Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he’s added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade.  CBS’ Mark Knoller:

This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the first time. The latest high-point is not unexpected, considering the federal deficit for the just-ended 2009 fiscal year hit an all-time high at $1.42-trillion – more than triple the previous year’s record high.

Much of the increase in the deficit and debt is attributed to government spending outpacing revenue – both exacerbated by the recession and the government response to it – including hundreds of billions in bailouts and stimulus spending and tax cuts along with decreased tax revenues due to rising unemployment.

[...]

The National Debt has increased about $1.6 trillion on Mr. Obama’s watch, though less than $4.9 trillion run up during the presidency of George W. Bush.

But the White House budget review issued in August projects that by the end of the current fiscal year on Sept 30th, the National Debt could top $14 trillion.  It gets worse. The same document projects that by the end of the decade, the National Debt will hit $24.5 trillion — exceeding the Gross Domestic Product projected for 2019 of $22.8 trillion.

According to the Treasury Department, the debt stood at $5.727 trillion on January 19, 2001, Bill Clinton’s last day in office, and $10.627 trillion when Bush left office eight years later.  That’s $612.5 billion (or $0.6125 trillion) a year, during which we fought two major wars, had the 9/11 attacks, and at least two major bailouts to deal with a global financial crisis.

We’re thus far averaging $1.92 trillion a year under Obama, or a factor of 3.146 more.   And the government is projecting that we’ll continue spending at this crisis rate for the next decade, more than doubling the current record level?

That ain’t good.

Presumably, we’d have had another major bailout had Bush stayed in office for a third term (were that Constitutionally or politically possible) or had John McCain been elected.  So spending and thus the debt would have escalated substantially regardless.  But we likely wouldn’t be talking about adding a massive health care payment on top of the pile.

As widely expected, the Powers That Be have declared the recession  over, while cautioning that the economy still has a long way to go.  And, of course, the Obama administration is crediting its stimulus packages for the good news.

It might not feel like it to most voters, but the U.S. economy is growing again after a more than a year of contraction.  The nation’s gross domestic product grew at a seasonally adjusted rate of 3.5 percent for July through September – the first growth since the spring of 2008, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That marks a sort of unofficial end to the recession that has bedeviled President Barack Obama since he took office. Economists credited the growth to consumer spending – up 3.4 percent – fueled in part by government stimulus, such as the popular Cash-for-Clunkers car-buying program.

But Obama economic adviser Christina Romer stopped well short of declaring victory. “The U.S. economy is moving in the right direction. However, this welcome milestone is just another step, and we still have a long road to travel until the economy is fully recovered,” Romer said in a statement.

That’s because more than 15 million Americans remain out of work, and a jobs report is due next week that’s likely to show the nation’s unemployment rate continues to creep upward toward 10 percent. That means the White House and politicians on the Hill will be very careful about declaring the recession over, even if the economy has finally started growing again.

The Obama administration said its analysis found that the $787 billion stimulus program contributed between 3 and 4 percent points to the GDP growth – meaning the nation’s output would have risen little, if at all, in the past quarter without it.

Now, taking credit for good things that happened on their watch is simply what presidents do.  Bush took credit for his recovery, Clinton for his, and Reagan for his.  Naturally, few presidents take the blame for bad times, which they attribute variously to the business cycle, their predecessors, the Congress, or a national malaise.

But it’s rather clear that neither the $787 billion stimulus nor the Cash for Clunkers programs had much to do with the recovery, such as it is.   Aside from the disputed AP report claiming that the administration’s report used some fuzzy math and bizarre calculations, the fact of the matter is that the recession was global and so, too, is the recovery.  Things happening all over the world, generally, are not explainable by small gestures made in a single country — even a hyperpower.

Cash for Clunkers, most agree, simply moved up sales that would have happened later in the year.  That’s not such a bad thing so far as it goes, except that many dealers are still waiting to get paid.  It’s hard, then, to credit money that hasn’t been distributed for stimulating the economy.  But, yes, condensing several months’ sales into a single month does boost the books for that quarter.

