side point is that historically – and in some cases problematically – so called “political activity” by the White House has been within the purview of the White House Office of Political Affairs. That office has not been without controversy. Senator John McCain pledged to eliminate it during the 2008 campaign and Congressman Henry Waxman has also called for its abolishment. But shortly after the election, President-Elect Obama announced that he would keep that office although it has been relatively quiet over the last eight months. The political conduct with the arts community seemed to come out of the White House Office of Public Engagement. So it would seem that the desire to push a political agenda has drifted into other White House offices.
But the ultimate question is whether the White House Counsel, the Office of Special Counsel or the Justice Department determines there is enough evidence from the NEA telephone call and the meeting at the White House to form the basis of an investigation into the actions of White House and NEA staff. That will serve as the ultimate indication as to whether this administration represents the promised new era of accountability or simply more politics as usual.
Human Decency and Hollywood: The Voice of America
Posted by Chris Burgard in Featured Story, Politics on October 8th, 2009
I work in Hollywood and many in my industry consider my views to be pretty radical. I blame my father and the values that he instilled in me: Never hit a woman and protect your children.
Over the past few years, throughout this country I have heard the same thing from audiences over and over, “Why doesn’t Hollywood make the kind of movies that we want to see? Why don’t movies represent our values?”
This is an outstanding opportunity for lessons learned. To everyone outside of this community, I implore you to take a long and hard look at the people who are standing up for Roman Polanski. The stars. The studio heads. Many of these people are the powers that be who green-light projects. These are the people that we pitch to. These are the people who decide whether or not our films get distribution. These are the people who decide what product should be available to you and your children.
Hollywood is the voice of popular American culture. Control Hollywood and you can steer the direction of the country.
Roman Polanski is a talented director. He has many friends who do not want to see him go to prison. He has many friends that do not want the eye of judgment to be turned on them.
Let’s put the workplace, friendship, history and the passage of time away for just a moment and look at the facts:
At age 43, Roman Polanski drugged a 13 year old girl. He plied her with alcohol and then he sodomized her. She was 13. She was a child. He was an adult, a powerful Hollywood player. She was in grade school. After confessing his crime, he ran away.
She was 13!
If you cannot look at this and say that this is wrong, if you cannot recognize an act of rape and pedophilia when you see one, then I submit that you have not lost your moral compass, you never had one.
I believe the rule of law needs to apply to all Americans equally. I do not support vigilante activity. But if Mr. Polanski had done that to my daughter, and had I found him first, I do not know that I could have guaranteed his safety. I do not know a father among my friends and family that does not feel the same.
Yes, I am probably shooting my career in the foot, again, by writing this article, but if we say nothing, then we are complicit in the perversion.
Edmund Burke wrote, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
How about it Hollywood? Do we still have a few good men? Are there any other fathers out there? Has this town completely forgotten who we are?
We are Americans? We are supposed to stand for something. We are supposed to lead by example. How can we face the threat of Sharia and say that abusing women, killing gay people and marrying prepubescent girls is wrong, if we do not protect our own children.
Where are we headed as a nation, as a culture, if we do not make a stand?
Inadequate Record-Keeping Cost Acorn Housing $130K
Posted by Kevin Kane in ACORN, Featured Story, Politics on October 8th, 2009
From Steve Beatty, Pelican Institute’s investigative reporter:
More than two years before an ersatz pimp and prostitute raised troubling questions about Acorn Housing Corp.’s financial advice, Louisiana officials criticized the organization’s bookkeeping as it denied the group tens of thousands of dollars from a potential $1.5 million state contract.
The office overseeing the contract recommended against rehiring Acorn Housing in part because it couldn’t document its work. The contract was designed to inform low-income residents about the Road Home program and help them apply for post-hurricane benefits.
A much smaller $53,000 contract that Acorn Community Land Association had with the state attorney general’s office also was criticized for thin financial justification, though the group got its full payment and was recommended for future work. The contract was to tell hurricane victims of non-discriminatory housing policies as they sought temporary rentals.
In both contracts, the state files contain promotional materials extolling the virtues of paying for an ACORN membership – a solicitation expressly forbidden under the contracts.
