Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts

Aug 4, 2010

‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’

The New York Review of Books



The Promise: President Obama, Year One
by Jonathan Alter
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., $28.00




Pete Souza/Corbis

Barack Obama meeting with US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and General Stanley McChrystal, Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, March 28, 2010

Of course Barack Obama was too hot not to cool down. He was the one so many were waiting for—not only the first African-American president but also the nation’s long-awaited liberator after eight years of Bush-Cheney, the golden-tongued evangelist who could at long last revive and sell the old liberal faith, the first American president in memory to speak to voters as if they might be thinking adults, the first national politician in years to electrify the young. He was even, of all implausible oddities, a contemporary politician- author who actually wrote his own books.

The Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama, a mere chief executive, to follow. Only Hollywood might have the power to create a superhero who could fulfill the messianic dreams kindled by his presence and rhetoric, maintain the riveting drama of his unlikely ascent, and sustain the national mood of deliverance that greeted his victory. As soon as Inauguration Day turned to night, the real Obama was destined to depreciate like the shiny new luxury car that starts to lose its book value the moment it’s driven off the lot.

But still: How did we get to the nadir so fast? The BP oil spill, for weeks a constant fixture on the country’s television and computer screens, became a presidential quagmire even before Afghanistan could fulfill its manifest destiny to play that role. The 24/7 gushing crude was ready-made to serve as the Beltway’s bipartisan metaphorical indicator for a presidency that was verging on disaster to some of Obama’s natural supporters, let alone his many enemies. “I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill,” wrote Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal on Memorial Day weekend without apparent fear of contradiction.

Pressed by critics to push back against BP with visible anger and kick-ass authority, Obama chose to devote the first Oval Office address of his presidency to the crisis in the gulf—on June 15, nearly sixty days after the Deep- water Horizon rig had exploded. His tardy prescriptions were panned even by the liberal Matthews-Olbermann-Maddow bloc at MSNBC. To many progressives, Obama’s too-cool handling of the disaster was a confirmation of a fatal character flaw—a professorial passivity that induced him to prematurely surrender the sacred “public option” in the health care debate and to keep too many of his predecessor’s constitutional abridgements in place at home and at Gitmo. When, a day after his prime-time address, he jawboned BP into setting up a $20 billion escrow fund for the spill’s victims, the Obama-hating tag team of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its Tea Party auxiliaries attacked him for not being passive enough. To them, the President’s aggressive show of action was merely further confirmation that a rank incompetent and closet socialist (or is it National Socialist?) had illegitimately seized the White House to subvert America and the free-enterprise system.

Though the specifics may have differed from left to right, such was the political culture’s consensus on Obama’s presidency in June 2010: doomed. Even the near-universal praise that greeted his firing of the Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal, came with asterisks from both ends of the political spectrum. To many liberals, McChrystal’s demise accomplished little but to prolong the inevitable catastrophe of a futile policy in Afghanistan. To hawks, cashiering McChrystal did nothing to alter their conviction that Obama was a weak-kneed commander in chief whose vow to start withdrawing troops in July 2011 was a timeline for defeat. They gave the President a bye on the McChrystal firing only because of their long-time crush on his irreproachable successor, General David Petraeus.

There was, however, one contradictory footnote to the many provisional Obama obituaries of late spring and early summer 2010. For all the President’s travails, his approval rating, somewhere between 45 and 50 percent depending on the poll, still made him the most popular national politician in the country. By contrast, Congress’s popularity was in Bernie Madoff territory, with Republicans even more despised than Democrats. Perhaps some of the Obama faithful had a take on his still-young presidency that, in defiance of (and perhaps ignorance of) the Beltway consensus, paralleled a report card cited by Jonathan Alter in The Promise, his account of Obama’s first year in office:


PolitiFact.com, a database of the St. Petersburg Times that won a Pulitzer Prize for its fact-checking of the 2008 campaign, had catalogued 502 promises that Obama made during the campaign. At the one-year mark the totals showed that he had already kept 91 of them and made progress on another 285. The database’s “Obameter” rated 14 promises as “broken” and 87 as “stalled.” With promises ranging from “Remove more brush and vegetation that fuel wildfires” to “Establish a playoff system for college football,” PolitiFact selected 25 as Obama’s most significant. Of those, an impressive 20 were “kept” or “in the works.”

Alter goes on to cite some of Obama’s more substantive achievements. Despite continued violence and political stalemate in Iraq, he was on track to withdraw combat troops (however loosely defined) by his stated August 2010 deadline. He scrapped the F-22 fighter, ended Homeland Security pork in states where terrorist threats are minimal, attached strings to US military aid to Pakistan, and banned torture (if not “extraordinary rendition”). He pushed the Pentagon to abandon “don’t ask, don’t tell,” expanded AmeriCorps, increased funding for national parks and forests, and “overperformed on education” (at least for those who buy into the reforms of Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan). And then there’s the piece de resistance, the health care bill, which among other things will extend Medicaid to some 16 million relatively poor people. “He had won ugly—without a single Republican—but won all the same,” writes Alter in his book’s concluding paragraph. “Whatever happened next—however bad it got—Barack Obama was in the company of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson now in terms of domestic achievement, a figure of history for reasons far beyond the color of his skin.”

That achievement has since been joined by another legislative victory for Obama’s domestic agenda, the enactment of what he has called “the toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression.” Never mind that the financial regulatory bill, like the health care bill, fell considerably short of many progressives’ ambitions. (Not for nothing did the stocks of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley rise more than 3 percent on June 25, once the bill emerged from the congressional reconciliation process.) A win is a win, and when you toss in the stimulus package at the inception of the Obama presidency, it is hard to deny the administration’s record of accomplishment, however irksome some of the small print.

Alter, a native Chicagoan, a columnist for Newsweek, and a fixture on MSNBC, is a sympathetic observer of this president. His previous book—The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (2006)—was a celebration of the comparable passage in one of the three heroic presidencies (along with Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s) most frequently invoked by him and other Obama fans as the most pertinent historical antecedents. There has been some sniping from the left and right that The Promise is hagiography, as Alter’s sunny accounting of Obama’s achievements might suggest. But that’s not the case. One may quibble with some of Alter’s emphases, but his well-reported, judicious book is as mindful of Obama’s failings as his successes and seems to be carrying water for no one in the White House or outside it. It’s a credible guide to what’s gone right, but also to what’s gone wrong and what, we must hope, can be fixed.

