"My working assumption has been that the only thing that Barack Obama
believes in is Barack Obama. With that thought in mind, I'm seldom
surprised by anything he's done. For leaders, particularly the kind who
should be written of in quotation marks ("leaders"), it's often easier
to just go along with what seems to be conventional wisdom in a
bureaucracy, and end up losing a fight. When you don't believe in
anything, there aren't really going to be many reasons to avoid going
along."
Cujo359
...
As true as this may be, it really begs the question "why bother contesting for a leadership position if you are not going to lead?" From Poppy Bush onwards we have been inflicted with empty suits that captured the Executive as resume padding. It has been all about blind ambition linked to ego gratification; with no real desire to do the heavy lifting the job required. You can see the downward spiral from Pappy Bush, to Bill Clinton, to Shrub and, finally, to Obama.
Each iteration, each candidate, was ever more solipsistic, ever more nihilist, ever more ego driven, ever more the unprincipled political hack. Each was ever more the dog chasing the bus; totally lost when said bus ended up in the dog's possession.
I wish I was a systems engineer, or someone who could discern how systems work. I do not have the mental discipline or the framework to achieve that kind of analysis. I just know that our system of government, especially it's political process is fundamentally flawed. I keep looking at the results of the the process and keep being amazed on how badly it fails at delivering a more perfect union. We are 0 for 3 since Regan as far as leaders go. And let's be blunt, while Reagan was a great leader, where he lead us was truly awful place. The triumph of Goldwater reactionary conservatism has been a disaster for the nation.
There is something very wrong with the rigged political system we operate under. The will of the People, what they voted for, was transformational change. The Democrats and then the nation went way outside the box and voted for something new under the sun; or something at least seen as new. What they got was yet another clueless pol, interested only in his own aggrandizement.
I look at Obama and just wonder. Here is a man who has been angling for the Presidency since Harvard Law. Every move he made since then was made in that effort. He kept his nose clean, and carefully avoided leaving any fingerprints. And to what end? To sooth his outsized ego? To attain some kind of personal validation?
But more importantly, why is a man like Obama being so richly rewarded? Why do we keep accepting these empty suites to "lead" us? Why are our political elites so feckless, so underwhelming? Does the system have to break as badly as it did in the 1930's for a change to occur? I dread that possibility. Our nation came a lot closer to totalitarianism than was comfortable in then1930's. We got really lucky with FDR, who was able to save Capitalism from itself. This time, we were not so lucky, we got Obama.
And it does not look much better going further, as our choices look like Mitt and Barack for the top job. Neither of these feckless political chameleons can be described as a "leader." Mittens is Barry's doppelganger, a big pander bear with no core to speak of. Again there is something fundamental wrong with a system that delivers the "choice" of Mittens or Barry.
I no longer see any cure within the system for what ails it. My thin reed of hope lies with the Occupy movement and its very smart decision to stay far away from the siren song of our political duopoly. The worst thing the Occupy movement could do is become an arm of the Democratic Party. As long as Obama holds the Oval Office the Donkeys are irredeemable. Even after Obama leaves, the Progressive base has to undergo a total rebuild. Obama's tenure has been an absolute disaster for the Progressive base. The supposed high minded and principled base has degraded itself to fan politics and the cult of personality during Obama's term in office. The Progressives have cheer-lead Obama's continuation of Bush policies; policies that the Progressives would have absolutely opposed if those same policies were attached to a President McCain. It seems that hypocrisy has a bipartisan appeal as both TEA Party and Progressives are more than willing to soak in it.
Fortunately Occupy is not a "progressive" movement, or maybe it is the only real progressive game in town. Either way, Occupy is the first grass roots movement for systemic change I have seen since the heyday of the 1970's liberation movements. Interestingly Occupy does not claim any leaders but depends solely on participatory democracy to set its agenda. That is smart move, seeing as the leadership class we have is so underwhelming.
Cujo359 is spot on about Bush being contemptuous of the role of government. What he did not point out is the ideology that provided cover for W's refusal to do any heavy lifting after invading Iraq. Bush and his cronies really bought into the Libertarian notion that the Market was the solution to everything.
God knows why Conservatives have so bought into the idea that private enterprise has the answer to everything. Thom Hartmann has some ideas about this, but it is still passing strange how the ideology that Hartmann outlines can be accepted as Gospel by thinking human beings. Even the most cursory glance at history shows that you can not have any kind of market, never mind a free one, without government providing some sort of base.
Be that as it may, the Libertarian propeller-heads that manned up the Iraq Occupation Authority were all gung ho to prove the notion that the market would solve all issues of governance in Iraq. A Iraq socialist society and economy was thrown to wolves by incompetents chosen solely for their fealty to Republican Party notions of governance.