“If you are not rich, you need to join your ACORN community group and work on the problems affecting you,” reads one flier in the attorney general’s file.
Several governors, including Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, have frozen payments to ACORN or its hundreds of affiliated groups. The state has no current contracts, but records revealed the two expired contracts that paid the organizations more than $700,000.
ACORN officials did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
In the larger of the two state contracts, Acorn Housing was paid $671,000. However, it asked for much more: $801,000.
In the final evaluation of the contract, the state said Acorn Housing achieved the goal of reaching some of the targeted potential Road Home applicants, but it recommended that the state not rehire Acorn Housing.
That’s mainly because Acorn Housing kept lousy records, said Belinda Kennedy, who monitored the contract for the state’s Office of Community Development.
In the end, she rated Acorn Housing as being in “marginal compliance” with the state contract.
“There were items they were billing that we couldn’t account for,” she said in an interview this week.
Overall, the state said the invoices on file in the Acorn Housing office didn’t always match what was submitted to the state, some travel expenses couldn’t be confirmed or justified, and that the hours worked by employees weren’t always properly billed.
The final review of the contract said that Acorn Housing worked face-to-face with 629 households and another 159 over the phone in the 10 months between December 2006 and September 2007. Its subcontractor, working in rural western Louisiana parishes more affected by Hurricane Rita, reached more people, for a total of 2,099 households served by the contract.
Kennedy worked with Acorn Housing officials to try to clear up the bookkeeping problems, visiting the New Orleans office four months after the contract ended. She said she encouraged agency officials to work to justify some of the questionable billing.
“We never heard back from them,” Kennedy said.
More background on this story can be found here.
Patrick Courrilche on ‘Glenn Beck’
Posted by Big Hollywood in Politics, Video on October 8th, 2009
Patrick Courrielche discussed his pieces here and here with Glenn Beck on Monday. For those of you who missed it, or those of you who want to relive the magic once more:
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Part II after the jump.
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(UPDATED) School Kids Sing Praises of Health Care Reform on CNN
Posted by John Nolte in Obama, Politics, Video on October 7th, 2009
Big Hollywood should have started a pool where we could all drop a buck and guess the date and time a national news network would highlight a bunch of school kids singing for Dear Leader’s flagging bid to take over our nation’s health care. This is what the Left does, after all. Correcting bad behavior that furthers their cause is out of the question. So instead, they get us used to their bad behavior by performing it over and over again as if to say, “Would I be doing this so brazenly if it was wrong?”
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Predictably, CNN comes to the rescue, absolving all those awful school teachers who abused their captive audience with some of the creepiest child behavior since “Pet Sematary.” And I say “CNN” because Wolf –I lost on Jeopardy, baby– Blitzer just isn’t smart enough to figure all of this out on his own.
What’s so very disappointing about that clip is that these are many of the same students from the same school that provided The Brightest moment of the 2008 election:
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Is it me or do the kids look looser — less programmed and more joyful — in this video than the CNN one?
Anyway, looks like someone finally got to Ron Clark to remind him that true bipartisanship is agreeing with the Left.
UPDATE: The first video posted got zapped, but this new one is even worse. The kid talking to the CNN anchor opposes ObamaCare but he’s still forced to sing about it!
Financial Times: Breitbart Shapes Conservative Agenda
Posted by Big Hollywood in Politics on October 7th, 2009
From today’s Financial Times:
“When Andrew Breitbart first saw video footage of workers from Acorn, a community activist group, telling two undercover reporters how to set up a brothel and avoid paying taxes he knew he had a big scoop on his hands.
“The conservative commentator also knew the series of undercover videos, which caused an outcry when he released them last month on his BigGovernment website, would be dismissed by what he calls the “mainstream media”.
““The mainstream media are not story driven, they are ideology driven,” he says in an interview with the Financial Times. “They are universally left of centre and they protect their own . . . their raison d’être is to put pressure on anyone that would dare challenge their aggressive ideology.”
