The Evolutionary: Barack Obama’s First Term in the White House
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The most important of Obama’s ex-Clintonites was his Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. Geithner began his public career in the Reagan’s Treasury Department in 1988, advancing to become the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs ten years later, a job he held until 2001. In 2003 he became the President of the New York Fed, where he arranged the sale of Bear Sterns and supported the efforts of George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, to bail out other banks and investment houses. Geithner liked to brag that he’d never worked on Wall Street, but as Noam Schieber points out in The Escape Artists, his excellent account of the Obama Administration’s efforts to deal with the economic crisis, “Geithner cared deeply about the constituents he consulted with, be they Wall Street big shots, financial technocrats, or market pundits.” More importantly, he had come of age in a time when business enjoyed the benefits of a friendly consensus between academia, industry and government. The financial sector, these men believed (and they were almost all men), was the engine of the American economy, too important to fail, and too sensitive to seriously reform.Some of Obama’s economists disagreed, particularly Christine Rohmer, head of the Council of Economic Advisers. She believed, as many economists are now coming to accept, that there should be no such thing as banks that are “too big to fail,” and that banks should no longer be allowed to behave like hedge funds unless strong regulation is enacted to minimize risk to the world financial system. Larry Summers, another Clinton alum and Geithner’s mentor, actually agreed, but as the head of the internal opposition he was blustery and disorganized; Rohmer, Summers and their allies didn’t have the resources Geithner could command at Treasury and found it difficult to fashion a coherent alternative. Meanwhile, Geithner and his allies, including Budget Director Peter Orszag (another Washington veteran), had already put their plan in motion, “stress-testing” the banks to determine whether they should be required to raise more capital. (The capital requirements they eventually set were weak.) Any approach Summers and Rohmer could come up with would require billions. Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff (and veteran of Clinton Administration), made it clear that Obama would not ask Congress for those billions; he had just passed a stimulus, wanted a health care bill, and faced a united opposition.But Obama’s culpability should not be overestimated. The economy was truly a disaster; his priority had to be stability and growth. In such an atmosphere Geithner’s warnings about the financial sector’s sensitivity were difficult to ignore, and as mentioned, Obama faced a Republican opposition whose radicalism and uniformity had no parallel in the modern era. Perhaps his biggest mistake was that he took too long to realize it, allowing his opponents to take advantage of his moderation and desire for compromise and blunting the effectiveness of the stimulus.The first hints of this new devilry surfaced before Obama took office. As president-elect and de facto leader of the Democratic Party, Obama led the negotiations for a new stimulus package. Most Republicans opposed any measure that didn’t include tax cuts (many opposed stimulus wholesale), and Obama’s political team was chary of asking for too much money. Christine Rohmer calculated that the stimulus should be well over a billion dollars, but that option was never seriously considered in top-level meetings because Larry Summers, who fancied himself a political guru as well as an economic advisor, considered it unattainable.The Obama Administration caved to GOP demands for tax cuts. They made up fully one-third of the entire $800 billion package, but Republicans voted against it anyway. They only switched their votes because the stock market dove immediately afterwards. This pattern, wherein Obama’s desire for compromise and his political team’s timidity enabled a disciplined opposition, repeated itself several times in the coming years. The stimulus fight was the first time it played out, and the unfortunate result was a bill that was, despite the help it gave and the important investments it made, far smaller and less effective than it could have been. The stimulative effect of the tax cuts was negligible, and the employment rate continues to languish today, largely because the public sector never received the money it needed to prevent layoffs, a breach in decades of bipartisan consensus about how the nation responds to recessions and a loss Republicans shamelessly continue to blame on the president.The GOP was actually rewarded for this behavior. In 2010 they won a landslide victory in the House of Representatives and chopped the Democratic majority in the Senate from 59 to 53. More than 80 freshman representatives flooded the House, and they had no mind for compromise: many owed their victory to the Tea Party, and the coming fights over the national spending would give them a chance to repay that debt.Normally in American politics, when the two parties are negotiating over a budget, they pass interim measures so that negotiations can continue. “In order to keep the government running while Democrats and Republicans negotiated,” Noam Scheiber writes,
Congress needed to pass two more short-term funding measures over the next few weeks [early March 2011]. Such measures are usually routine affairs. But, in both cases, the Republicans demanded spending cuts as the price of approving the extension—the “toll road” approach, administration officials dubbed it. And yet even after Democrats paid the toll, fifty-four conservative House Republicans still refused to approve the second extension because they took a dim view of any deal Democrats might agree to.
