Re: Ross Douthat article in New York Times The problem seems to be that Barack Hussein has profound distaste for politics. As much as I detested William Clinton it must be conceded that he had (and has) a love for politics. You could say the same for LBJ and JFK, somewhat for Reagan, unquestionably for Karl Rove, and if you are history minded, the apex of such love can be seen in the veritable burning lust for politics on the part of the two Roosevelts.
For Obama, politics seems to be an impediment, something that may be a necessary evil but which is to be avoided if at all possible. As Niall Ferguson put it so well recently, "Obama doesn't know how to govern." The reason is that he doesn't care for politics, at least not for politics at some other level than that of city politics as he knew it in Chicago. This is understandable: Obama's original ambition was to become mayor of Chicago, following in the footsteps of Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor in the era when Barack first became a South Sider after relocating there from Harvard. Basically this means that, once elected, you rule as King of Chicago, with aldermen acting as a rubber stamp for royal decrees. Now that is fun politics -as Obama understands politics. Added to this is the fact that, despite all the hoopla and media myth-making about Obama's great intelligence, he isn't very smart. Or, more clinically, his intelligence is circumscribed. He is very good at some things but terrible at most others, and among his weaknesses is that entire areas of politics disinterest him profoundly. Thus he doesn't take the time to learn how to operate as a successful politician and much prefers rounds of golf. As of this writing he has visited the fairways 200+ times since 2009, and almost never in the company of politicians, but in the company of buddies because he wants to get away from politics. To be a good politician politics must be a full time job, not something to avoid at every opportunity. If electoral politics is war, this means that non-election politics is preparation for war. This means negotiating alliances, learning to play any number of games with one's constituents and opponents, thinking deeply about strategy, paying attention to details of tactics, and even such things as "weather forecasting," viz., discerning which way the wind is blowing, when storms are brewing, what to expect by way of snow, and so forth. Think of, well, Eisenhower making plans for D-Day, which took years, even as the actual invasion came and went in a matter of a few weeks. I have un-fond memories of Lyndon Johnson; the man had no class, as they say. However, he had a passion for politics. For him all politics, no matter how noble it could sometimes be -its lofty goals- or how dirty it could get, was practical in nature. There was nothing (or precious little) that could possibly be understood in the abstract, or reduced to formal rules. Like history as a discipline, you might be able to arrive at a number of valuable generalizations, and here and there you could call it a science, but mostly it was real world practicality that mattered. Politics is about getting things done. It is about achieving success despite obstacles and despite a forever changing cast of characters. To the extent that any science has parallels to politics it would seem to be Fluid Dynamics. There is no place in politics for pure idealists -even if idealism may well be a help in getting elected. In fact, idealism usually is a necessity as part of the process; you need to stand for something and the best way to communicate that you do is to express idealistic values that voters can relate to. However, this is the smallest part of politics. The smallest part. The largest part is wheeling and dealing, and making tough decisions. Hence the need to learn, somehow, the ins-and-outs of psychology -also at a very practical level. And hence the need to learn how to teach others -because, except for hacks, there is always something new to cope with, some new issue to try and resolve, and everyone has a need to learn continuously. And someone needs to teach them. It matters greatly to know how to teach effectively. There is a helluva lot more to it than imparting facts or making speeches. Obama is none of these things, basically he doesn't know what in the hell he is doing. He is, as one recent best-selling author has said, a rank amateur. He's also a doctrinaire Leftist who is so enamored of Leftism that, for him, the Left is the Center and the Right is so much nonsense not worth listening to. For him the word "Left" can only mean what for the rest of us is completely off the charts, Maoism, or Stalinism. But for Obama, while he also rejects anything like that, "normal" means Cultural Marxism, it means Gramsci in American clothes, it means the Frankfort School transposed to his experiences at Harvard, and it means Political Correctness elevated to the status of divine revelation that must never be questioned. With that kind of mindset, how could American politics resonate with Barack Hussein Obama? American politics, for him, is utterly foreign. Or: When it is American his model is the worst of America, not its best. Obama is Al Sharpton who speaks better English, who isn't nearly as boorish, that pretty well sums it