Is Afghanistan another Vietnam?

Frank Rich's column in today's (Sunday 9/27/09) New York Times discusses a chilling reminder about how wrong advisors get things with presidents.  His discussion of Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster makes me wonder why smart outsiders, like Obama, listen at all to Washington foreign policy insiders.  Just as George Ball, Undersecretary of State, warned Kennedy of the impending disaster in Vietnam, Joe Biden, for all his self-important puffery, seems to know what is likely to happen if we expand the war in Afghanistan.  I hope Obama is listerning....

Is Obama "Going Public?"

The weekend blitz by President Obama can be seen as engaging in a strategy detailed by political scientist Samuel Kernell in his book Going Public: New Strategies In Presidential Leadership.  First published in 1986, Kernell argues that presidents "go public" to expand the scope of political conflict to include the general population, who then exert overt or implicit pressure on members of Congress to go along with presidential initiatives.  In this view, the president must do this on every issue, since the stability of party is not a given.

Although there are some elements of Kernell's theory here, I doubt that this is what Obama is doing.  Instead, I think that Obama is focused on using this public blitz to appeal to the opinion elite, not the masses.  Do not have time now to explain this, but I will, if I don't forget to make another entry soon...

Now, Let's See What Happens

Just a quick blog entry, since the readings I assigned to my students are rather boring (Nice Move: turn them off in the first week by assigning dry material...) and I don't wish to read them for the fifth time...

Okay, President Obama has shown his respect for the constitutional provisions that not only suggest, but demand, that Congress be the body that deliberates legislation. Now, let's see how deft he is at using his extra-constitutional power of bargaining. I get the impression that he is very good at it, despite the rather shallow analyses that pervade the airwaves (and we wonder why people like my brother, sister, and brothers-in-law are so uninformed about politics and prone to manipulation of demagogues?!).

First, I hope you saw the faces on Republicans as he spoke to them on Wednesday about health care. The vacuous ones in the popular press do not seem to connect the frustrated blurting of Rep. Wilson to the grimaces on most Republicans (or McCain's painful smile and "thumbs up" when Obama cornered him by adapting his views to McCain's), who know they are cooked. We may be seeing the end of the Republican Party as we know it (I am not willing to make such a bold assertion yet, though), and they know it. That is why they are grasping at fiction in countering the Obama plan.

This guy is good, a modernist in a postmodern political era, but one who actually appreciates the postmodern dilemma. He seems to understand that responding in-kind, the method used by Democrats in the Clinton era, is not the way to win.
I have always thought that postmodern politics would burn itself out, and I think Obama is dousing the flames in a cool, effective manner. Let's see if I am right on health care...