Alter’s reporting feels trustworthy not just because it’s nuanced and persuasively sourced but also because it spares us any of those tinny slam-bam-pow recreated “scenes” that have become a plague in books of this genre in the Bob Woodward era. There are no huge revelations here, aside from an exceptionally complete and prescient account of Obama’s first confrontation with McChrystal after the general’s early acts of incipient subordination in the fall of 2009. But the many grace notes in The Promise are often telling, if not exactly scandalous. Lest anyone doubt that this president is a boy scout, Alter reports that the much clucked-over Reuters photo of him and Nicolas Sarkozy seemingly ogling the derriere of a seventeen-year-old Brazilian woman at the G-8 meeting in Italy was misleading (at least as far as Obama was concerned). “When the video came out,” Alter writes, “it was clear that the president was merely turning to help an older woman down the steps.”

Alter also provides some footnotes to the well-worn story of Obama’s path to the White House. We get—in an actual footnote, as it happens—a new and credible reason why Al Gore, for all his distaste for the Clintons, remained neutral during the primaries: “He depended on the largesse of Clinton Global Initiative donors for his own climate change activities.” We also learn that Obama’s praise of Ronald Reagan for having “changed the trajectory of American politics” in a Nevada newspaper interview was not some idle riff but a calculated stunt to shake things up after his loss to Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary. He knew his reference to Reagan would be “like waving a red cape in front of the Clintons” and provoke an embarrassing overreaction—as indeed it did, in the form of over-the-top ads that were widely ridiculed. To the close Obama friend and confidant Marty Nesbitt, “this may have been the most brilliant move of the entire Obama campaign.”

There is nothing in these pages to contradict the idea that Obama is the smartest guy in every room, hard as he works to avoid advertising that fact. He is in on the joke of his own outlandish success and the almost absurd run of good luck that has helped fuel it. He never ceases to remark how unlikely it is that a man named Barack Hussein Obama, the black grandson of Kenyan goatherds, “could run against the most potent political machine in a generation and become president of the United States.” As Alter observes, FDR may have been a second-class intellect with a first-rate temperament, in the famous judgment of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., but Obama “came to office with both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament.”

To which one might respond: If he’s so smart, and so sane, why has he fallen short of his spectacular potential so far? That shortfall is most conspicuously measured by his escalation of a war held hostage by the mercurial and corrupt Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai; a woefully inadequate record on job creation; and the widespread conviction that the White House tilts toward Wall Street over those who have suffered most in the Great Recession. Alter doesn’t soft-peddle these criticisms. “Even by late 2009, when every major bank except Citigroup had paid back its TARP money,” he writes, “the impression of a colossal injustice remained—that fabulously wealthy bankers would be made whole, but ordinary Americans would not.”




David Patraeus; drawing by John Springs

Among those critics who are fundamentally sympathetic to Obama, explanations for his disappointing performance abound. To many, he is not and never really was a progressive, only a cautious pragmatist who pandered to primary voters in 2008 by speaking in broad liberal bromides and reminding them incessantly that he had been to the left of Hillary on Iraq. Many see him as far too wedded to a naive and platonic ideal of bipartisanship that amounts to unilateral political disarmament when confronting an opposition party as nihilistic and cynical as the current GOP. He lacks a fierceness in battle that, as William Pfaff and Robert Reich have suggested, might have driven him to exercise federal authority over BP at the start of the oil spill, much as an angered Truman did when he seized the steel industry to end the crippling strike of 1952. (Truman’s executive action was ruled unconstitutional in the absence of a law authorizing it, but Reich has argued that present law, including the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, would allow BP to be placed in temporary receivership as AIG and General Motors were last year.) Obama is also faulted by disappointed fans for his surprisingly subpar political skills. The master orator who left millions of Americans fired up and ready to go during election season has often come off as aloof once in office, and has proven a surprisingly prolix and lackluster salesman for his own policies.

There is some validity to all these diagnoses. The falloff in messaging prowess is particularly perplexing. Alter attributes some of it to the success of Obama’s speech on race during the Jeremiah Wright firestorm of the campaign. Because that comprehensive and nuanced address was “a hit without sound bites,” Obama felt that his congenital distaste for glib verbal formulas had been vindicated. But as Alter notes, his “diffidence toward cogency was ahistorical.” Sound bites like “a house divided against itself cannot stand” or “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” are hardly without their virtues. “Without them,” Alter writes, Obama’s speeches often amounted to “fast food that left you hungry again soon after the meal.”

The White House’s sporadic attempts to dress up its marketing with catchphrases—”New Foundation” as an umbrella description for Obama’s domestic programs, for instance—have been too bland and scattershot to gain traction. They are certainly no match for a focused, Fox-perfected Republican message that conjures up vivid bogeymen like “government takeovers,” “out-of-control spending,” and “death panels.” That the GOP, which perennially pushes for the castration of Medicare, could present itself as Medicare’s valiant defender during last year’s health care wars was a particularly telling feat. Obama had a lot of trouble formulating his own health care message in accessible language—”It was like he was trying to find the combination on a lock,” said his close friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett—and so the opposition could fill the White House’s vacuum with any outrageous bumper-sticker message it could whip up.

It’s also true that Obama has been victimized by his overconfidence in his ability to woo political adversaries. “We should have taken the hit for ending bipartisanship early because it was never going to be bipartisan,” a White House aide admitted to Alter in retrospect, after months had been wasted waiting for the administration’s health care point man in the Senate, Max Baucus, to strike a bargain with supposedly congenial moderate Republicans like Charles Grassley and Olympia Snowe. As detailed in The Promise, Snowe was particularly adept at stringing along the White House to burnish her public image as a paragon of Maine’s vintage brand of flinty Yankee Republicanism. When she finally announced that she would join the rest of her caucus in a filibuster after all, her excuse, that she hadn’t had time to read and absorb the bill, was patently false. “I’m an eternal optimist,” Obama had said months earlier, after his tussles with congressional Republicans over the stimulus. “That doesn’t mean I’m a sap.” But Snowe had played him for a sap.