Ditto the “stimulus” package, almost all of which has all along been targeted for out years.  Again, very little of that money has been spent and therefore it’s impossible for it to have done much stimulating, aside from whatever psychological impact the government’s “doing something” may have had.  Most of the “stimulus” will presumably be spent well into the recovery, making it more akin to ordinary “pork.”

Again, this isn’t a partisan attack on Obama.  He inherited an economic crisis and is doing what politicians do under the circumstances.  And, yes, I similarly rejected George W. Bush’s claims that his modest tax rebate ended the recession he inherited from Bill Clinton.  For that matter, I didn’t blame Bill Clinton for said recession nor overly credit him for the economic boom that took place over much of his tenure.  He had the good fortune of being in office during the Internet boom and post-Cold War booms and the good sense not to screw it up.   Presidents have some impact on the economy but not nearly as much as we attribute to them.

As to the recovery itself, the administration is right to downplay expectations.  NPR’s Kevin Whitelaw:

“We’re no longer simply on the roller coaster to hell,” says Donald Luskin, the chief investment officer for Trend Macrolytics LLC, an economics consulting firm. “But the idea of returning back to normal growth levels? That will be well into next year.”

[...]

“In a normal recession, the leaves fall off the trees because it’s autumn,” Luskin says. “In this recession, the leaves fell off the trees because there was an enormous forest fire. It’s a little bit of uncharted territory to know how long it will take to come out of that.”

This time, the damage was so severe that companies and consumers alike appear more reticent to return to their old habits. With Americans still adjusting to the tough new economic realities, consumer spending might not recover for quite some time.

“We have seen a permanent change in consumer behavior after seeing their retirement savings and home values go down,” says Gus Faucher, the director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Economy.com. “People are going to be more cautious coming out of this recession than they have in previous recessions because of the depth of the downturn.”

“Permanent” is the wrong word here.  Consumer confidence always rebounds.  We’ve had numerous booms and busts since the Great Depression, after all.  But not only was this recession deeper than any in quite some time it was this first major economic crisis in today’s 24/7/365 media climate and therefore the most hyped in history.  It’ll naturally take longer to recover.

And some significant percentage of the 10 percent unemployed — a figure that’s all the more staggering after decades of record employment — will never get their old jobs back.  Most will eventually land somewhere but this is a serious shakeup of the composition of our jobs base, not the standard business cycle.

Photo credit: For Granted

Mark Liebowitz had a piece for NYT over the weekend titled “Man’s World at White House? No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say.” At first blush, it reads like some feminists are genuinely concerned about a male-dominated culture in the West Wing. After awhile, however, one begins to suspect it’s a PR exercise to make President Obama seem more manly.

President Obama and golf partners, including the White House assistant chef Sam Kass, right, during his vacation in August. Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Does the White House feel like a frat house?

The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players.

The president, after all, is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a “big rambunctious dog” over a “girlie dog” and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.

He presides over a White House rife with fist-bumping young men who call each other “dude” and testosterone-brimming personalities like Rahm Emanuel, the often-profane chief of staff; Lawrence Summers, the brash economic adviser; and Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, who habitually speaks in sports metaphors.

The technical foul over the all-male game has become a nagging concern for a White House that has battled an impression dating to the presidential campaign that Mr. Obama’s closest advisers form a boys’ club and that he is too frequently in the company of only men — not just when playing sports, but also when making big decisions.

Uh huh.

“Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former press secretary in the Clinton administration whose sister, Betsy, served as the Obama campaign’s chief operating officer. Ms. Myers said women have high expectations of the president. “Obama has a personal style that appeals to women,” she said. “He is seen as a consensus builder; he is not a towel snapper and does not tell crude jokes.”

Ooh, so he’s not only a Guy’s Guy, but he’s mature and sensitive, too? Oh, my!

Mr. Obama, in an interview with NBC on Wednesday, called the beef over basketball “bunk,” saying that the players were largely picked from a regular Congressional game and that the list of invitees was reviewed by women on his staff. “I don’t think it sends any kind of message or signal whatsoever,” said the president, who often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home (where he is the only non-canine male). He added, in the interview, that he had hired women into “some of the most important decision-making positions in this White House.”

