Obama at war with the liberals?
The domestic political stakes of a wider war in Afghanistan
Obama at war with the liberals?
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Now that Thanksgiving is over, we're all watching to see whether a certain American leader can extricate himself from crisis and rebuild his popularity...but enough about Tiger Woods. Lest we forget, the president of the United States also has a big task ahead of him. Here is my Sunday print column, updated and expanded:
Barack Obama is poised tomorrow night to expand America's military commitment in Afghanistan, a troop hike decision that is likely to enrage his liberal Democratic base. This strikes me as a problem that could seriously undermine his presidency.
In terms of domestic politics, the first task of any chief executive is to secure the support of his own followers; this is especially true if he's waging a war. A president needs to know that the voters who elected him are on board for the long haul. George W. Bush enjoyed that luxury. Six years ago, he went into Iraq to thunderous applause from his conservative Republican base - which stuck with him for years, long after it became clear that he had hyped the rationale for invasion and failed to win the peace.
By contrast, Obama's imminent dispatch of roughly 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan comes at a time when roughly two-thirds of all Democrats are telling pollsters that the war is not worth fighting; indeed, 57 percent reportedly favor troop withdrawals. The antiwar liberals who propelled Obama's nascent candidacy are worried that an expanded, costly war will wind up sinking his domestic agenda. Democratic strategists are worried that if the war continues to go badly even with the hike in troops (a distinct possibility), liberals might register their disgust by skipping the 2010 congressional elections, thus trimming or imperiling the Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill.
Looming over this week's troop hike rollout is the specter of Lyndon Johnson. Back in 1965, when LBJ launched the first major escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, he enjoyed broad national support (that August, only 24 percent of Americans told pollsters that the war was a mistake), and landslide loyalty from congressional Democrats. But by the winter of 1968, his ambitious domestic agenda was in tatters and the party was torn apart from within.
The Democrats who lit Obama's fuse in the early primaries did so because they assumed he was generally opposed to military adventurism. It's true that he talked up Afghanistan as the right war, but his followers were mostly galvanized by his indictment of Iraq as the wrong war. In that very distant era - two years ago - few rank-and-file Democrats were focused on Afghanistan at all. They had no problems with Obama talking tough about Afghanistan, because they saw it as a political necessity. They knew he'd never get elected unless he exuded some national security gravitas.
But now the deal is real. The irony for Obama is that, in the absence of broad Democratic support, his decision to expand the war will be applauded primarily by the Republicans; nationwide, 60 percent of Republicans are telling pollsters that the war is worth fighting. GOP leaders will probably praise Obama for giving Gen. Stanley McChrystal most of what he wanted, and they'll be glad that Obama has vowed anew to "finish the job," even though nobody really has a clue what a finished job would actually look like.
As we know, however, these people are not Obama's friends. Six months from now, if his benchmarks for success come up short, or if he starts talking about exit strategies (known, in the new parlance, as "off ramps"), they'll quickly try to morph him into Jimmy Carter and deride him as a wimp incapable of command. Granted, Bush was the president who invaded the wrong country after 9/11 (with the GOP's acquiescence) and put Afghanistan on the back burner (with the GOP's acquiescence), thus bequeathing Obama a festering mess with few cleanup options - but, hey, that's politics.
All the more reason why Obama needs strong support from his own party. Certainly, some Democrats do support the troop hike as essential to our national security. Last Wednesday, on a Washington blog, a counterterrorism analyst named Jim Arkedis urged his fellow Democrats to fall into line: "The president will need his party’s understanding and support to succeed. If Democrats fall out over Afghanistan, he won’t be able to sustain a coherent policy, and the public will likely lose confidence in the party’s ability to manage the nation’s security."
But that's a very tough sell. The majority Democratic stance was articulated yesterday by Paul Kirk, the Massachusetts senator who temporarily occupies the Ted Kennedy seat. Writing in the Boston Globe, Kirk said, "We should not send a single additional dollar in aid or add a single American serviceman or woman" unless the corrupt Afghan government gets its act together. Until that happens, Kirk said, "we need not enlarge our military footprint in Afghanistan and risk even more violence for our perceived 'occupation.'"
As far as Senate-speak goes, that's strong stuff; away from the Hill,, other antiwar Democrats are more outspoken. Michael Cohen, a former State Department speechwriter and current Washington think tank scholar, argued in a blog post the other day: "If you want the public to 'lose confidence' in the Democratic party's ability to manage the nation's security, then, yes, mindlessly supporting a strategically dubious war in Afghanistan...is a jolly good idea....I'm getting ready to watch a Democratic president, to whom I've invested a great deal of emotional energy and support, tragically follow this course. But just because the president makes a decision to send more troops into an Afghan quagmire, it most certainly does not mean that his party should blindly follow course."