Republican leaders insisted on $60 billion in cuts for the final 2011 budget (on top of those already made by the continuing resolutions), a number so extreme that the White House was only able to whittle it back to $38 billion, and then only when a provision eliminating funding for abortions in the District of Columbia was included. The provision may not have been germane to the question of government spending, but it was a clear indication of the cultural preoccupations of the Tea Party and the new Republicans, two groups who claimed that the deficit was their issue of choice. In any case, the right had succeeded in turning the conversation in Washington from jobs to debt.The next battle was the debt limit. A vote to raise it is usually pro forma. It’s been raised 74 times in the last fifty years, and on few of those occasions was the country in any danger of default. In 2011 Republicans threatened to let that happen unless four trillion dollars was cut from the deficit, a plan authored by Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, who now Mitt Romney’s running mate. Obama assumed that the economic catastrophe that would result from a default would force Republicans to compromise. The negotiations in the House dealt with spending cuts first, but the discussion froze when it reached the subject of raising revenue, something any responsible plan would do. The Republicans balked at the idea of any new revenue.
and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
To that end he kept his campaign promise to devote more resources to the war in Afghanistan, which had gone badly after US troops were diverted to Iraq. Not long after Obama took office, Afghan President Hamid Karzai won a second term in elections plagued by fraud and low voter turnout. Obama attempted to cultivate an alternative but that went nowhere, and he was stuck trying to prop up a weak government led by a paranoid, corrupt and erratic man. The Taliban were operating in relative safety from the remote tribal regions of Pakistan, just across the mountainous border, with the support, official or otherwise, of a significant portion of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service.There was no way to achieve “victory” in any conventional sense of the term, so the Obama administration settled for the crippling of al-Qaeda, a weakened Taliban, and an Afghan government that could defend itself with minimal assistance. Into this morass Obama sent 17,000 more troops on February 18, 2009, less than a month after he took office. A full-scale review of the strategy came due in later in the year, at which point he agreed to another 30,000. All told, Obama nearly tripled the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan, from 34,000 when Bush retired to over 100,000 in the summer of 2011, and another 100,000 contractors besides.Yet Afghanistan continued to deteriorate and the definition of victory sank downward again. Today the United States won’t even train its Afghan counterparts: a rash of attacks by Afghan recruits has made it unsafe to do so. Americans may soon be spared the loss of any more combat troops: forces are scheduled to withdraw by 2014, a timeline Obama put in place over the objections of his generals (and a decision he continues to misrepresent to the public, who love their generals). Afghanistan’s best hope seems to be a partial takeover by the Taliban, with a weak, quasi pro-American government huddled in Kabul, an end similar to one Afghanistan endured during the 90s, as the Soviet-backed government crumbled and American attention wandered elsewhere.
Obama knew that to fulfill his campaign promise to focus on the Afghan War, he had little choice but to accede to the Pentagon’s longstanding requests for more troops. But despite his campaign pledges, he was growing skeptical about what could be accomplished by doubling the size of the force. “I think he hated the idea from the beginning,” one of his closest advisers told me early in 2012. “He understood why we needed to try, to knock back the Taliban. But the military was ‘all in,’ as they say. And Obama wasn’t.”