“The media outlets criticised by Mr Breitbart, which include CNN and the New York Times, reject accusations of bias. However, Mr Breitbart argues that liberal bias is inherent and admits to pursuing his own ideological aims through his websites. His policy has been rewarded with plenty of online traffic: September brought almost 11m unique users to his sites and 35m page views. (more…)
Polanski’s Polymorphous Perversity
Posted by Adam Baldwin in Featured Story, Politics on October 7th, 2009
After more than thirty years Oscar® winning director Roman Polanski, the infamous child rapist and decades-long fugitive from justice, has been captured. He should be extradited back to California as soon as possible for sentencing.
Some of Polanski’s early apologists and defenders are likely now entertaining discomforting second-thoughts about their hasty signing of the petition demanding his immediate release from captivity, as indeed some are also now furiously backpedaling in regret over their indiscretion of speaking out publicly on his behalf.
It seems an appropriate time to review some origins and history underlying the modern psychological rationales currently attempting to dilute and evade Polanski’s morally deviant nihilism, and the cognitive dissonance (i.e., “it wasn’t ‘rape’ rape”) introjected by countercultural pseudo-intellectual sycophants.
Its members’ values inculcation was, with purposeful destructiveness, initiated early last century by an all-too-often overlooked intellectual vanguard. So, in deconstructing the value of his sexual crimes, Polanski’s sophistic defenders were/are perhaps unwittingly acting out a reflexive cultural pre-conditioning, rather than logic and reason. This is hardly surprising, considering the players, yet the whys and wherefores are important, if only for historical perspective.
Consider last century’s counter-revolutionary works by postmodern cultural Marxism’s Intellectual Moron gurus:
Such as Alfred C. Kinsey, whose “‘pansexual worldview’ says that all forms of sexual expression are equal and acceptable.”
Or, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros & Civilization that, pace William Lind, ‘condemned all restrictions on sexual behavior. Calling instead for “polymorphous perversity” that, by the way, helped open the door for aspects of the political correctness movement. Its self-congratulatory, narcissistic foundation for Marcuse’s good human society whose liberating tolerance for “non-procreative Eros” was intended, per Roger Kimball, to help society ‘find great enlightenment and great happiness which was supposed to be the key to utopia’.
UC Berkeley professor Martin Jay (2:20 mark…) summarizes that polymorphous perversity “argues that at certain early developmental levels of the human psyche, there was a potential for sexual expression/sexual pleasure which had not yet been organized into the restricted notions of heterosexual sexuality. And that these had some sort of capacity to be reinvigorated.”
Correlation: Leading Polanski petitioner Woody Allen has produced intimate knowledge of this Freudian psychoanalytic term (promoted by Marcuse): In his Oscar® winning “Annie Hall,” Allen’s character tells his girlfriend he loves her because she is “polymorphic perverse.” Likewise, in Allen’s “Celebrity” a nubile female model claims to be a “polymorphic perverse,” whom the protagonist finds invigorating. In another of Allen’s films, “Manhattan,” he portrays a divorced man dating a high-schooler (Mariel Hemingway).
Elsewhere more recently, in American Splendor, Joyce Brabner informs Harvey Pekar that his friend Robert Crumb is “polymorphously perverse.”
Coincidence? Not a chance…
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PJTV’s Bill Whittle neatly condenses this history in “The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness.”
Polanski’s current intolerant defenders’ politically correct instincts to apply empathy and/or glorify the iconic-old-fugitive-child-rapist might afford some comfort while insulated within the closed-circles of elite and fashionable salons and retreats.
However, the practical consequences of such a rash decision — and any subsequent indignant retreats in faux-‘victimhood’ or mountings to self-anointed moral ‘high ground’ should, for those with any common sense of decency remaining, become imminently difficult, if not impossible to ignore from colleagues, audiences and customers whom reside in the real world down here on Olympus’ lower slopes.
The temptation of mercy and patient edification for the clueless (a.k.a., ‘useful idiots’) is strong and perhaps even good. After all, it’s really little more than their ignorant do-gooder idealism that causes them to swoon for perverted totalitarian ideologies.
Intolerant, stubbornly divisive, self-satisfied Polanski-apologist glitterati, continue to receive well-earned rejection and scorn from regular Americans.