Even so, Alter’s chronicle confirms that the biggest flaw in Obama’s leadership has to do with his own team, not his opponents, and it’s a flaw that’s been visible from the start. He is simply too infatuated with the virtues of the American meritocracy that helped facilitate his own rise. “Obama’s faith lay in cream rising to the top,” Alter writes. “Because he himself was a product of the great American postwar meritocracy, he could never fully escape seeing the world from the status ladder he had ascended.” This led Obama to hire “broad-gauged, integrative thinkers who could both absorb huge loads of complex material and apply it practically and lucidly without resorting to off-putting jargon”—and well, why not? Alter adds:


Almost all had advanced degrees from Ivy League schools, proof that they had aced standardized tests and knew the shortcuts to success exploited by American elites. A few were bombastic, but most had learned to cover their faith in their own powers of analysis with a thin veneer of humility; it made their arguments more effective. But their faith in the power of analysis remained unshaken.

This was a vast improvement over the ideologues and hacks favored by the Bush White House, but the potential for best-and-brightest arrogance was apparent as soon as Obama started assembling his team during the transition. The Promise leaves no doubt that his White House has not only fallen right into this trap but, for all its sophistication and smarts, was and apparently still is unaware that the trap exists. During the oil spill crisis, Obama and his surrogates kept reminding the public that the energy secretary, Steven Chu, was a Nobel laureate—as if that credential were so impressive in itself that it could override any debate about the administration’s performance in the gulf.

This misplaced faith in the best and the brightest has not coalesced around national security, as in the JFK-LBJ urtext, but around domestic policy—especially in the economic team, whose high-handed machinations Alter chronicles in vivid detail. Contrary to some understandable suspicions on the left, Obama’s faith in that team has nothing to do with any particular affection for captains of finance (his own campaign donors included), or their financial institutions, or wealth. “Over and over in his career, often to Michelle’s chagrin, he had turned down chances to make more money,” Alter writes. Obama is if anything annoyed by Wall Street’s hypocrisy and tone-deaf behavior. “Let me get this straight,” he said at one meeting about TARP and its discontents. “They’re now saying that they deserve big bonuses because they’re making money again. But they’re making money because they’ve got government guarantees.” Obama’s angriest moment in his first year of office came when he heard that Lloyd Blankfein had claimed that Goldman was never in danger of collapse during the fall 2008 financial meltdown—an assertion the President knew was flatly untrue.

But if Obama is not blinded by dollar signs, he suffers from a cultural class myopia. He’s a patsy for “glittering institutions that signified great achievement for a certain class of ambitious Americans.” In his books, he downplayed the more elite parts of his own resume—the prep school Punahou in Hawaii, Columbia, and Harvard—but he is nonetheless a true believer in “the idea that top-drawer professionals had gone through a fair sorting process” as he had. And so, Alter writes, he “surrounded himself with the best credentialed, most brilliant policy mandarins he could find, even if almost none of them knew anything about what it was like to work in small business, manufacturing, real estate, or other parts of the real economy.” Not only did the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, have the quintessential best-and-brightest resume (Princeton summa, Marshall Scholar, Ph.D. from the London School of Economics) but even the OMB spokesman, Ken Baer, had a Ph.D. from Oxford.

Obama complains that he doesn’t get enough credit for stabilizing an economy that was teetering toward another Great Depression when he arrived in office. “It’s very hard to prove a counterfactual, where you say, ‘You know, things really could have been a lot worse here,’” as he puts it. He has a point. The stimulus package, actually five ambitious pieces of legislation packaged together for political expediency, was the largest economic recovery bill in American history, bigger in constant dollars than any program of FDR’s first hundred days. It gets no respect because it left no New Deal–style legacy of grand public works and did more to prevent jobs being lost—as more than 2.6 million were in 2008—than it did to add new ones.

Yet it’s hard not to wonder if much more would have been accomplished, both substantively and politically, had Obama’s economic principals, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, been more open to ideas not of their own authorship and more capable of playing with others, including a public that still hardly knows either of them. Obama “apparently never considered appointing a banker or Fed governor from outside the East Coast who knew finance but was less connected to the policies that caused the crisis,” Alter writes. The homogenous team he chose “all knew one another and all looked at the world through nearly identical eyes.” Once in place in Washington, they would all underestimate the threat of rising unemployment, be blindsided by the populist anger rising outside the capital, and even fail to predict the no-brainer popularity of the “cash for clunkers” program. Their paramount group-think lapse—their inability “to think more boldly about creating jobs fast”—still haunts the administration. A White House job summit didn’t materialize until December 2009, nearly a year too late.

The Promise depicts a carelessness and dysfunctionality in the economic team that at times matches that revealed by Rolling Stone in the military and civilian leadership of the team managing the Afghanistan war. Geithner’s inexplicable serial income tax delinquencies, as elucidated by Alter, should have disqualified him for Treasury secretary just as Stanley McChrystal’s role in the Pentagon’s political coverup of Pat Tillman’s friendly fire death should have barred him from the top military job in Afghanistan. Summers’s Machiavellian efforts to minimize or outright exclude the input of ostensible administration economic players like Paul Volcker, Austan Goolsbee, and Christina Romer seem to have engaged his energies as much as the policy issues at hand.

In April 2009, at Obama’s insistence, a group of economists that Summers had blocked from the Oval Office, including Volcker, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Alan Blinder, was invited to a White House dinner. That colloquy has been cited ever since by White House aides in response to complaints that the administration’s economic circle is too insular. The dinner was a one-off, however, and the liberal economists’ ideas about tougher financial reform and a more ambitious stimulus package have languished.

Obama may have entered the White House with the intention of assembling a Lincolnesque “team of rivals,” but Summers subverted that notion by making himself chief packager and gatekeeper for any dissenting arguments about economic policy—all, he claimed, to spare the President from meeting with “long-winded people.” Lincoln’s “team of rivals” reported directly to Lincoln, but, as one source told Alter, Summers so skewed the process in this White House that it was like “a team of rivals reporting to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s prideful secretary of war.” Even Warren Buffett, a supporter who had spoken to Obama weekly during the fall of 2008, “found himself mysteriously out of touch with the new president” once he took office.

Obama was now imprisoned within the cozy Summers-Geithner group “and it would be increasingly difficult for him to see beyond its borders.” This “disconnection from the world,” Alter concludes, was not due to ideology or the clout of special interests but was instead “the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved from a mere culture to something approaching a cult.” For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was “in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a ‘right answer’ to everything. But a right answer for whom?”

Once he belatedly reached out to business leaders for other ideas, Obama began to overrule his own economists. Presumably he will continue to learn from his mistakes. The administration is still young, and so is the President. If he has any immutable ideological tenet, it’s that he is “a big believer in persistence.” He doesn’t like to lose. Health care had not been an Obama priority in the campaign, but he embraced it during the transition. Though Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel, and David Axelrod were all skeptical of pursuing it as a Year One goal, he wouldn’t be deterred.