Maybe it’s naïve to expect any president, no matter how unconventional he seems, to be above these sorts of calculations, but it’s a testament to the uniqueness of the man, and the hope he deliberately fostered, that the violence Obama deployed is still shocking. A John McCain or a Mitt Romney would surely have gotten more people killed, but that’s small comfort for disenchanted citizens and cold comfort for the dead. Today Obama only mentions the country to trumpet the coming withdrawal to voters, and Mitt Romney, seeing no political upside in attaching his name to any relevant thoughts, doesn’t mention it at all. Afghanistan is a war nobody talks about.There’s a similar pattern of calculation, brutality and silence in another war, the “war on drugs.” Here too it’s difficult to believe that Obama doesn’t comprehend the stupidity of the policies he enforces. States throughout the country are making the humane decision to decriminalize drugs and legalize marijuana for the sick, but Obama’s Justice Department insists on raiding dispensaries, ruining lives and being all-around “tough on crime.” This from a man who made liberal use of pot and cocaine in high school. There is a clear political argument for continuing this foolish “war,” which claims thousands at home and more abroad, where cartels commit mass murder for the privilege of supplying the West with drugs. No president could legalize or decriminalize drugs and get to a second term, but Obama went beyond hum-drum enforcement and actively persecuted people who grew or smoked pot with the blessing of their state governments. Obama could have left local policy to locals, allowing progress to spread under the cover of state’s rights. That’s exactly what he did with gay marriage, when he directed his Attorney General to cease enforcement of the bigoted Defense of Marriage Act, repealed the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, and belatedly endorsed full marriage equality – the act of a liberal with a conservative temperament.There’s another sort of convenience at work in Obama’s massive expansion of drone strikes and special operations. The United States doesn’t have the will or resources to send ground troops into every land that shelters its enemies. Obama has quietly, finally called an end to the war on terror, and chosen instead to mostly target al-Qaeda and its offshoots – “the people who attacked us,” he often intones. That might reduce the possibility that America will invade another Middle Eastern country anytime soon (at least if he remains in office), but it’s not clear if it represents any significant decrease in what the military calls “kinetic operations.” Probably the opposite.One of Obama’s first decisions as president was to authorize a drone strike in the FATA, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan’s anarchic northwest. Daniel Klaidman, a Newsweek correspondent, has written in Kill or Capture a disturbing and tightly-focused account of Obama’s prosecution of the war formerly known as the war on terror. The machinery, he explains, was already in place, and the military defended its institutional prerogative:
During the transition and in the days after the inauguration, the CIA’s drone program had continued to operate, uninterrupted, under protocols established by the Bush administration. Most of the time, the drone strikes succeeded in killing terrorist targets. But as the pilotless aircraft lingered high above Karez Kot on that evening, relaying live images of the fallout to its operators, it soon became clear that something had gone terribly wrong. Instead of hitting the CIA’s intended target, a Taliban hideout, the missile had struck the compound of Malik Gulistan Khan, a prominent tribal elder and member of a pro-government peace committee. The strike killed Khan and four members of his family, including two of his children.
There are two broad categories of drone strikes: “personality” or “high-value individual” strikes, in which a prominent terrorist is identified before attack, and “signature strikes,” where drone operators look for behaviors and hints which imply that the targets could be terrorists - detractors call it “crowd killing.” The FATA strike was crowd killing, and though Obama was initially repulsed, he continued the practice with minor modifications. “According to one of his advisers,” Klaidman reports,
Obama never seemed entirely comfortable with the CIA’s signature strikes. Intellectually, he appreciated the arguments for them, but he remained unsettled. “He would squirm,” recalled the source. “He didn’t like the idea of kill ‘em and sort it out later.” Still, Obama’s willingness to back the program represented an early inflection point in his war on terror. Over time, the program grew exponentially, far beyond anything that had been envisioned by the Bush administration.