Not surprisingly, with no one minding the store, corruption and graft became the order of the day. The vultures swooped in and began picking the place clean. Out-right theft was the order of the day, as Palets of hard currency were handed over without as much as a proper receipt. Bush could ignore the bad news, not only because that was his default, but also because he could always fallback on an ideological excuse. No need to intervene, the Market will sort this out, government intervention will only make things worse. Stay the course; it will all work out.
You can see the mindset of a no government intervention, the Libertarian mindset, even prior to the invasion. Rumsfeld rejected any kind of due diligence or planning for the Iraqi Occupation. Iraq was to be the great Libertarian proof that market driven government, laissez faire ideology on steroids, is best. Iraq was to be the shining beacon on the hill, Gault on earth, where all would bend their knee to the Sainted Ayn Rand, high priestess of Objectivism. It turned out to be a mess.
With all the mental energy going into the Randian project of Iraq, Afghanistan was abandoned to the fates. Bush and Cheney only bothered with Afghanistan because they had to. It was the prerequisite to their jolly little war in Iraq. Iraq got the troopers, and the one thousand support staff for the US Embassy; Afghanistan got Tora Bora.
Bush thoroughly screwed the pooch. It was gross negligence backed up by an ideology that "proved" that gross negligence was the best policy option available. This was the state of affairs when Obama took the helm of the Ship Of State. Here too is where I depart from Cujo359, which is weird, because I am ending up an even harsher critic of Hope On A Rope than Cujo359. This is not exactly and easy thing to do.
Be that as it may, I do have nothing but contempt for Obama's performance as regards to both Iraq and Afghanistan. How can a man with such an obvious intelligence as Barack has, slip into the group think that infests the fetid political swamps of the Potomac, is beyond me. How can you come out of Harvard and become so clueless? Or is that the whole point of Harvard, to inculcate a man or woman in to the mysteries of the Conventional Wisdom, and thus make that person just another mindless Pod Person in good standing with the political class?
If the goal of Harvard is to turn bright men and women into unthinking zombies wedded to the conventional wisdom, well, mission accomplished as far as Barack Obama is concerned. The man lacks an original thought in his head. An entire Winter spent contemplating options in the Graveyard of Empires, just to make the same kind of decision Incurious George would make in two seconds flat; change you can believe in boys and girls!
Obama followed the script laid down to him by grand consensus of the DC elite without even bothering to change an i or a t. He ignored the military as much as he could, without sparking an out-right mutiny, and he ignored the facts on the ground as best as he could as well. He kicked the can down the road to avoid the political repercussions of what really needed to be done: fish or cut bait.
The situation on the ground in Afghanistan was exactly what one would suspect after nearly four years of neglect and low priorities: an utter disaster. The Talaban were back bigger, badder than ever. The government of Hamid Karzai was a corrupt, disheveled, incompetent non-starter. The US troopers where burnt out from multiple deployments, and utterly cynical about the mission. The Afghan police and army were a disorganized, unprofessional collection of louts and layabouts, a menace more than a help to the civilians. In short, the best policy for Afghanistan was to walk to the exits as quickly as decorum would allow. But that would be toxic politics, and Obama is nothing if not a political animal.
Obama doubled down with his own Bushite Surge. True to form, the Surge, not really woking in Iraq, did not work at all in Afghanistan. It was a net loss all around; except to the Taliban, who had a gay old time running circles around the Coalition military.
That Obama did not see this coming, or that he pretended not to see it, are two equally hideous possibilities. Obama's failures frustrate me much more than Bush's. Bush was a man-child, a dry drunk with a mean streak, one can understand, if not approve, his lack of compassion for everyone caught in the meat grinder of Afghanistan. But Obama was supposed to be the smarter one, the intellectual, the cool, rational leader. Obama was supposed to occupy the higher intellectual and moral space. Instead, he carried on, continued the pointless war in Afghanistan. Obama even attempted to renegotiate the withdrawal from Iraq. After the epic mess Bush made, there was no way on God's good green earth that the Iraqi's were going to extend the SOFA with the US. Incredibly, Obama was even more foolhardy than Bush, who saw the writing on the wall and caved to the Iraqis.
To me, Obama is the prime example of what is wrong with our political class. He is a prime example of the intellectual and moral rot; of how the Establishment has corrupted and degenerated. With no real check on its enthusiasms, the political elite had become intellectually and morally flabby. The All Volunteer Military has released them to attempt all manner of hare-brained interventionist schemes. Because so few US citizens have any skin in the game of power politics, there is no accountability. If the troopers in Iraq and Afghanistan were draftees, the Bush and Obama Administrations would have been much more circumspect about how they went about their policies. You sure would not see the multiple deployments, and the traumatic brain injuries that are the signature outcomes of our two wars of choice. You might not have even seen a unthinking rush to war with Iraq if the Draft was in place. But there is no draft, so our clueless, incompetent, unthinking political class gets to charge off into any number of misadventures and then leave the bill for later generations to pay. Yes, war is always a costly and dirty business, but our political elites have found a way to make it even uglier, nastier, more brutal, and more pointless than it needs be.