OK. He loses a couple of Man Points here for 1) blaming the selection of his basketball team on female staffers and 2) having female staffers pick his basketball team.

Mr. Obama is hardly the first commander in chief whose penchant for sports and other guyish stuff (comic books, “Star Trek”) has become part of his presidential persona. The first President George Bush presented himself as a horseshoe-playing, pork-rind-eating Texan. He was followed by the Big Mac-gobbling, cigar-chomping Bill Clinton and the brush-clearing, bike-busting George W. Bush. It worked to good effect, said Mark McKinnon, a media adviser and mountain bike companion of the latter Mr. Bush.

Aside from perhaps the brush-clearing, is there any reason to believe any of this is affect? There’s every reason to believe Bush 41 likes horseshoes and pork rinds and Clinton liked hamburgers and cigars. And all these men were demonstrably avid sportsmen in their day.

As to the merits of the culture clash issue, these passages put it in perspective:

In interviews, five women who work in the White House or advised officials there described the culture with more of a collective eye-roll than any real sense of grievance or discomfort. One junior aide, who like the other women spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about appearing publicly critical, said that the “sports-fan thing at the White House” could become “annoying” and that her relative indifference to athletics could be mildly alienating. And while this is not uncommon in any workplace, sports bonding can afford a point of entree with the boss.

[...]

Recreation is only one source of affinity within a White House culture, people there say. Obama veterans describe a camaraderie forged over a grueling campaign and a merciless nine months at the White House. It is not about gender, they say, but shared experience. “Many of us have known each other for a long time, and we have brother-and-sister kind of relationships,” said Jen Psaki, the deputy press secretary, who works in an office with seven other spokesmen under 35, all “brothers” from the campaign.

[...]

Ms. Dunn said that she recently hosted a baby shower for an administration official and that no men from the office were invited. She is comfortable with that — just as she is fine with never playing basketball with the president. “That is just part of the culture here that I am excluded from,” she said. “And I don’t care.”

Quite right. Women are in very powerful roles in this administration, as they have been in the last several administrations. That’s the direction our culture has taken over the last three decades or so. But it doesn’t mean that men and women aren’t going to still tend to have different interests.

Just once, I’d like to see Obama break out of campaign mode and give an honest answer to silly questions like this. He’s a very good basketball player, especially for a middle aged Harvard Law graduate with a busy schedule. Unless he’s going to invite elite level women’s players (i.e., people good enough for the Olympics or the WNBA) they’re not going to be very good competition. For that matter, aside from pre-pubescent children, who ever heard of co-ed basketball teams?

No worries, though, Obama invited Melody Barnes, his chief domestic policy advisor, to play golf with him Sunday.  Which, naturally, was widely reported.

Paul Krugman continues to demonstrate that brilliance in one field doesn’t necessarily translate into sound insights into others. He’s upset that some Republicans took pleasure in President Obama’s embarrassment in not landing the Olympics for his adopted Chicago and their cynicism in positioning themselves as the defenders of Medicare in order to fight his health care reform proposals. His explanation for both: “the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama.”

But that’s rather silly. The Olympics matter was one of schadenfreude. I know plenty of people who voted for and continue to support Obama who nonetheless question his hubris and the cult of personality that surrounds him. And the Medicare issue is one of tactics, choosing a politically expedient means to an end.

Moreover, Krugman continues this to Friedmanesque extremes.

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern. Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

Reagan won landslide victories and was still opposed by Democrats at every turn, often in vitriolic terms. Who can forget the late Teddy Kennedy’s vicious harangue against “Robert Bork’s America”? And goodness knows, George W. Bush wasn’t exactly treated with kid gloves. Our politics have taken a nasty turn this generation — hardly unprecedented in our history but magnified by a changed media climate — and now it’s Obama’s turn to feel the heat.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance.

Only because the Democrats have long since embraced the same rhetoric, forcing the Republicans to either adopt extreme positions or be “Me Too.” They’ve done some of both.

Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.

Again, this has been equally true of Democrats when they cycle out of power. It requires blindness or sheer partisan hackery to think what Obama’s facing now is any more ruthless or impolite than what Bush did during his eight years.

