Ruminations, November 29, 2009
How will Obama rank?
There is a tendency among historians to rank presidents from best to worst. This is largely an exercise in erudition with no conclusive result possible but lots of juicy arguments. For example, was Jimmie Carter a better President than James Buchanan? How does Harry Truman stack up against Abraham Lincoln? Would Ronald Reagan be as successful fighting World War II as was Franklin Roosevelt? We can’t compare one president with another because each met different challenges at different times and we can’t say with any certainty of how a president from one era would handle issues from another. Different times and different folks.
We can’t rank presidents in a nice neat row, but we can put them into categories as successful and unsuccessful. President Obama today stands a reasonable chance of finding his presidency viewed, over time, as an unsuccessful one. And here’s why.
Health care
If Obama fails to get health care legislation passed with great Democratic majorities in Congress, he will be considered a failure.
If health care does pass in a facsimile of either of the two current bills, he will also be considered a failure. First, and perhaps most important, the bills, through accounting chicanery, have been made to look fiscally sound and they are not; a $440 billion chunk has been pulled out of Medicare and will be added back in separately, and funds for health care will be collected over the first five years while expenditures start in year six giving the delusion of a fiscally sound program. Add to that the fact that broad, sweeping new legislation usually carries with it unintended consequences and the fact that the latest Rasmussen Poll shows the public opposed to the current congressional plans by 56%-35%. Politically, a win could be worse than a loss.
Global warming
If Obama fails to any get global warming legislation passed with great Democratic majorities in Congress, he will be considered a failure.
If a global warming bill does pass, it will be considered a failure. The established science of global warming is now in doubt. We find that the global temperatures are lower today than they were ten years ago and Al Gore’s award winning documentary used trick photography and contained several errors. And now, thanks to a computer hacker, we find that the “science” supporting anthropocentric global warming has been sham science and, in fact, last week the Competitive Enterprises Institute stated its intent to file a law suit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration if it fails to comply with the Freedom of Information act and provide information relating to the falsification of information alluded to in the hacked emails. (In a Rasmussen Poll taken before the hacked emails were disclosed, 47% of Americans believed that global warming is primarily the result of planetary trends as opposed to 37% who believe that it is primarily the result of human activity). So the passage of global warming bills will result in great expense for, apparently, no reason.
Iraq
If the Iraq mission is successfully concluded, it will largely be seen as Bush’s doing. Obama will get credit for only mopping up.
If the Iraq mission fails, it will be seen as Obama’s fault. The consensus on Iraq is that George W. Bush left office with the war in Iraq virtually won. In truth, it’s not quite as simple as that. Wars may be fought militarily – and that is an important element – but they are won diplomatically and economically. As Obama stepped into office, the military aspect seemed in-hand with the political and economic pieces in place. If Iraq fails as a state or the war reignites, Obama will get the blame.
Afghanistan
If Obama successfully concludes the war in Afghanistan by the end of his first term, he will receive plaudits around the world. Of course, that all depends on what “successfully concludes” means. To many, that means defeating the Taliban and establishing some sort of democracy in Afghanistan. To others, “successfully conclude” means pulling the troops out and bringing them home in short order. In view of his statements calling it a “war of necessity,” it would be fair to assume that Obama leans toward the former but we’ll find out more about that when he announces his new strategy next week.
If the war has not concluded or isn’t reasonably close to a conclusion by 2012, he will be considered a failure. If Obama has the war still in progress by the end of his first term, he will lose the support of the anti-war left (a significant component of his constituency); those who are on the right and support Obama on this issue are likely to be lukewarm towards him at best. It is true that when Obama took office, Afghanistan was in a state of flux but since that time he announced one strategy in March and will be announcing a second next week. Both strategies are his.
Trial of terrorists
If the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others in New York goes off without a hitch, it will not be without problems. In a time of high deficits, New York City has been promised a minimum of $75 million of Federal money to cover their security costs. At the very least, the defendants will be given an opportunity to a public forum in which they can justify their attacks on the United States. In addition, given Attorney General Holder’s and President Obama’s promises for findings of guilt and capital sentencing, the trials will be seen not as examples of American jurisprudence but as examples of Soviet-style show trials.
If the trial is unsuccessful, depending on how one defines “unsuccessful,” there will be moderate to extreme negative repercussions. If the defendants are found not guilty or the charges are dropped due a technicality, there will be nothing to save Obama’s reputation.
Cap and trade
If Obama, with great Democratic majorities in Congress, fails to get The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (better known as Cap and Trade), enacted, he will be considered a failure. The bill was passed by the House of Representatives last June and is awaiting Senate action.