In his eight years in office, George W. Bush authorized 52 drone strikes. So far, Obama has authorized 284, accelerating their use in Pakistan and expanding them to Yemen and Somalia, and perhaps elsewhere. They have unquestionably been effective in spying on and killing terrorists – a drone hovering over Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound helped establish the location’s importance and the patterns of life inside it – and they are very popular at home. But they are deeply resented abroad, and with some reason: some estimates put civilians as a quarter of all casualties, and those who don’t die must live in terror not only of the Taliban, but of the intermittent whirr of electronic predators levitating overhead, heard but too high to be seen.The rest of Obama’s foreign policy shows potential, though it too is full of ambiguity. His response to the Arab Spring was halting in the early moments – the first autocrats to be challenged, in Tunisia and Egypt, were allies – but he eventually embraced the movement and tried to ease Ben Ali and Mubarak out. Those revolutions were largely non-violent, but when unrest in Libya turned to armed revolt, it forced Obama to choose between humanitarianism and the lighter international bootprint he’d promised. His approach was characteristic: morality argued against inaction, politics and resources against invasion. His generals proposed a no-fly zone, but when they told him that it wouldn’t stop Muammar Gaddafi’s advance on the rebel-held city of Benghazi, Obama took the huge risk of demanding something me, something that would work.The air campaign that resulted was unique. Though the US committed more resources than any other country, Europe and even a few Arab allies were encouraged to take a leadership role. They didn’t acquit themselves particularly well, but a precedent had been set: America would no longer be the default leader of international intervention; it could “lead from behind,” as many put it. A humanitarian precedent, however slight and tenuous, was also created: in cases where there was little direct strategic influence, and where risk was not heavy, the international community would intervene to prevent mass murder. It’s no balm for the people suffering in Syria today, or those in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, whose repression elicited only soft and ineffectual remarks from the president, but it is nevertheless a small step toward a more just and multipolar world order.In the future, decades from now, we may look back and see that Obama’s most important foreign policy adjustment had nothing to do with the Middle East. On November 16, 2011 he announced the deployment of 2,500 marines to a base in Darwin, on the northern coast of Australia. It was the first new long-term increase in America’s Pacific forces since Vietnam, and an obvious message to China. Obama began his relationship with China the same way he began with Russia: by offering to “reset” relations to a friendlier baseline. But the US-Chinese relationship quickly grew acrimonious. David Sanger believes that “if there was a lesson in Obama’s early outreach to China, it was this: what Obama’s team viewed as extending a cooperative hand—welcoming them as equals in managing world affairs—was viewed by some factions in Beijing as weakness.”Because the workings of its government are so opaque, Americans tend to think of China as a giant, single-celled organism, but as Sanger points out, “its leadership is at its weakest since the beginning of the revolution that swept in the Communists,” and it is rife with submerged factionalism. Many favor a more harmonious relationship with the United States, and others, who believe America is in inevitable decline, favor a more assertive approach. The result is often unpredictable. For instance, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Beijing in early 2011, the Chinese military conducted a test flight of its new stealth fighter, an unambiguous provocation that President Hu Jintao may not have been aware of.“For the United States,” Obama told the Australian Parliament, as he announced the new deployment,
this reflects a broader shift. After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region… With most of the world’s nuclear power and some half of humanity, Asia will largely define whether the century ahead will be marked by conflict or cooperation, needless suffering or human progress. As President, I have, therefore, made a deliberate and strategic decision -- as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future…
At the time this was taken as a largely symbolic move: 2,500 soldiers – a brigade – is small as deployments go. But the number betokens a massive shift in military spending, as the Pentagon looks to procure and refit equipment and weapons for work in the Pacific. East Asia will soon become the next frontier of unmanned spycraft and warfare, as the military moves more of its pilotless vehicles toward the Chinese seas. It is easy to argue that something must be done to balance China’s growing aspirations – it lays claim to many resource-rich island chains and shipping lanes, bullies its neighbors, and has not even America’s occasional compunction about doing business with the world’s most brutal regimes – but Obama’s moves, which seem prudent today, could trigger a more intense arms race. Instead of nuclear weapons the US and China would compete to build stealth navies, warplanes, and automated killing machines. Of all recent presidents, Obama by temperament seems uniquely qualified to maintain that balance, but it is a precarious one indeed.