Bill Clinton is joining Gavin Newsom’s campaign for governor of California in what Michael Finnegan argues is payback for Jerry Brown’s snub way back in 1992.

Seventeen years after fellow Democrats Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown clashed in the 1992 race for the White House, the former president made clear today that bygones will not be bygones in the 2010 campaign for California governor: Clinton signed on today to support Brown rival Gavin Newsom in the Democratic primary next year. Newsom is the current mayor of San Francisco.

It is highly unusual – perhaps unprecedented, according to the mayor’s campaign – for a former president to take sides in a California gubernatorial primary. Sitting chief executives and former ones usually like to wait for the intraparty bleeding to stop before endorsing.

[...]

Tensions in the 1992 race for the Democratic presidential nomination peaked at a debate in Chicago, where Brown accused Clinton of “funneling money to his wife’s law firm for state business.” That set off Clinton. “I don’t care what you say about me, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife,” he snapped, shaking his finger at Brown. “You’re not worth being on the same platform as my wife.”

I’m reminded of this weekend’s hubbub around Michael Jordan’s decidedly ungracious Hall of Fame induction speech, which he used to vent every slight, real or imagined, he’d suffered since high school.   One would think winning would be vindication enough to salve those old wounds but, for Clinton and Jordan, it apparently isn’t.  Michael Wilbon has the best line on that one:

My reaction was to be surprised at the reaction of people who were so stunned. What did they think separated Jordan from merely great athletes? Almost certainly it was the controlled rage with which he played every single night of his life and probably 90 percent of the practices in which he participated. A less ruthless Jordan would have been, well, Clyde Drexler.

Now, Drexler was a great, great player.  But he’s not one of four or five people in the discussion for greatest baller of all time.  Jordan is — usually as the favorite.

I’ve never been more than a casual fan of basketball, and have followed great players rather than picking a team.  I gravitated towards Julius “Dr. J” Irving toward the end of his career, then Larry Bird, and then Jordan.  And, really, nobody since. (I appreciate LeBron James’ gifts but have less sports-watching time these days.)   Despite being clean cut, articulate, and funny, Jordan frequently displayed a jerkish quality, even — perhaps especially — to his teammates.

Conversely, I was never a fan of Bill Clinton’s, seeing in him a snake oil salesman quality long before the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  But one can’t be a political junkie and not admire his talents.  And, certainly, his up-from-nothing story, elected as the youngest governor in the country at 32 and president at 46,  is simply remarkable.

It’s possible that a less ruthless Clinton would have been, well, Jerry Brown.

Former Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon has died.  He was only 64.

Kenneth H. Bacon, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who became chief Pentagon spokesman under President Bill Clinton, died Saturday at age 64.

Bacon had been battling melanoama, and was on leave was his job as president of Refugees International, a Washington-based group he joined in early 2001.

[...]

“Prior to working at RI, Mr. Bacon was Assistant Secretary, Public Affairs, at the U.S. Department of Defense and served as Pentagon spokesman from 1994-2001. From 1969 to 1994, he was a reporter, editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal based in Washington, DC. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Amherst College, and a Master’s degree in Business Administration and Master’s degree in Journalism.”

Sad news.

Lane Hudson felt justified in interupting former President Bill Clinton’s remarks at Netroots Nation to scream questions about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Defense of Marriage Act on the grounds that there was no Q&A session scheduled and he was therefore “being held as a captive audience.”

Julian Sanchez, also in attendance and quite sympathetic to Hudson’s views on both DADT and DOMA, demurs:

No, you spectacular dick,  you were not being “held as a captive audience”; you were voluntarily attending a talk where the speaker had declined to allot time for questions. Believe it or not, there were probably one or two other people there with strong feelings about any number of other matters. Being what we call “grown ups,” however, they were not so convinced of their righteous specialness that they imagined themselves entitled to set the speaker’s agenda like some jackass fratboy screaming “Freebird” at the band. I realize it seems shocking that some of your fellow audience members were more concerned about norms of civility than your most-important-issue-evar, but the fact that everyone has one of those is why we have norms of civility. The only reason it was possible for you to be rewarded for your boorishness by getting your question addressed is that you had the good fortune to be surrounded by people who were housebroken.