And his party won't do that. Congressional Democrats are recoiling at the cost of an escalated conflict - Nancy Pelosi remarked the other day that there is "serious unrest in our caucus about can we afford this war" - particularly in the wake of reports that the price tag per soldier is $1 million a year. They don't want to pay for Afghanistan if it means shelving the party's domestic agenda, so some have suggested a solution: a new "war tax" to help finance the wider war.
This idea is being floated by Democratic congressman David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. As he argued yesterday on CNN, "If this war is important enough to engage in the long term, it's important enough to pay for," via new taxes, as opposed to simply borrowing more money and fobbing off the debt on future generations. He said that if this war is destined to last another eight to 10 years, "at least you ought to pay for it so that it doesn't destroy every other effort that we need to rebuild our own economy." (By the way, Obey believes that the imminent troop hike is "a fool's errand.")
So...a new tax on recession-burdened Americans? To pay for a war that at this point barely musters 50 percent support in the national polls? That's a synonym for political suicide, and thus not likely to happen. But the fact that a high-ranking Democrat has even proposed such a bill is proof of the party's restiveness. (The pro-war Republicans would never support such a move, of course. They preferred to finance our misadventure in Iraq in part by borrowing heavily from China and sticking our grandkids with the tab.)
The likeliest money scenario, voiced recently by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen, is that Obama's escalated war will require a supplemental funding bill next year. Oh, the irony: That's precisely how Bush often did his war business, by circumventing the regular defense budget. During the '08 campaign, Obama won liberal hearts by assailing Bush's budgetary tricks and vowing he'd never finance a war that way. So this too could prompt liberals to cry betrayal.
Obama is surely trying to chart a pragmatic, non-ideological course - signaling that Afghanistan (and, most importantly, its impact on Pakistan) is a vital security interest, while also stressing that the wider war will not be open-ended. Indeed, in his Tuesday night address he is expected to outline his exit strategy goals (if only to reassure his Democratic base), without specifiying how or when those goals may be achieved (thereby unnerving his Democratic base).
All told, Obama will need political strength at home to sustain his mission abroad, and I question whether he can succeed in that effort if most rank-and-file Democrats begin to wonder whatever happened to hope and change.
still_independent, those statisticians were given data by the Associated Press, and I even mentioned them in one of my post. Do you even bother to read? However, are statisticians climate experts? Isn't that one of the arguments used against the deniers, that they are mathemiticans, engineers, etc. and not climate experts? As for causing global warming, my quote was from the UK Times which wrote "He (Phil Jones) and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity." I ask again, exactly what is the argument of anthroprogenic global warming if not that it is caused by human activity? Finally, there may be raw data available. That was not the issue. The issue was the raw data accumulated by the UEA CRU which was then massaged for variables in collection methods, etc. and used to come up with a lot of the data sent to the IPCC for their AR4 paper on global warming. That data was dumped to save space. Isn't science supposed to preserve their data so they can be fact checked and the data can be used to rule out other causes? Isn't science supposed to not only produce theories but use that data to rule out other competing theories? So if the data is dumped, how can it be checked? Are the data sets to which you linked those that were used by the UEA CRU scientists? As for warming, if the models did not predict the current stoppage (as noted by Michael Mann in his e-mail I linked to), then does that mean there is a flaw that might make longer term future warming uncertain?— tom - wilmington, de
Comment removed.- Rush is calling the climate people 'warmers'. Too funny.— NEPhilly
- TOM & XI: I thought we were in Afgan to get bin Laden! All the young American lives that Obama is sacrificing for political ends after dithering to do just that. Now, we find out Bush and Cheney would not supply 800 Army Rangers in 2001 to get bin Laden at Toro Boro, and we add another questionable act to his now 111 to 116 questionable acts. Conse 'Pubs are outraged by Obama having even 1 state dinner or day off, while Bush blowing getting bin Laden is too minor an issue. Dems should be ashamed to criticize Bush for that.— Talvenada
- TO NEW POSTERS: Conse 'Pubs know for a fact that Obama is guilty of everything they accuse him of, like dithering to add more troops and sacrificing young lives by sending them. I say questionable acts, but don't confuse that with all but innocent.— Talvenada
- Comment removed.