His achievements so far have been accomplished in spite of obstacles that would fell most mortals—the almost uncountable messes he inherited from Bush-Cheney, a cratered economy, a sclerotic Congress in thrall to lobbyists and special-interest money, and a rabid opposition underwritten by a media empire that owns both America’s most-watched cable news channel and its most highly circulated newspaper. Indeed it could be argued that the matrix of crises facing Obama would have outmatched any Bush successor, no matter how talented. (They certainly would have drowned John McCain, whose utter cluelessness about the economic crisis alarmed even his Republican allies in 2008.) But Obama knew what he was getting into when he ran for president, and the question that matters now is how he can do the job better.

The most challenging quandaries he has faced from the start, unemployment and Afghanistan, may be overcome only if he addresses his own internal obstacles. These include not just his misplaced faith in his own cultural cohort and his romantic illusions about bipartisan collaborations with a Mitch McConnell–John Boehner GOP that has no interest in governance. He might also reexamine his split-the- difference approach to decision-making. Compromise and pragmatism have their virtues, but they can also produce Rube Goldberg policies like an Afghanistan strategy that is at once intellectually clever and yet makes no discernible sense on the ground.

Can Obama self-correct? He remains the same driven, smart, psychologically balanced leader we saw in the campaign, and to these familiar attributes, Alter adds another quality that is less frequently displayed in public—an utter lack of sentimentality. He’s “the most unsentimental man I’ve ever met,” says one aide, summing up for many of his peers. That trait may be the most useful of all if Obama undertakes the ruthless course corrections that are essential to the realization of his promise.

—July 22, 2010
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Jul 23, 2010

A place for race on Obama's agenda

Screenshot of Obama's speech on race, A More P...Image via Wikipedia


By Karen Tumulty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2010; A03


Two years ago, in a powerful speech in Philadelphia, presidential candidate Barack Obama warned that Americans will not be able to overcome their divisions if they continue to "tackle race only as a spectacle."

This week, however, the subject of race returned to the forefront as just that: A spectacle over a selectively edited Internet video that led to the hasty firing of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod for seemingly making racist comments. Then came a rush of recrimination and vindication when a fuller version revealed that she had actually been giving a speech about overcoming prejudice.

On Thursday, Obama called Sherrod from a private study off the Oval Office to apologize for his administration's missteps, but Sherrod insisted that there was much more that he should do.

"The president, if he could actually look at this in the way that he should, he could help bring this front and center and do a lot to help at least start the process," she told Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart in an interview a few hours before she talked to Obama. "I don't think he can solve it by himself. But being in the position he's in, he could do a lot to help this nation get to the point where we can deal with it."

"What happened to me," she added, "was an attempt to run away from it."

Whether that is true or not, the subject of race has had a way of catching up with Obama.

His apology to Sherrod came on the one-year anniversary of a news conference in which Obama kicked up the first racially charged controversy of his presidency by declaring that the Cambridge, Mass., police had "acted stupidly" by arresting his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., an African American professor at Harvard and one of the nation's preeminent scholars. The ensuing storm of criticism led to the "beer summit" at which Gates and the officer who arrested him shared brews in the Rose Garden with Obama and Vice President Biden.

Officials conceded privately that one of the reasons the White House kept its distance from the Sherrod controversy when it first erupted, with the posting of the misleading video by blogger Andrew Breitbart, was that it didn't want to ignite yet another round of racism accusations against the administration by conservative media.

As Obama himself has pointed out many times, it would have been naive to think that the election of the nation's first African American president would be enough to make the country a paradise of racial harmony.

"If there's a lesson to be drawn from this episode," Obama told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview taped Thursday, "it's that rather than us jumping to conclusions and pointing fingers at each other, we should all look inward and try to examine what's in our own hearts and, as a consequence, I think we will continue to make progress."

Though he rarely addresses the subject of race explicitly, Obama's advisers insist that he has not failed to honor the promises he made in that Philadelphia speech two years ago.

But it can require something of a bank shot to make that case. "Look at an issue like education," where the administration has launched an initiative to reward states that lift their standards, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "Many civil rights leaders talk about education as a civil rights issue."

His allies say that Obama has so much else on his plate, with a recession at home and two wars overseas, that there is no room left for much else right now. And they contend that it would be difficult for him to lead a dialogue on race when he is the subject of some of its more corrosive story lines.

"You can't have this conversation when the political environment is so polluted," said Donna Brazile, an African American and a Democratic political strategist. "A healthy part of this conversation has to start with the fact that, since his election, those who oppose him have redoubled their efforts to somehow prove that he is not an American, to question his legitimacy."

Conservatives, meanwhile, say they are the ones who have had their legitimacy unfairly questioned. Since Obama became president, they say, accusations of racism have too often been hurled at his opponents when they have a difference with him over policy or philosophy.

"The left has used race as a weapon for a very long time," Erick Ericson wrote Tuesday on his RedState.com blog. "They have devalued what racism means -- which is a terrible shame if you actually care about stopping real racism or remembering it in our history. The word now connotes disagreeing with the left instead of what it actually means."

Although civil rights leaders say they do not expect -- or necessarily even want -- Obama to use the Sherrod episode to launch a dialogue on race, they say that it showed he still has work to do in one area: making sure that his own government reflects the country at large.

"I really believe there is an experience gap in this administration," a lack of diversity in its upper echelons, said House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the highest-ranking African American in Congress. "I really believe those kinds of experiences need to be shared at the highest levels of government."
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Jul 6, 2010

What Obama Should Have Said to BP | The New York Review of Books

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Governor Charlie Crist and Barack Obama at Casino Beach, Pensacola, Florida, June 15, 2010

Barack Obama’s demand, in his June 15 speech, that the former British Petroleum Company create an escrow account, to guarantee the funds that will be needed to deal with the consequences of the continuing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, should have been made weeks ago, and should surely have been framed more strongly than it was.

The President, in this matter, continues to demonstrate the quality, laudable in itself, but in politics extraordinarily dangerous, of assuming that those he is dealing with are as reasonable and well-intentioned as he is himself. In fact they are often driven by ruthlessly self-interested motives that leave him in a position of seeming weakness and unwillingness to defend not only national but his own political interests.