Quite.

Clinton does quite well handling the interruption and defending his position.  And he’s right:  In 1993, I was firmly against changing the policy on gays in the military and thought DADT was an outrageous concession to political correctness; now, I think it’s time to let gays serve openly.  Ditto, gay marriage.

While my political philosophy has no doubt evolved over the past sixteen years, it’s mostly a matter of the culture having changed through learning.  For Americans outside a handful of urban communities, gays were a theoretical construct or the object of jokes on television.  Now, they’re a small but visible part of the culture and, aside from a fringe Queer Pride element that enjoys the attention that provocativeness brings, pretty damned normal.

Soldiers are drawn from the society-at-large if not quite a microcosm of it. The military culture naturally lags the broader culture because it’s self-selected and more traditional in its values.   If the military leadership isn’t quite ready to end DADT, they soon will be.

And gay marriage will become normal, too, now that it’s taking place in several states.  The idea that gays marrying each other is somehow a threat to the marriages of heterosexuals already seems silly.  The resistance of the religious community will take longer to break down but it’ll happen.  Probably in less time than the sixteen years since DADT threatened to end the Clinton administration before it got started.

I’ve refrained from rapid reaction to the controversy over Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea to secure the release of two American journalists because I’ve been torn between competing maxims.  I agree with the critics who say rewarding despots who have seized American citizens is bad precedent, incentivizing illegal behavior.  Yet, Bob Manning is right, too:  our leaders have no good alternative to talking with our adversaries.

Dave Schuler and I discussed the topic at some length toward the end of last night’s edition of OTB Radio and I’ve written an extensive essay on the matter at New Atlanticist entitled “Bill Clinton’s North Korea Gambit.”

The short version is that:

• We don’t know what, if anything we gave in exchange for the hostages, making it difficult to assess the deal

• Bill Clinton was clearly just a high profile courier in this mission, there to take pictures and bring back the hostages according to a pre-arranged deal

• While I’m not terribly hopeful it will bear fruit, this opens a window to improved bilateral relations

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern.

Dave Schuler and I will be talk about the Cash for Clunkers program, the Birthers, Bill Clinton’s North Korea trip, and other topics in the news.

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“I know folks think I’m a city boy, but I do appreciate listening to country music. It’s about folks telling their life story the best way they know how.” – President Barack Obama

Via Norm Geras, I see that the president hosted Alison Krauss, Brad Paisley, and Charley Pride as part of the White House Summer Music series.

“They grabbed the contemporary popular chart,” [Paisley] said, referring to himself. “They grabbed the artistic bluegrass side,” he continued, referring to Ms. Krauss. “And then they grabbed the legend side”: Mr. Pride, country’s most successful African-American performer, has had more than three dozen No. 1 country singles since the mid-1960s.

Mr. Paisley performed the title song of “American Saturday Night,” about the United States as a melting pot, and “Welcome to the Future,” which has a verse about race relations that starts with the recollection of a burning cross and concludes, “From a woman on a bus to a man with a dream/Hey, wake up Martin Luther.” He wrote it, Mr. Paisley said before the concert, after the 2008 election, when he was in New York City on election night and saw jubilation in Times Square. “It just felt like the world had shifted on a dime,” he said. “I wanted to encompass this big theme of how far we’ve come in a song.”

[...]

Mr. Pride has taken pains throughout his career to set aside racial considerations, describing himself as “an American singing American music.” He had performed for Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

“It’s always an honor,” Mr. Pride said.

Before the concert, he called President Obama “a very blessed man and a brilliant mind,” and saw a parallel between their careers. “There’s a similarity in what he has done and what I went through,” he said. He added that in his long career on the country circuit, there had “never been a hoot” or a racial epithet from his audiences.

These stories are not only entertaining but useful in reminding us of the continuity in American life that transcends politics.  I don’t know or much care about the political views of Pride, Paisley, or Krauss or even about the musical tastes of Obama.  None of it mattered last night.

And while there are obvious parallels in Pride and Obama as “firsts,” I’m willing to bet Obama never got traded for a used bus.