- still_independent, yes, the report is riddled with "very likely", "likely", "virtually certain" and even "more likely than not". However, isn't that the nature of science? Isn't acceptable scientific theory based not on your assertion being proved, but competing assertions being disproved? Once all competing assertions are disproved, then your theory becomes accepted, correct? Is there ever science with "definite", "guaranteed" or "certain" used? Darwin's theory of evolution, was it proven, or is it accepted because other competing theories were disproved? So, if the assertions are only "likely" or "very likely", would it be safe to say that it is only a probability that the warming trends forecasted will become realized, and that it is only a probablilty that it is somewhat caused by human activity, and that it could be wrong? So then, would it be safe to say that the science is not "settled"? Could carbon emissions be drastically reduced, methane and aerosols reduced, and no discernable impact on warming trends be realized? Shouldn't Al Gore, the Secretary General of the UN, and other politicians stop speaking on the certainty of man causing warming, since it is only "likely" or "very likely"? Like I stated, I acknowledge the earth is in a warming period, it is the doomsday scenarios and man's contribution to the warming the is in dispute.— tom - wilmington, de
- tom: where id you quote the Times in your 12:58 post? You wrote "When I asked what anthroprogenic global warming supporters were saying, and showed where the IPCC report says global warming is completely human induced, you again said nothing." Maybe you mentioned them on another day's posting. In and case, the IPCC report does NOT say that "global warming is completely human induced", so I didn't respond to it. Oh wait, their I go with semantice again, actually responding to what you wrote instead of what you were thinking. You then go on to state "Finally, there may be raw data available. That was not the issue" - to which I respond, "yes, it was". Fine. The UEA CRU raw data is gone. It's a little drop in the bucket. Even discount their data. There's still mounds and mounds of it out there. Then there's "As for warming, if the models did not predict the current stoppage ..." - guess what, the models aren't designed to do that. the scientists all acknowledge that they can better predict what will happen over the long term (many decades) then next year - that's the way the climate works. There is too much variability and short term effects to actually predict the short term. Finally the statisticians. I have no problem with them ion this case, because they were doing nothing moer than a statistical analysis. They weren't physicists (or mathemeticians) trying to do the work of climatologists. What they were doing had nothing to do with climatology. They were given a series of numbers, and asked a simple question. the question was "Statistically, is this data trending up, trending down, or neither". That is what they are best qualified to determine. What they weren't doing was looking st tree rings or ice core samples for which they are unqualified.— still_independent
- Talvenada- Actually Bush did what you leftists were always clamoring for Bush to do. That being forming alliances and coaltions instead of " unilateral " action. In the case of Toro Bora , Bush forged a fighting coalition with the Afghan Northern Alliance to capture or kill Bin Ladin. To be very frank with you. I woundn't be using the " not getting bin Ladin " as a feather in your cap. The Saudis offered Bin Ladin to Clinton in 1996 and Clinton refused. Furthermore, look at all the terrorists that under Bush were captured or killed. Under Bush we got KSM. And to be very honest with you I don't know what the Obama admin. would do if they captured Bin Ladin. I guess he would be read his rights and have bail set, and wait to get is ACLU lawyer. Until Obama actually has accomplished something/anything on the war on terror I would say, keep quiet.
- Man, I've read and re-read DP's column. Didn't see one mention of global warming or climate change, unless they're buried in the reference to BO's "sinking domestic agenda."— pj katauskas
- Tal, according to MSNBC.com, "The report states categorically that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora when the U.S. had the means to mount a rapid assault with several thousand troops at least." From where do you get the 800 figure?— tom - wilmington, de
- Still Independent- Give it up already on the global warming. Anyone who lives in reality can see it's a fraud. The published emails really blew the roof off the entire hoax. There is major evidence from these emails that data was manipulated and supressed and there appears to be a culture of cohercion among the climate community to keep their" peeps" in line. Bottom line is that if is there is no man made global warming, then there is no reasearch grant. There are millions of dollars at stake in stoking this science for as long as possible. At this point the whole thing comes down to human greed instead of science.
- In his recent Senate testimony, AG Holder was asked where UBL would be tried if he were captured. Incredibly, Holder had no answer for that other than "it depends." Great.— pj katauskas
- WAD: This is new information. What you're saying is it's okay to dis Obama for not rushing a decision, sending more troops, but not Bush for new info on why we supposedly went there. If he had supplied 800 Army Rangers, we would have been out of there in 2001, and there would have been no Taliban resurgence. I blame who is at fault, Conse 'Pubs blame Obama and Clinton, and Dana Perino says there was no terror attack during Bush's term. .........BTW, if new info comes out about Bush, I'll post it. Why? Because there is no expiration date for Conse 'Pubs to blame Clinton. Clinton didn't get bin Laden before 9/11, and Conse 'Pubs let it be known after we saved Iraq and the world in 2003. 2 years into Bush's Admin., while you cannot talk about Bush 2 days into Obama's Admin. If something new came out about Clinton, it would be open season for Conse 'Pubs.— Talvenada
- WAD: This is new information. What you're saying is it's okay to dis Obama for not rushing a decision, sending more troops, but not Bush for new info on why we supposedly went there. If he had supplied 800 Army Rangers, we would have been out of there in 2001, and there would have been no Taliban resurgence. I blame who is at fault, Conse 'Pubs blame Obama and Clinton, and Dana Perino says there was no terror attack during Bush's term. .........BTW, if new info comes out about Bush, I'll post it. Why? Because there is no expiration date for Conse 'Pubs to blame Clinton. Clinton didn't get bin Laden before 9/11, and Conse 'Pubs let it be known after we saved Iraq and the world in 2003. 2 years into Bush's Admin., while you cannot talk about Bush 2 days into Obama's Admin. If something new came out about Clinton, it would be open season for Conse 'Pubs.— Talvenada
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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