At the end of May one saw the President on international television walking on a Louisiana beach, accompanied—off-scene—by hundreds if not thousands of newsmen, broadcasters, and cameramen. He seemed abject. He bent over and picked up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. He shook his head in concern. A cutaway showed his speeches earlier in this affair declaring that his administration is in charge of the great effort to save America’s coast and waters from the terrible pollution that is spreading as a result of a volcano of oil erupting from the sea’s floor and meeting the sickly-colored, toxic chemicals being mixed into the water that are meant to disperse it.

In his June 15 speech, Mr. Obama finally insisted that BP would pay for all the damage and cleanup and would be held responsible for any illegalities; and the next day at the White House BP agreed to an independently administered $20 billion escrow fund, while the full costs to the Gulf region are far from clear.

In the press conferences given by the President and the BP chairman that followed the meeting it was clear that the American government still does not control this situation. BP alone will determine what is done with respect to the oil geyser and its promised closure. While it will make available the $20 billion compensation fund, the timing, terms, and ultimate worth of BP’s assurances of compensation and reparation remain open to interpretation and change.

How can the President possibly say that his administration has “been in charge”? BP has been in charge from the start—it and its contract companies, all of them desperately trying to plug the hole in the bottom of the sea, and all defending corporate and fiscal interests of their own. The President’s associates and advisers have apparently decided that the agencies of the United States government are technically incompetent to give instructions to BP, which seems improbable. But they certainly can and must tell BP what priorities must be set, and they must establish goals to be met, and on what timescale.

BP’s lawyers and lobbyists have just as desperately been striving to allow BP to unload responsibility upon anyone or everyone else, including incompetent or irresponsible or compromised federal regulators.

Allow me, in the style of the metropolitan columnists who influence Washington, to draft what the President might have said in his June 15 speech:

My friends:

The American nation has suffered a grievous blow from the catastrophe produced in the Gulf by what formerly was known as the British Petroleum Company. This is the latest in a series of major accidents produced in this company’s American operations, causing loss of lives among its workers, unforgivable human suffering by private citizens, and great damage to private and public interests, continuing today in the Gulf.

I have therefore today given orders that the American functions of this company be provisionally seized, or placed in temporary receivership, by the American government, as in recent months we have been forced to seize banks and corporations devastated by economic crisis, such as General Motors, AIG, and certain financial institutions.

BP’s American management will be placed under public authority and will be instructed to terminate the oil emergency as rapidly as possible and in disregard of whatever costs must be incurred by the company. This effort will be conducted by BP through its own best efforts, closely supervised by officers of the United States Coast Guard and Navy, the Energy and Treasury Departments of our government, and will be accompanied by an investigation by the Justice Department and its executive agencies, including the FBI, for any possible evidence of fraud, malfeasance or profiteering, contributing to this disaster. None of these agencies of government will incur any responsibility whatever for the decisions and actions of BP while conducting its operations to terminate the oil blowout.

In no circumstances will company, proprietary, or stockholder interest be given priority over measures to terminate this emergency and to safeguard the assets or interests of the United States public or government. No funds of this company shall be expended on political lobbying intended to influence Congress or the executive agencies of federal government until this emergency has formally been determined to have been ended.

Clearly, losses to British pension funds and other British shareholders of BP should be of concern to the British government. However those individuals and institutions investing in companies with notoriously controversial histories assume the accompanying risks.

The Oil Pollution Act signed into law in 1990 greatly expanded the US government’s ability and resources necessary to respond to oil spills; and it does not preempt state action to impose additional liability, which may be unlimited, with penalties and damages in addition to federal liabilities that may extend to prison sentences.

I am instructing that all BP assets within the United States, or in its surrounding waters, including funds immediately at its disposal, and all other BP funds accessible to the United States government, be temporarily seized and sequestered so as to prevent the transfer of any funds or assets of this company outside United States jurisdiction and access. The disposition of those assets will eventually be determined by the courts or by a new independent federal agency, with priority given to the reimbursement of persons and property-holders victimized by this catastrophe, and the redressment of damage or destruction to public assets and municipal, state, and national interests for which the former British Petroleum corporation is deemed by the courts, or by the independent agency, to have been responsible.”

This is what the American people wanted to hear. President Obama wishes to be seen as decisive and a leader? Here was his opportunity. He wants a Democratic Congress elected in the fall? And a second presidential term for himself? This could have made a decisive contribution to those ambitions, as well as assuring necessary help to millions of people and repairing grave damage to the environment.

He then could have concluded his speech by saying to his political opponents that any Republican or Democrat who wishes to run for office in November as an opponent of these Obama administration crisis measures—and as a defender of BP corporate and stockholder interests, or its customary executive remuneration and financial practices—as against the national interest of the United States and redress of the damage that continues at this moment to be done to the United States and its citizens, would be more than welcome to do so.

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Jun 4, 2010

Obama's win apparently hasn't helped black politicians in campaigns

NEW YORK - MARCH 04:  A poster of famous Afric...Image by Getty Images via @daylife

By Perry Bacon Jr.
Friday, June 4, 2010; A03

Eighteen months after Barack Obama's presidential win seemed to usher in a new era in racial politics, a different reality has emerged: African American candidates in campaigns nationwide are struggling so much that it's possible that there will be no black governors or senators by next year.

The drubbing Tuesday of Rep. Artur Davis (D), who was running to be the first black governor of Alabama, was the latest in a series of defeats this year of African American politicians in primaries for statewide office. And two of the three who already hold major statewide posts are leaving them. One of the nation's two black governors, New York's David Paterson (D), who has been plagued by ethics scandals, opted not to run this fall -- the same decision made by the only black senator, Roland Burris (D-Ill.).

The only African American favored to win a gubernatorial or Senate race is Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick (D), who is running for a second term.

Aspiring black politicians, such as Rep. Kendrick B. Meek (D-Fla.), who is seeking a Senate seat, are underdogs in general-election contests. And while a number of black Republicans are running, many are losing in primaries.

The defeats suggest that Obama's victory did not herald greater success for other black politicians.

"We have had breakthroughs, but the obstacles are still there," said Christopher Edley, who was special adviser for the President's Initiative on Race in the Clinton administration and is now dean of the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law. "The bench is weak. If you look at lower office levels or state legislatures, I think the picture is dramatically better, but we haven't been able to bring enough people up from there."

The majority of black politicians in Washington are members of the Congressional Black Caucus, representing districts that are disproportionately liberal and African American, making it difficult for them to build broader coalitions of supporters to win a statewide race. Two blacks, have been elected to governorships -- L. Douglas Wilder (D) of Virginia and Patrick -- and six, including Obama and Burris, have served in the Senate.