Julian Sanchez argues that, while Sonia Sotomayor was given special consideration because she’s a Latina at various stages in her life, her case is “pretty close to the ideal of how affirmative action is supposed to work.”

From a pool of highly qualified candidates, you let ethnicity act as a tiebreaker. It seems self-evident to me that John Smith with Sonia Sotomayor’s resume would be a reasonable pick for the Supreme Court. I think it’s equally evident that, when it came time to choose from the highly elite people with the requisite experience and qualifications, it mattered that she was a Latina. For an institution like the Supreme Court, I have no serious problem with that being a consideration, provided we’re talking about the choice between candidates who meet the prior threshold of excellence you want any justice to surpass. It’s not like there’s some Supreme Court SAT that lets you objectively rank jurists, such that Sotomayor is “unfairly” promoted ahead of “better” candidates. Once you’re down to that elite pool, the decision amounts to a president’s highly subjective assessment of the specific character, experience, and philosophy of individual candidates, bearing in mind the composition of the rest of the court. And when you’re carrying out that level of individualized analysis, for a job that includes interpreting the meaning of “equal protection” or “hostile work environment” for a diverse population, it’s hardly mysterious why membership in a disadvantaged group might seem relevant—it’s not independent from some external, independent criterion of “bestness.”

Sotomayor got into Princeton despite subpar SATs but excelled once she got there.  She was appointed to the federal bench by George H.W. Bush over more stellar candidates because he was looking for a Hispanic nominee and had a small pool to choose from but she was both demonstrably qualified for the job and performed it well.  Presumably, Bill Clinton wanted to make the appeals courts “look more like America” and tabbed  Sotomayor from, again, a very small pool of qualified Latinas.  Now Obama has done it again.

Sometimes, affirmative action picks are obviously stellar.  Thurgood Marshall had a spectacular resume and would previously have been denied consideration because he was black.

Would Sandra Day O’Connor have been on the short list for the Supreme Court were she Sam O’Connor?  No.  Frankly, there probably wasn’t a woman in the country — let alone a Republican woman — who was superbly qualified for the Supreme Court in 1981.  Most of the law schools had excluded women until not long before then.

Clarence Thomas, were he white?   No, again.  There just weren’t a whole lot of black Republicans to choose from and it would have been politically difficult to appoint a white justice to replace Marshall, thereby turning the court back into an all-white institution.

Both had the requisite skills to do the job and proved to be competent additions to the bunch.   But neither were Antonin Scalia or Louis Brandeis.

My preference would be for every president to swing for the fences with every Supreme Court pick, going for a spectacular legal mind who would have the potential for greatness on the bench.  But I’ve got no real heartburn with affirmative action picks, either, so long as they’re of the type Julian advocates.   All manner of considerations other than intellectual greatness are going to factor in:  party affiliation, ideology, personality, age, and, increasingly, confirmability come readily to mind.  While ensuring diversity of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender isn’t something I much care about (so long as they aren’t negative factors) there’s no reason they can’t be “tiebreakers” or of minor consideration along with the others.

Danny Glover reports on President Obama’s total restructuring of the White House message machine in a piece ominously titled “The Cost of Controlling The Press.”

Barack Obama’s White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices. Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab reaches nearly $100,000 a week, or nearly $5 million a year-and that is for salaries alone.

[...]

Although other staffers undoubtedly did work on the White House website and other Internet projects, Bush’s dedicated new media team appears to have consisted of two people-a specialty media director who earned $84,000 a year and a website assistant who earned $34,000. By contrast, Obama has the 11 employees in the Office of Public Engagement and another nine aides with titles such as new media director, new media creative director, deputy director of video and e-mail content/design lead. Those nine earn nearly $700,000 a year combined.

One has to read well into the piece, however, to understand that this is mostly a reshuffle of existing resources:

Overall, Obama is spending about 12 percent more for his communications operation than Bush-$4.97 million compared with $4.44 million.

So, while the White House spending nearly $5 million in taxpayer dollars for propaganda  seems outrageous on its face, it’s essentially par for the course. Presumably, the increase is a combination of cost-of-living adjustments and a reallocation of staff from other areas to communications. After all, Congress controls presidential spending on staff.