As for child-rapist Polanski: it is long past time for the Crimes & Consequences of this perverted ‘progressive’ icon to be administered once and for all… Guilty as charged.
Satire is the Highest Form of Dissent?
Posted by Scott Graves in Politics, Video on October 7th, 2009
Though Thomas Jefferson never said, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” the well-applied use of satire is certainly one of the highest forms of dissent. Jonathan Swift, after all, is more remembered for his grim irony in castigating the British and Irish for their collective humanitarian failures than for any contributions to the culinary arts.
Mad Magazine reigns supreme in creating a satirical crucible through which all subjects, social, cultural, political, artistic and philosophical typically pass. The difference between valid satire and mere mockery being, of course, the elements of truth contained therein, it is sometimes difficult to rule out former as as being buried so deeply in the latter as to be inconsequential, particularly during political campaigns. The editors of Mad would likely say that if such a line is drawn, they erase it, but nonetheless credibility rests on facts in satirical endeavors, humor being in the manner of delivery.
Ignorance Is Strength...
All this comes to mind partially as a result of hearing, for the umpteenth time, that horrid, superciliously intoned little chant that goes “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, Barack Hussein Obama…” as sung by the children in that “unauthorized” Burlington Township School District video that is making the rounds. The message being obvious and well-analyzed elsewhere, let us not forget how disturbingly cloying and memetically insidious the song is, in and of itself. Even the 1910 Fruitgum Company, acknowledged masters of the form, would be hard-pressed to corkscrew such a tenaciously mind-numbing ditty into the listener’s skull.
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The mind reels. The brain, in a desperate attempt to exorcise the alien and excruciatingly insufferable mental loop, invents its own lyrics to alleviate the suffering, at least temporarily:
Ooooo, Ooooo, Ooooo
Barack Hussein Obama
Ooooo, Ooooo, Ooooo
I’ll tell my daddy and momma
Two, four, six, eight
Let’s build a liberal fascist state
Ooooo, Ooooo, Ooooo…
The President of the United States is
Black so all dissent is racist
Ooooo, Ooooo, Ooooo…
Remember all that you are taught
His problems all are Bush’s fault
Ooooo, Ooooo, Ooooo…
Little ones to him belong
We are weak but he is strong
Ooooo, Ooooo, Ooooo…
Redistributive justice rules
So we will be our Leader’s tools
Ooooo, Ooooo, Ooooo
Barack Hussein Obama
Ooooo, Ooooo, Ooooo
I’ll tell my daddy and momma
But not even Weird Al Yankovic would touch that one. Better to catch a chunk of concrete upside the head at a G20 protest in the act of dissent than go there, such dissent, contrary to the President’s own honest assessment, being instantly equated with the evils of race-hatred by those who would silence opposing viewpoints. Well-heeled anarchists can surely yell “no borders, no banks,” block traffic and hurl garbage all day to further the destruction of capitalism. That’s healthy, and double-plus so for those who favor the particular dissent that would herald the end of the aforementioned economic system.
Thus, the temptation to round up a gaggle of youngsters to sing the horrid little satirical ditty of unknown origin mentioned above, record it on a cell phone, and snag a cheap zillion hits by posting it to YouTube is quashed. Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.
But, really, nobody does it better than these folks:
We have always been at war with Eastasia, er, Westhollywood...
The People’s Cube – Correct Opinions for Progressive Liberals – Political Humor & Satire
Funny stuff, highly recommended, and fans of Thomas Jefferson will likely approve.
Bailout May Be Helping to Generate Up to Half of Bank’s Profits
Posted by Anthony Randazzo in News, Obama, Politics on October 7th, 2009
We will never know how many, if any, of the major banks would have failed without the TARP bailout package passed a year ago. Several banks were strong-armed into taking the money. We can be reasonably sure that Citigroup and Bank of America wouldn’t be the institutions they are today without some government hand-holding—actually, it is more like continuous CPR while giving blood and donating a kidney.
However, while we can’t know the counterfactual, we can assess how the liquidity infusions have decreased credit risk, lowering the cost of capital, and compare these savings to profits. And the stunning numbers show that up to nearly half of all profits from the top 18 banks are the result of Uncle Sam subsidizing the cost of credit.