The recent losses do not have one unifying factor. Davis struggled to woo white voters in the primary but could not galvanize blacks, either. He lost to Alabama insurance commissioner Ron Sparks, who is white, in some overwhelmingly African American counties. Burris's connections to former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (D) probably doomed his candidacy the moment he was appointed to fill the seat vacated by Obama.

Black voters and activists, perhaps because of doubts about some black candidates' ability to win, have not rallied around them as they did Obama.

African Americans "are so invested personally in Barack Obama the man, and it's unique to him," said Cornell Belcher, a black pollster who worked on the Obama campaign. "They are invested in him in a way they are not in other black political leaders."

The primary process is thinning the ranks of black candidates, but among the few who remain, Patrick has a double-digit lead in Massachusetts. And Meek could benefit from a three-way Florida race in which two of the candidates -- Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running as an independent, and GOP candidate Marco Rubio -- could split the conservative vote.

"There were a lot of people who were in fantasy land about black candidates all of sudden getting elected to all of these offices," said David Bositis, who studies black political trends at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "But in most years, there are only a handful of Senate seats that are truly competitive, and a lot of people want these seats. And given this is going to be a favorable year for Republicans, the notion that it was going to be a great year for African American candidates, it just wasn't going to happen."

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May 31, 2010

Obama's national security strategy is light on the human rights agenda

United Nations Human Rights Council logo.Image via Wikipedia

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, May 31, 2010; A15

What sort of international order does Barack Obama seek? Last week he gave a detailed answer: "One that can resolve the challenges of our times -- countering violent extremism and insurgency; stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and securing nuclear materials; combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth; helping countries feed themselves and care for their sick; resolving and preventing conflict, while also healing its wounds."

That's a big agenda. But isn't something missing? Nowhere in that long sentence, in the introduction to his new national security strategy, does Obama suggest that the international "engagement" he proposes should serve to combat tyranny or oppression, or promote democracy. In that sense, it is typical of the first comprehensive account Obama has offered of his administration's goals in the world. In theory -- as in the practice of his first year -- human rights come second.

Big, set-piece Washington policy statements often provide a road map to the struggles over policy inside an administration, and the 52-page paper Obama released last Thursday is no exception. The White House's left-leaning "realists" -- who seek to limit U.S. foreign engagements, shift resources to domestic programs and jettison the "freedom agenda" of George W. Bush -- seem to have won all of the big arguments. Definitions of strategy throughout the report, from how to defeat al-Qaeda to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to dealing with North Korea and Iran, exclude any mention of democracy or human rights.

Like the Bush administration before it, the Obama team says America has an interest in the creation of a Palestinian state -- but unlike Bush, Obama doesn't say that that state should be democratic. The policy says al-Qaeda's extremist ideology should be combated with an agenda of "hope and opportunity," but doesn't mention freedom. A section titled "Promote a Responsible Iran" says "the United States seeks a future in which Iran meets its international responsibilities . . . and enjoys the political and economic opportunities that its people deserve." Does that include free speech and free elections, as the opposition Green Movement has demanded? The paper doesn't say.

Proponents of an Obama freedom agenda did get one chapter of the report, titled "Values." But its very segregation from the other three "interests" -- "Security," "Prosperity" and "International Order," gives its proposals a fenced-off feel. The policy begins with a couple of big qualifications: The United States will promote its values mainly "by living them at home," and it will "recognize economic opportunity as a human right." That means that "support for global health, food security and cooperative responses to humanitarian crises" will share attention and resources with the fight against tyranny and torture -- which will be welcome news for rulers in places such as Burma and North Korea.

The report's discussion of "engagement with non-democratic regimes" is solid, so far as it goes. It says the administration will pursue a "dual-track approach" in which it will cajole governments about human rights while supporting peaceful opposition. "When our overtures are rebuffed," it says, Washington will use "public and private diplomacy" and "incentives and disincentives" in "an effort to change repressive behavior."

But will this policy apply to Russia -- where the administration so far has offered nothing but incentives? "We support efforts within Russia to promote the rule of law, accountable government and universal values," the policy not-very-clearly says. How about the Arab Middle East? "We will continue to press governments in the region to undertake political reforms and to loosen restrictions on speech, assembly and media," says a sentence buried on Page 45.

Maybe such textual analysis is meaningless. But Obama's written strategy has a lot in common with what has actually happened since he took office. It will sound more than familiar to the dissident Greens of Iran, or to the leaders of the nascent pro-democracy movement in Egypt, who are already deeply disillusioned with this administration. It will confirm the thinking of Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hu Jintao of China that strategic partnership with the United States won't require domestic reforms.

Obama has already demonstrated that he does not accept Bush's conclusion that the promotion of democracy and human rights is inseparable from the tasks of defeating al-Qaeda and establishing a workable international order. But nowhere in his 52-page doctrine is there a coherent explanation of why.

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May 25, 2010

General Petraeus' Secret Ops

Gen David H. Petraeus, CENTCOM official photo.Image via Wikipedia

Links:
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/world/25military.html


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May 18, 2010

How the U.S. Engages the World with Social Media

State Department Social Media LogoThe perception of the U.S. abroad varies widely, and is subject to many forces, including world events, media coverage, policy changes, and presidential administrations. In response, the U.S. State Department, America’s public relations branch, has been charged with the difficult task of engaging in the dialogue surrounding the controversial policies discussed in almost every corner of the world.

Social media has proven to be a valuable tool in this regard, and the State Department has made impressive gains in their mission to turn conflict into conversation. Cabinet officials, foreign dignitaries, and embassies are experimenting with ways to inject America’s voice into the global chatter. Some of their experiments are paying dividends that few expected. Here’s a look at some of these efforts.


Social Media Can Bridge the “Last Three Feet”


President Barack Obama garners an enormous response when he solicits the country’s opinion online, as when he circumvented the White House press corps with YouTube-submitted questions this past February — an effort that received over 11,000 responses.

But when Obama fields Internet () questions from local residents during an overseas trip, the numbers are staggering — a whopping 17,000 responses during a visit to Ghana, and an astounding 250,000 in South Africa (though some responses did come from outside Africa). Given the relatively smaller population and shallow Internet penetration, these numbers speak volumes about the world’s web-based engagement with U.S. leaders.