More troubling: Glover notes that the new communications team has managed to bypass the already Obama-friendly press on numerous occasions, including staged “town hall” meetings with preselected guests and even disinviting the press entirely from mundane events like photo-ops with championship sports teams, preferring to produce their own videos for release on the Web.

I don’t like it.  But, again, it’s a natural evolution of the system.  Ronald Reagan’s team was legendary for limiting access to the president and ensuring that their preferred sound byte was pretty much all the press had to report in a given day.  Bill Clinton famously bypassed the more difficult talk shows during the 1992 campaign, instead going on talk radio and late night comedy shows.  George W. Bush and his team gave more time to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other friendly outlets.   Obama is taking that to the next level using social media techniques that PR firms have been advocating for their clients for years.

Again, this is probably not healthy.  The press is an important check on our politicians and, to the extent the politicians can bypass the press to get their message out, we lose that check.  It’s especially problematic at times, like the present, when the White House and Capitol Hill are controlled by the same party.

It’s quite possible, however, that the press will grow tired of being manipulated in this way and go out and do some actual reporting.  Hanging around the press room for scraps isn’t really journalism, after all.

The protests in Iran have entered a third week and the state media acknowledges that the death toll has reached 19 and that hundreds have been injured. Fareed Zakaria, a man not noted for idle leaps, proclaims, “we are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy.”

In an interview with CNN, he explains:

No, I don’t mean the Iranian regime will fall soon. It may — I certainly hope it will — but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. I mean that this is the end of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian regime.

The regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists had divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea was at its heart. Last week, that ideology suffered a fatal wound.

When the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “divine assessment,” he was indicating it was divinely sanctioned. But no one bought it. He was forced to accept the need for an inquiry into the election. The Guardian Council, Iran’s supreme constitutional body, met with the candidates and promised to investigate and perhaps recount some votes. Khamenei has subsequently hardened his position but that is now irrelevant. Something very important has been laid bare in Iran today — legitimacy does not flow from divine authority but from popular support.

As for the United States,

I would say continue what we have been doing. By reaching out to Iran, publicly and repeatedly, President Obama has made it extremely difficult for the Iranian regime to claim that they are battling an aggressive America bent on attacking Iran. In his inaugural address, his New Year greetings, and his Cairo speech, there is a consistent effort to convey respect and friendship for Iranians. That is why Khamenei reacted so angrily to the New Year greeting. It undermined the image of the Great Satan that he routinely paints in his sermons. In his Friday sermon, Khamenei said that the United States, Israel, and especially the United Kingdom were behind the street protests, an accusation that will surely sound ridiculous to most Iranians. The fact that Obama has been cautious in his reaction makes it all the harder for Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to wrap themselves in a nationalist flag.

I think a good historic analogy is President George H.W. Bush’s cautious response to the cracks in the Soviet empire in 1989. Then, many neo-conservatives were livid with Bush for not loudly supporting those trying to topple the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But Bush’s concern was that the situation was fragile. Those regimes could easily crack down on the protestors and the Soviet Union could send in tanks. Handing the communists reasons to react forcefully would help no one, least of all the protesters. Bush’s basic approach was correct and has been vindicated by history.

One of those neoconservatives, columnist Mark Steyn, points out that the Iranian regime will interpret whatever Obama does or does not do however they see fit, noting that they’re already railing against American “interference” and saying we have no right to lecture them about human rights given, for example, the debacle with the Branch Davidians in Waco during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

There’s a very basic lesson here: For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early nineties, the attitude of much of the west to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight. Fair enough. But over in the Balkans junkyard the various mangy old pooches saw it rather differently. And so did the Muslim world, which regarded British and European “neutrality” as a form of complicity in mass murder.

And, of course, the United States, along with our NATO allies, ultimately decided we had no choice but to intervene, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo.

Like Zakaria, NYT op-ed columnist Roger Cohen thinks the situation permanently changed, observing that Khameini has “lost his aura.”

Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.

He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.