Every day financial firms borrow money to conduct business. Just like with individuals and families, there is a cost to the credit in the form of an interest payment or fee. However, with a virtual government guarantee of security, the big financial institutions have been able to borrow at artificially reduced rates. Lenders to financial institutions know Uncle Sam has the back of the big boys on Wall Street. They’re sure to get their money back, based on current White House and Fed policy.
The problem is that this gives large financial institutions a competitive advantage over smaller business. Those smaller firms have to pay more for their credit. They don’t have the government guarantee. They are more risky. And while it is true that smaller firms will always have to pay more money to borrow than the larger firms, the government guarantee has widened the gap between the cost of credit for the smalls and bigs.
This has been a generally accepted phenomena over the past year, but now we have some real numbers to back up the theory. The left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) released an interesting study last week that looked at the implicit benefits that banks have received from TARP and associated Federal Reserve programs. The report finds that banks have received up to $34.1 billion in benefits—beyond the $700 billion of TARP infusions—from cheap access to credit due to their too big to fail (TBTF) status.
Here is the gist of the study:
The spread between the average cost of funds for smaller banks and the cost of funds for institutions with assets in excess of $100 billion averaged 0.29 percentage points in the period from the first quarter of 2000 through the fourth quarter of 2007, the last quarter before the collapse of Bear Stearns. In the period from the fourth quarter of 2008 through the second quarter of 2009, after the government bailouts had largely established TBTF as official policy, the gap had widened to an average of 0.78 percentage points. [...] The increase in the gap of 0.49 percentage points implies a government subsidy of $34.1 billion a year to the 18 bank holding companies with more than $100 billion in assets in the first quarter of 2009.
Note that the “subsidy” mentioned here is not direct cash taken from taxpayer coffers, but rather it is a benefit that is gained by the promised use of taxpayer monies to insurance against losses/failure. This is the government using policy to redirect resources in the marketplace. Essentially this is saying that big banks were saved over $34.1 billion in costs.
To put that number in context, the total profits of the 18 largest banks during the second measured period from the end of 2008 to 2009 has been $68.56 billion, meaning the “subsidy” from cheaper access to credit accounts for nearly half of big bank profits. And, again, this not even counting the direct benefit that the capital infusions from TARP have provided.
The report also notes that $34.1 billion is the high end estimate and that there are other factors which could be considered as the cause for the increased spread in cost of credit. But if the high end estimate is correct, then government “subsidy” accounted for 166% of Capital One’s profits last year, and it prevented Morgan Stanley’s losses from being 50% larger. Those are very significant numbers when you consider what other uses the assets and resources these failing companies are consuming could be put towards.
If President Obama’s Wall St. regulation reform plan becomes law it will make TBTF explicit, perpetuating these associated problems with artificially reduced credit risk (which I wrote about in my recent financial services regulation study published by the Reason Foundation). As The New York Times puts it:
Too-big-to-fail is already an extremely costly policy; the longer it is allowed to persist, the heavier this taxpayer burden will become.
See here for the full CERP report and data.
For more on this, check out Reason’s blog Out of Control: New Study Suggests Nearly Half of Bank Profits Could Be From Too Big To Fail Guarantees
Obama’s America- the Gordon Brown years?
Posted by Daniel Kalder in Obama, Politics, health care on October 7th, 2009
The 2008 election campaign filled me with an eerie sense of déjà vu, as I suspect it did many British people living in America. The hysterical reception accorded Barack Obama was strongly reminiscent of the frothing enthusiasm for Tony Blair in 1997.
Obama had a more inspiring biography than Tony Blair of course and did sincerity better; nevertheless there were many parallels. Both were relatively young, charismatic men who insistently repeated stirring but vague mantras about change and a coming new era to an exhausted electorate craving a break with the recent past. Both surrounded themselves with pop stars and other glamorous types, in an attempt to identify with everything that was young and progressive and hip. Of course, this being America, Obama operated on a much grander, messianic scale: Blair never implied that his victory might lower the earth’s water levels for example, and nor did anybody ever faint at his rallies as if he were a faith healer. However when Blair won the election the sympathetic Guardian newspaper did get rather overheated: I recall an article in which the atmosphere in the UK was compared to the relief felt at the end of World War II, thus equating the hapless John Major with Adolph Hitler. That total absence of proportion will sound familiar to anyone who has flicked through the People’s Temple style newsletter that is Newsweek or spent a few minutes watching the risible MSNBC. (In the Guardian’s defence however, none of its writers were ever so feeble-minded as to compare Blair to God.)