Obama’s responses alone, just out of sheer publicity, may have some positive impact on foreign attitudes. But, for Bill May, Director of the State Department’s Office of Innovative Engagement (i.e. social media), being at the epicenter of online chatter is what he thinks of as the “new version of the last three feet.”

May was invoking Edward R. Murrow’s famous public diplomacy strategy where he wrote, “The real crucial link in the international exchange is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.” In public diplomacy, there are a latent number of people throughout the world who will befriend America’s vision after a thorough conversation. The reverberation of Obama’s message, coupled with the hyper-local follow-ups from America’s Embassies, can reach more of those hidden friends than ever before.

Indeed, when Elizabeth Tradeau of the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria tweeted, “South Africa, what’s the impact of new media in your view of America?” there was a mix of negative and positive comments. But, one in particular seemed to prove May’s point:

South Africa Tweet

America is Fun


Jakarta Facebook Image

For every serious news or political blog, there are likely twice as many dedicated to sex, drugs, or rock n’ roll. And when Bill Clinton pioneered a youth outreach strategy answering questions from MTV fans, it was the infamous “boxers or briefs” question that garnered him the most attention. In the end, entertainment is just so much more appealing.

Seizing on this strategy, the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia has seen Facebook () fan growth of jaw-dropping proportions — an increase from 36,000 to 120,000 in roughly one month. On a single Facebook post, the embassy often receives between 700 to 1,000 comments (that’s about 10 times more comments than The Huffington Post). This is especially astonishing when you consider that less than 10% of Indonesia’s population even uses Facebook.

So, what’s their winning strategy? Simple social games, where users can dress up Barack Obama in local garb and share the creation with friends, or suggest what Obama should eat during his next visit.

While the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia does delve into some culturally thorny issues, foreign diplomat Tristram Perry admits that Facebook is “not a good venue for hard policy topics.” Instead, he says “we make our Facebook fun. Jazz, technology, tourism — we have a fascinating history. There’s lots about it that people admire.”

The embassy saw huge traffic from an essay contest to win a trip to “Barack Obama’s America” (Hawaii and Chicago), where winners will blog about their tour for what will surely be a stadium’s worth of jealous peers back home.


Education


Many of the messages texted to President Obama plead for “not a hand out, but a hand up,” says Trudeau of the South Africans she speaks with. Centuries of colonization, war, and resource scarcity have paralyzed innovation in many parts of the world. To jump-start the economy, the U.S. helps plant what is seen as the seed of technological innovation: Education.

For instance, in the humble rural township of Mamelodi, just outside Pretoria, the Embassy provides technological and scientific literacy to disadvantaged children. In the Mae Jemison reading room, which is named after the first female African-American astronaut, children are “introduced to the Internet,” says Trudeau. She tells them, “This is how you use Google (); this is how you get an e-mail account,” and my personal favorite as a writing teacher, “don’t use Wikipedia () as a source.” The students’ curiosity is limitless. During class, Trudeau observes that students bunch up by computers “six-deep” in line “looking, exploring,” and are eager to learn more.

The current business culture in South Africa points to some promising returns on this educational investment. “It’s like being in Silicon [Valley] or San Francisco in 2004 with Biz Stone and all of his friends,” said one visiting American at a local technology conference, as recounted by Trudeau. “It’s journalists, it’s editors, it’s tech entrepreneurs … they all use Twitter () to connect. It’s a very interconnected, very engaged community,” Trudeau notes.


Media Outreach


Dipnote Image

The State Department has taken to providing timely information on crises and policy via social networks. During an attempted coup in Madagascar, a rumor began circulating that the threatened president was seeking refuge in the U.S. Embassy. After refuting the rumors themselves, the State Department tweeted out the correct information, “and immediately we started getting retweets and people saying ‘thanks for the correction,’” notes Daniel Schaub, Director of Digital Communications for the State Department. “And, then within probably an hour or so, the traditional media had caught it,” helping to blanket the spreading fire of a rumor that “could potentially put embassy staff at risk.”

Moreover, Schaub’s department manages Secretary Hillary Clinton’s blog, Dipnote, which provides rich context for otherwise curt policy pronouncements. Dipnote is now cited by news organizations such as the Associated Press and The New York Times for detailed explanations of Department policy and procedure.

The importance of this supplementary information should not be underestimated. A recent study suggests that the clarity of White House rhetoric can impact the political world. “If the president is able to define an intervention in simple, compelling terms, he is likely to get considerably more support from the public,” says Associate Professor Cooper Drury, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy Analysis.


Conclusion


Every single Department official I spoke with admitted that the era of one-way broadcasting is dying. The ubiquity of mobile and social technologies means the U.S. must now have an ear as well as a voice. It seems like an unprecedented opportunity to open a dialogue with people and communities all over the world who would otherwise be isolated.

It should be noted that members of the State Department often disagree with their bosses on best practices. But, they also understand that conversation, even in 140 characters, may one day mean the difference between conflict and peace.

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May 9, 2010

Obama makes personal diplomacy part of Afghan strategy

President Obama with, from left, Vice President Biden, President  Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan.
President Obama with, from left, Vice President Biden, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan. (Bill O'leary/the Washington Post)

By Scott Wilson and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 9, 2010; A01

President Obama has bluntly instructed his national security team to treat Afghan President Hamid Karzai with more public respect, after a recent round of heavy-handed statements by U.S. officials and other setbacks infuriated the Afghan leader and called into question his relationship with Washington.

During a White House meeting last month, Obama made clear that Karzai is the chief U.S. partner in the war effort -- which will be reflected in his visit to Washington that begins Monday, according to senior administration officials. In doing so, Obama is seeking to impose discipline on an administration that has sent mixed signals about Karzai's legitimacy and his value to the U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign. As a result, Karzai threatened to join the Taliban just days after Obama concluded his first presidential trip to Kabul in late March.

After a two-hour palace meeting that advisers to both leaders described as productive, Karzai grew bitter after receiving a copy of comments made by Obama's national security adviser on the way to Kabul that struck him as insulting. Days later, Karzai read in a newspaper article that an unnamed U.S. official was threatening to put Ahmed Wali Karzai, his half brother, on the military's kill-or-capture list.

Karzai had been led to believe months earlier that his brother -- the leader of Kandahar's provincial council -- would remain in his post despite persistent accusations of corruption and ties to drug trafficking. Karzai erupted in anger soon after, stunning the White House.

"There has been a rough patch," said a senior administration official who participates in Afghanistan policy development. "Frankly, some of what Karzai said needed to be responded to. But the bottom line is that there has been an improvement since then in the atmospherics and in the substance of our dealings with President Karzai and his team."

