I've always expressed a certain bewilderment about Barack Obama. The things he does just don't make sense if you look at them at all carefully. Or rather, they do make sense--but only if you make rather bizarre assumptions. For example, assume on the one hand that (A) he actually does understand the basics of American political history, he knows that no major, transformational policy ever came from bipartisanship, he understands that he just won a realigning election, (B) he's spent years working within the Democratic Party, and (C) that he wants to utterly destroy the Democratic Party's chance for political dominance over the next 40 years. If you accept those three premises, then the following makes perfect sense.
It was laid out exquisitely by Dday at Hullabaloo on Friday, "The Costs Of Reductive Thinking". In it, he quoted Barack Obama from the Organizing for America strategy session on health care saying:
"So for about the same cost per year as we've been spending over the last five to six years, we could have funded this health care reform proposal, just to give you a sense of perspective."
And himself responding:
I don't know if I was the only one, but my immediate reaction was, "Um, well, why don't you do something about that?" I mean, sure, the costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq and a war headed toward quagmire in Afghanistan could have paid for the front end of health care reform. But they're both still raging, at a time when we have few national security interests in those regions, and certainly nothing that could not be handled with a diplomatic, law enforcement and intelligence approach rather than a military one.
So if the cost of the wars from 2003-2009 could pay for health care, the future costs from 2009-2019 could go a pretty long way in their own right.
It's particularly pernicious to find the President making this argument, when as commander-in-chief he has the ability to draw down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. If he wants to make that kind of comparison, he ought to back it up.
Yet this transcript from Bruce Reidel, who managed a lot of the policy reviews on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the White House, might offer an explanation of why he won't go that far.
The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World.This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And, those moderates in the Islamic World who would say, no, we have to be moderate, we have to engage, would find themselves facing a real example. No, we just need to kill them, and we will drive them out. So I think the stakes are enormous.
That's extremely dangerous thinking, as Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum make clear. It's also not new thinking - it's basically what kept us in Vietnam for so long,...
It's not surprising to see establishment figures embrace such a reductive theory based on image and manliness. But the guy who just made the connection between the costs of war abroad and the betterment of the lives of citizens at home?
So, in other words, Obama was elected in a 1932-like moment, and he's acting just like guns-and-butter LBJ knowing ahead of time exactly how that will end. Make every conceivable mistake that Johnson made (and none of the smart moves) plus the greatest hits of the Carter and Clinton eras, too.
What else could he be thinking? Fast forward from 1932 to 1968 in one 4-year term. Utterly and totally discredit the Democratic Party so quickly that people forget the GOP doesn't even have any policies anymore, aside from name-calling.
It makes perfect sense, and from a very simple set of premises.