If it is passed, its results will also render Obama a failure. Critics on the right say that Cap Trade will reduce GDP. They estimate its total cost is estimated to be $821 billion and they also contend that Cap and Trade will kill jobs -- If that were not the case, then why would provisions of the House bill include $4.2 billion payments to those who lose their jobs as a result of Cap and Trade? Republicans in the House offered three compromises, which were rejected. They proposed that the Cap and Trade program will be suspended: (1) if gas hits $5 per gallon, (2) if electricity rates rise more than 10% over 2009, and (3) if unemployment rates hit 15%.
Critics on the left consider Cap and Trade to be a farce. They say that it will do little to actually reduce air borne pollutants while creating a market for speculation. Left of center groups, such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Public Citizen, have turned against it. In Europe, where a Cap and Trade program has begun, the speculative market it created was $126 billion in 2008 and is projected to be $3.1 trillion by 2020 with little effect on pollutants. Critics on the left have also been censored; Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees Laurie Williams and Alan Zabel were told by the EPA to shut up when they publicly said “Cap-and-trade with offsets provides a false sense of progress and puts money in the pockets of investors. …We think that [Cap and Trade] might not be constitutional."
The Economy
The public often holds the president responsible for the state of the economy. The economy is considered by the public to focus on five areas (1) jobs, (2) the stock market, (3) inflation, (4) the housing market and (5) the deficit.
(1) Employment a lagging indicator and as the economy improves (and it will, over time), employers will extend hours and overtime before they take on the additional expense of hiring workers. That’s the assumption for when the economy improves; however, there are economists who are predicting that the job market will continue to shrink. Former Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg, and others, speculates that unemployment may reach 12% or 13%. Granted the economy was headed south during George W. Bush’s second term but unemployment when he left office was 5.76%.
(2) The stock market’s Dow Jones Industrial Averages have risen over 27% since Obama became president. This is a very positive for Obama as long as the market can sustain some semblance of that performance. Rising stock prices create a feeling of well being as well as increasing the value of investment accounts. Of course, the stock market has its own dependencies including the world economy and watch for things like the Dubai World real estate crisis to impact the market.
(3) Inflation, when moderate, can be tolerated but when it is high, it negatively impacts the rest of the economy. Using gold as an indicator of the market’s predictor of inflation, its price has risen by over 37% since Obama has taken office. Foreign countries are beginning to shift to gold as a reserve replacing the dollar and there is serious talk of replacing the dollar as the pricing mechanism for oil. This looks bad for Obama.
(4) The housing market is rebounding. That’s good news and bad news. The good news is that we are getting back to the prices that we consider normal and that provide us equity from which we can borrow. The bad news is that we were in a housing bubble and to reach anywhere near previous levels we will have to create another bubble and, given that the private sector is not leading the way, it may be the government that leads the way to the bubble – that can’t be good.
(5) Deficit spending is an issue that Obama has said that he will address and promised to cut the deficit by half at the end of his first term. But, given that he has quadrupled the deficit so far, don’t look for the deficit to drop.
How will Obama rank?
Success isn’t necessarily measure by how many things a president does well. It is often measured by whether or not a president does the big important things well. It’s conceivable that Obama will fail on all the items listed above and still be successful because of some heretofore unknown challenge. But considering the scope of the issues he faces now, the future looks ominous for a successful Obama presidency.
The Taliban’s Afghanistan strategy
Mullah Omar is not holding a press conference to announce his strategy for Afghanistan as is President Obama but we can glean some idea of what it is.
On the public relations front, it seems that the Taliban and Mullah Omar are taking a page from the successful North Vietnam book. In a message last week, geared in part, to the anti-war movement in the United States, the Taliban sought to depict themselves as a nationalist resistance movement, the United States as colonial oppressors and Afghan President Hamid Karzai as a U.S. puppet. This will, no doubt, resonate with many Americans on the political left and perhaps some of our allies.
Procurement of weapons has never been a problem for the Taliban. While many weapons are smuggled to the Taliban from Iran, China and other black market sources, the Taliban may be cultivating a new source – Russia. One wonders if Omar and his cohorts are reminding the Russians of the American aid to the Afghan Mujahideen where the United States sent stinger missiles and rocket propelled grenades to Afghanistan, and how those munitions were vital in the defeat of the Russians in the Russian Afghanistan War of 1979-1989. And then Omar could say, “Want to get even?”
Whatever the Taliban’s evolving strategy, they won’t announce it on prime time national news and we’ll have to guess. It’s a pity that they don’t have to guess at our strategy.
Quote without comment
Jay Leno, on NBC’s Jay Leno Show last week: “A lot of criticism over Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu trading her vote on health care for $300 million. Glenn Beck called her a high-class prostitute. Rush Limbaugh called her the most expensive prostitute in the history of prostitutes, and Eliot Spitzer called and asked for her phone number.”
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