The taboo-breaking response was unequivocal. It’s funny how people’s obsessions come back to bite them. I’ve been hearing about Khamenei’s fear of “velvet revolutions” for months now. There was nothing velvet about Saturday’s clashes. In fact, the initial quest to have Moussavi’s votes properly counted and Ahmadinejad unseated has shifted to a broader confrontation with the regime itself.

Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner ss

For now, however, Obama is keeping his powder dry.  Yesterday, he issued his strongest statement yet:

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reports that “U.S. officials say Obama is intent on calibrating his comments to the mood of the hour. They say he is seeking to avoid having the demonstrators accused of being American stooges and is trying to preserve the possibility of negotiating directly with the Iranian government over its nuclear program, links to terrorism, Afghanistan and other issues.”  He adds that, “Despite increasingly intense Republican criticism, and the passage of resolutions in the House and Senate on Friday that were tougher than the president’s words, U.S. officials say they will stick to their current course.”

Is there a point at which waiting will become intolerable?  Perhaps.

They say there is not much the United States can do to influence the situation — except make it worse for the opposition — but they have begun planning for the administration’s response if the crackdown turns very violent.

“We have to watch every day to see what is happening, even while we anticipate several different possibilities and what to do in those circumstances,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Within the administration, officials say, Obama’s cautious stance has the support of key senior officials, with disagreements centered mostly on quibbles over a word choice.

It’s a frustrating balancing act that will please no one.  It’s not at all clear, however, that there are better options at this point.

Photo: Reuters Pictures.

Gays looking to get the Supreme Court’s help in being allowed to openly serve in the military have been rebuffed.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a challenge to the Pentagon policy forbidding gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, granting a request by the Obama administration.  The court said it will not hear an appeal from former Army Capt. James Pietrangelo II, who was dismissed under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

[...]

In court papers, the administration said the appeals court ruled correctly in this case when it found that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is “rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion.”

During last year’s campaign, President Barack Obama indicated he supported the eventual repeal of the policy, but he has made no specific move to do so since taking office in January. Meanwhile, the White House has said it won’t stop gays and lesbians from being dismissed from the military.

@anamariecox is miffed but this is hardly surprising.  It has been settled law for generations that the military has a “good order and discipline” interest that allows it to do things that other government entities can’t.  The homosexual exclusion policy has been tested time and again and been deemed consistent with that goal.  There was no basis for taking this case and ruling differently.

Ultimately, this is a policy decision that Congress will make.  Given the trendlines on this, it’s only a matter of time.  For example, a Gallup poll released June 5th:

The movement in favor of gays serving has been positive among all demographics, with more than two-thirds overal and even a sizable majority of self-identified conservatives in favor.    No group gave less than 58 percent approval.

President Obama has clearly decided not to make Bill Clinton’s mistake of sparking a distrating controversy by tackling this early.  With an economic crisis and two wars to deal with, that’s wise if not particularly courageous.

It’s been years since I’ve quoted Ted Rall here. He hasn’t appeared in a post title since September 2005’s “Rall: Charities are for Suckers.”  The man’s eminently quotable, if in a train wreck sort of way, but constantly pointing out that some commentators are crazy attention whores really doesn’t advance the debate much.

But you’ve got to hand it to Rall:  He’s a consistent loon.

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.

From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the nerve to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now — before he drags us further into the abyss.

Take that, Rush Limbaugh!  In your face, G. Gordon Liddy!

For what it’s worth, while I didn’t vote for Obama and will quite probably* vote for his Republican opponent in 2012, I neither think Obama has done anything to merit resignation nor think he’s sold out to lobbyists any more than the next guy.  Being president is much harder than being a pundit, in that actions have consequences.

For example, I simultaneously believe the Turks committed genocide nearly a century ago and that the United States Government should refrain from rubbing their noses in it.  Whatever satisfaction an individual might get from Speaking Truth to (Middling) Power, Turkey is an important ally at the nexus of several of our most pressing foreign policy hotspots.  Alienating them over something that happened generations ago is foolish.  The President Obama, faced with that reality, is more cautious than was Candidate Obama, is a feature, not a bug.

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*There are a handful of plausible nominees that could put me off the reservation.