up. Billy ================================================== Sunday Review The Great Immigration Betrayal Ross Douthat IN the months since President Obama first seem poised — as he now seems poised again — to issue a sweeping executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, we’ve learned two important things about how this administration approaches its constitutional obligations. First, we now have a clear sense of the legal arguments that will be used to justify the kind of move Obama himself previously described as a betrayal of our political order. They are, as expected, lawyerly in the worst sense, persuasive only if abstracted from any sense of precedent or proportion or political normality. Second, we now have a clearer sense of just how anti-democratically this president may be willing to proceed. The legal issues first. The White House’s case is straightforward: It has “ prosecutorial discretion” in which illegal immigrants it deports, it has precedent-grounded power to protect particular groups from deportation, and it has statutory authority to grant work permits to those protected. Therefore, there can be no legal bar to applying discretion, granting protections and issuing work permits to roughly half the illegal-immigrant population. This argument’s logic, at once consistent and deliberately obtuse, raises one obvious question: Why stop at half? (Activists are already asking.) After all, under this theory of what counts as faithfully executing the law, all that matters is that somebody, somewhere, is being deported; anyone and everyone else can be allowed to work and stay. So the president could “ temporarily” legalize 99.9 percent of illegal immigrants and direct the Border Patrol to hand out work visas to every subsequent border crosser, so long as a few thousand aliens were deported for felonies every year . The reality is there is no agreed-upon limit to the scope of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law because no president has attempted anything remotely like what Obama is contemplating. In past cases, presidents used the powers he’s invoking to grant work permits to modest, clearly defined populations facing some obvious impediment (war, persecution, natural disaster) to returning home. None of those moves even approached this plan’s scale, none attempted to transform a major public policy debate, and none were deployed as blackmail against a Congress unwilling to work the president’s will. And none of them had major applications outside immigration law. No defender of Obama’s proposed move has successfully explained why it wouldn’t be a model for a future president interested in unilateral rewrites of other areas of public policy (the tax code, for instance) where sweeping applications of “discretion” could achieve partisan victories by fiat. No liberal has persuasively explained how, after spending the last Republican administration complaining about presidential “signing statements,” it makes sense for the left to begin applying Cheneyite theories of executive power on domestic policy debates. Especially debates in which the executive branch is effectively acting in direct defiance of the electoral process. This is where the administration has entered extraordinarily brazen territory, since part of its original case for taking these steps was that they supposedly serve the public will, which only yahoos and congressional Republicans oppose. This argument was specious before; now it looks ridiculous. The election just past was not, of course, a formal referendum on the president’s proposed amnesty, but it was conducted with the promise of unilateral action in the background, and with immigration as one of the more hotly debated issues. The result was a devastating defeat for Obama and his party, and most polling on unilateral action is pretty terrible for the president. So there is no public will at work here. There is only the will to power of this White House. Which is why the thinking liberal’s move, if this action goes forward, will be to invoke structural forces, flaws inherent in our constitutional order, to justify Obama’s unilateralism. This won’t be a completely fallacious argument: Presidential systems like ours have a long record, especially in Latin America, of producing standoffs between executive and legislative branches, which tends to make executive power grabs more likely. In the United States this tendency has been less dangerous — our imperial presidency has grown on us gradually; the worst overreaches have often been rolled back. But we do seem to be in an era whose various forces — our open-ended post-9/11 wars, the ideological uniformity of the parties — are making a kind of creeping caudillismo more likely. But if that evil must come, woe to the president who chooses it. And make no mistake, the president is free to choose. No immediate crisis forces his hand; no doom awaits the country if he waits. He once campaigned on constitutionalism and executive restraint; he once abjured exactly this power. There is still time for him to respect the limits of his office, the lines of authority established by the Constitution, the outcome of the last election. Or he can choose the power grab, and the accompanying disgrace. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