Anyway, during the election campaign I would say to those who asked for my thoughts on the Obama phenomenon that perhaps it wasn’t wise for so many people to allow themselves to be so carried away. Obama was only a man; worse still a politician; and even worse- not a very experienced one. I would then suggest that many Americans were setting themselves up for a massive disappointment: that the impossible expectations that Obama and his devotees had aroused would ultimately lead to profound disillusionment, leaving people even more cynical and embittered than if they had never been thus misled. Tony Blair’s career in Britain offered a shining example of this process in action. My listeners would then change the subject and never mention Obama to me again. I understood: they wanted to believe, they were protecting their faith.
Meanwhile I had a sinking suspicion that having evaded the Blair era in the UK (I was in Moscow, enjoying the regime of Vladimir Putin) I was about to experience the big budget American remake under Mr. Obama. Of course, it was never going to be an exact fit: Britain and America have different political systems, different histories and different cultures even if we speak (roughly) the same language. Yet peering through Obama’s cloud of lofty rhetoric I seemed to see a lot that was familiar. Like Blair, Obama was obsessed with his representation in the media and excessively keen to be perceived as cool and trendy. Like Blair, he was enthusiastic for a massive expansion of government, for the promotion of relatively unaccountable unelected officials into influential positions, for the incurring of massive debt to pay for his grand schemes, for promoting people with backgrounds in campus radicalism, and for great globs of toweringly ambitious but apparently half-baked reform.
The comparison was not perfect of course. Thankfully Obama showed no enthusiasm for several of Mr. Blair’s more notorious outrages, such as establishing a new criminal offence for every day he was in office, or transforming Britain into a paranoid, surveillance society. Nor did he speak of ‘Democracy’ in the same dreamy way as Blair, as if it was a metaphysical force for good in itself. Post- Iraq, Obama prefers sovereignty, including the sovereignty of scumbags. Still, Britain 1997- 2007 seemed like a reasonable rule of thumb for some of the president’s agenda at least.
Recently however I’ve started to think I may have been wrong. You see, Blair, for all his faults, got things done. He cracked skulls and enforced rigid party discipline. Armed with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and faced with an opposition in total disarray, he seized the moment to ram through reams of legislation. Obama on the other hand seems unable to achieve much of anything, as even SNL has noticed, while his party is impressively undisciplined. The absurd stimulus package, so obviously stuffed with un-stimulating pet projects was an embarrassment. Then there is the ongoing civil war between elements of the administration and the CIA; and the endless shenanigans over health care etc. It is starting to look as though Obama has little control over his own party, and that its hierarchy does not necessarily respect him. Every major initiative he sets out to pursue seems to degenerate into chaos.
However, it was as I was watching Obama make his pitch for Chicago before the IOC in Copenhagen that I knew I definitely had the wrong analogy. After all, Blair won the Olympic Games for London when everybody thought the city was going to lose. Obama, on the other hand, not only lost but made himself look ridiculous in the process- the most powerful man in the world come as a supplicant before the crooks of the IOC, only to be slapped down.
Perhaps we aren’t about to live through a remake of the Blair years after all. Blair is a winner, you see- even now many think he may live again as first president of the EU. Obama on the other hand, well… he used to look like a winner, but increasingly- not so much. Could it be then that the USA has fast forwarded to what followed Blair? Maybe there will be no period of hope giving way to gradual disillusionment, no period of furious reform collapsing into widespread cynicism. Maybe instead we’re going straight to the catastrophic aftermath- courtesy of a man with big dreams promoted beyond the level of his competence, besieged on all sides by disaster, unable to effect anything. Is Barack Obama actually America’s Gordon Brown? I hope not- for all our sakes.