Managing the relationship with Karzai is part of the far broader challenge of maintaining political support for a nearly nine-year-old war, which a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found is once again opposed by a majority of Americans. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the war is not worth fighting, which means the bump in support for the war that followed Obama's announcing his new Afghanistan strategy in December has disappeared.

Karzai's meeting with Obama in the Oval Office on Wednesday will be the centerpiece of a rare extended visit. Over the next four days, Karzai and many of his senior cabinet ministers will be publicly embraced and privately reassured by Obama of the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan, which officials say will endure long after American forces begin leaving in July 2011.

Karzai has been frightened by the deadline, U.S. officials acknowledge. Obama intends to devote much of his meeting with him to spelling out a long-term relationship that includes far fewer U.S. troops but deeper diplomatic and economic support.

It is not certain whether the message discipline will be able to reset what has long been a complicated relationship. Despite Obama's edict that the Afghan leader receive public support, deep policy differences remain inside the administration, including among top U.S. officials in Afghanistan, over Karzai's commitment to the government and security reforms essential to the U.S. mission.

Some of the mixed signals in recent months appear to be a direct result of the president's actions. In contrast to George W. Bush, Obama established more of an arm's-length personal relationship with Karzai. He also raised questions about Karzai's viability as a partner during a White House strategy review of the Afghanistan war last fall.

But Obama now wants his administration to close ranks, senior officials said.

Karzai's visit has been designed to be "a manifest demonstration of the relationship and the issues we are working on," the senior administration official said. Karzai will be hosted at dinners by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he trusts perhaps more than any other U.S. official, and Vice President Biden, with whom he has had a stormy relationship.

The administration has encouraged Karzai to bring a large delegation of senior Afghan officials, giving them a chance to meet their U.S. Cabinet counterparts and influential congressional leaders. Among them are ministers Obama recommended to Karzai during the Kabul visit, based on their competence rather than the tribal or ethnic affiliations that can complicate government reforms in Afghanistan.

"We want to emphasize that this is not a relationship with just one person," said a second senior administration official involved in Afghanistan policy, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe White House thinking about Karzai. But, the official hastened to add, "we do not look at this as a zero-sum situation or as a way of working around Kabul."

'Spiral of events'

Karzai's most recent tirade was set off by what one White House official called "a spiral of events" surrounding Obama's visit -- some within the administration's control and some beyond it.

According to senior administration officials, the circumstances that angered Karzai included remarks made by national security adviser James L. Jones before the meeting even began.

Jones told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One that Obama intended to "make [Karzai] understand that in his second term there are certain things that have not been paid attention to almost since Day One." Those remarks were viewed by Afghan officials as condescending, but Karzai did not learn of them until after Obama left Afghanistan.

Three days later, Karzai was enraged to read a report in The Washington Post that quoted an unnamed U.S. official threatening Ahmed Wali Karzai with a spot on the military's Joint Prioritized Engagement List, better known as the kill-or-capture list. The next day, Afghanistan's lower house of parliament rejected Karzai's proposal to change the national election law to give him more control over the body that investigates voter fraud, a move the Obama administration had opposed.

"We have our own national interest in the country," Karzai told a gathering of Afghan election officials the next day, accusing the United Nations and the international media of conspiring against him. "They wanted a servant government."

Within days, Karzai called Clinton to clarify his comments. But days later, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs still declined to call Karzai an ally.

"At the end of the day for Karzai, this is very much a question of respect," said a third senior administration official involved in Afghanistan policy. "He tends, like any head of state, to conflate an insult against me as an insult against my people. We tend to try to separate the two."

'Apply that touch'

Karzai was not the only leader who was angry. Obama was, too, particularly at the way U.S. officials had spoken about the Afghan president.

Obama made clear in a meeting with his senior national security team that Karzai is "someone we're going to have to work with for the next 4 1/2 years." Therefore, "high expectations should be set for [Karzai], and he should be held to them," but Obama would not tolerate any more public criticism.

On April 8, a note from Obama was delivered to Karzai in Kabul, thanking him for arranging his recent visit. Three days later, Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows to praise Karzai.

Obama's decision most reflected the position of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the military commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal had been arguing during monthly Situation Room review sessions that U.S. officials needed to show more public deference to Karzai.

The chief U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, has been on the other side of that argument, pushing to identify leaders outside Kabul to work with, rather than relying so heavily on Karzai.

In Afghanistan, much of Karzai's handling has fallen to McChrystal, who often takes the Afghan leader on his travels inside the country. According to diplomats in Afghanistan and analysts who travel there often, Karzai does not think he can trust Eikenberry or Richard C. Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to the region, who has had a long and bitter relationship with the Afghan leader. A senior foreign diplomat in Kabul called Holbrooke a Karzai "bete noire," but both Holbrooke and Eikenberry say they have a productive relationship with the Afghan president.

Ryan C. Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, said the troop surge in Iraq succeeded in part because of the unity he and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander there at the time, showed in dealing with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, another complicated leader. But Crocker said the troop surge's success was also made possible by Bush's personal relationship with Maliki, with whom Bush spoke often via videoconference.

"So there was confidence at the top," said Crocker, who is now dean of Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service. "President Obama certainly has the touch, there's no doubt about it. And now is the time for him to apply that touch."

'Designed to focus us'

In his December speech at West Point, Obama announced that U.S. troops would begin to leave Afghanistan in July 2011.

"The date was meant to focus the mind of the Afghans, certainly," a senior administration official said. "But it was also designed to focus us back here. It enforces discipline on a project that really had been adrift for years."

Diplomats in the region say the date has sometimes had the opposite effect on Karzai, causing him to weigh every U.S. demand against its potential implications for his political life after the troops leave. Those fears lay behind his comments about joining the Taliban, officials say.

Obama is mindful of Karzai's anxieties, and he began describing the long-term U.S. role in Afghanistan in a videoconference with Karzai a few weeks before his Kabul visit, a senior administration official said. Obama will spend much of his Wednesday meeting with Karzai addressing those same concerns.

"President Karzai wants to have a sense of the enduring nature of the commitment, of his relationship with the president, and where he stands -- and that's natural," the senior official said. "What we'll be doing coming out of this is to talk in more detail about what the long-term relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan will look like. And that isn't about having 100,000 troops there forever."

Staff writers Al Kamen and Anne E. Kornblut and polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this story.

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