Joseph Lelyveld
Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
by David E. Sanger Crown, 476 pp., $28.00
Barack Obama can claim two big foreign policy accomplishments: getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor’s expansive, grandiose-sounding “Global War on Terror” into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the al-Qaeda network, relying largely on high-tech intelligence gathering and pilotless drones. The most conspicuous achievement of that campaign—the raid by Navy SEALS on the compound where Osama bin Laden had been sojourning for six years, hard by the Pakistani military academy, just an hour’s drive from the capital, Islamabad—shook the foundations of the state and put relations with this exasperating, supposed ally in a deep freeze.
As an outcome, this was not entirely reassuring. David Sanger enables us to eavesdrop on the
president when, a half-year after Osama was wrapped in a shroud and sent to his watery grave, he confronts the likelihood that the highly satisfying elimination of the most wanted terrorist had only deepened the dilemma still posed by Pakistan. “His biggest single national security concern,” he’s reported to have told advisers late last year, was that Pakistan would “disintegrate” and lose control of its nukes.
This hearsay, passed along by an unnamed White House official, can’t be read as a considered policy statement. Taken literally, it would mean that Obama’s worries over Pakistan had come to outweigh his concerns over the Iranian nuclear program or al-Qaeda itself. But the case can be made and Sanger comes close to making it. Describing Pakistan as “the world’s most dangerous nation,” this veteran New York Times correspondent1 slips in enough scary particulars to induce insomnia in any reader inclined to parse the president’s logic. Not only does Pakistan have “the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal on earth,” but, we’re told, the latest additions are “smaller, easier-to-hijack weapons.” Under George W. Bush and Obama, the United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars underwriting programs to help Pakistan secure those weapons but still doesn’t know where many of them are kept.
Read more at Joseph Lelyveld
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Lisa Jack/Contour by Getty Images
Barack Obama posing for the camera during his freshman year at Occidental College, Los Angeles, 1980
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August 16, 2012
Darryl Pinckney
Barack Obama: The Story
by David Maraniss
Simon and Schuster, 641 pp., $32.50
A white friend told me recently that he heard someone complain that he’d voted for the black guy last time around, did he have to do it again—as if Obama’s election had been a noble experiment we weren’t ready for. Only the big boys can deal with the global economy, so hand the keypad to the White House back to its rightful class of occupants, those big boys who helped to make the mess in the first place. President Obama got little credit from Wall Street for bailing out the financial system. Imagine the criticism had he not or had he tried to institute even more reform at that moment. It was an early display of his administration’s hope to lead by consensus.
Obama’s hold on the middle ground frustrates old liberals and engaged youth. But it remains one of his great assets that the Republicans can’t shove or provoke him from the middle ground. His entrenchment is perhaps why his opponents cannot make him lose his cool, his own understated black swagger. Think of the fierce need among Republican congressmen to try to insult him as chief executive. More so than his record, the accomplishments of his first term, his cool is his campaign’s best remedy for the negative messages that will get under the floorboards of the nation’s consciousness, placed there by Citizens United, the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott.
Read more at Darryl Pinckney
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FROM The New York Times: The Price of Politics,’ by Bob Woodward
ReviewedBy MICHIKO KAKUTANI
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many aspects of this book’s portrait of Mr. Obama echo reports from other journalists and Washington insiders: a president who has not spent a lot of time cultivating relationships with members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, and who has similarly distant (if not downright tense) relationships with business executives; an idealistic but sometimes naïve and overconfident chief executive with little managerial experience and little understanding of the horse-trading and deal-making that make Washington run (skills that, say, Lyndon B. Johnson possessed in spades).
[The book] examines the aftermath of the failure of the president and Speaker John A. Boehner to reach a “grand bargain” in July 2011 involving cutting the deficit, rewriting the tax code and rolling back the cost of entitlements. Large swaths of this book concern the depressing blame game the administration and Congressional Republicans waged against each other after talks...abruptly collapsed. What caused that collapse? Depends which side you believe.
Republicans have argued that the White House, nervous about how Congressional Democrats and the party’s base would react, “moved the goal posts” at the last minute, requesting an additional $400 billion on the revenue side.
Democrats have suggested that Mr. Boehner walked away because he could not rally Republican support for the deal. Within the White House, Mr. Woodward writes, many of those involved in the negotiations argued that Mr. Boehner “did not come close to steering his own ship”: “Instead of being a visionary trying to make a grand bargain, Boehner had, almost all alone, crawled out on a limb and watched as Eric Cantor and the Tea Party sawed it off.”
Read more at The New York Times:
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AND WHERE WILL WE BE:
Darryl Pinckney Continued:
No matter what, the Republicans are promising to bring Obama’s first term to a close with another budget crisis. The first term is becoming the story, the referendum. Meanwhile, Obama’s fight for a second term has had the curious effect of making books about his rise somewhat passé. We are familiar with the exoticism of his story: the absent African father; the young white anthropologist mother in Indonesia; the basketball team in Hawaii. We know about Chicago, the discovery of the black community and the future First Lady. YouTube has him when at Harvard. And then that Speech.
read more at Darryl Pinckney
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Heartland New York Review of Books
Now, as the eighty-seven freshmen Republicans—who account for more than one third of their party’s 242 seats in the House—prepare to face the voters in November, bearing both the advantages and burdens of incumbency, the picture of intransigence they’ve drawn of themselves will present no problem for those in right-leaning districts; in other words, most of them. But in a campaign that still has seven months to run, just enough seats will be up for grabs to make the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s rosy claim that the party is edging into a position to take back the House appear wishful, dubious, but not altogether outside the realm of the possible.*
The relentless, rat-a-tat “conversation” that fills the twenty-four-hour news cycle bears so heavily on the presidential race that it’s easy to forget the depth of the hole the Democrats dug for themselves two years ago when the Republican share of the vote for all House seats soared to 52 percent. For the Republicans, this was “their best showing since the election of 1946,” the psephologist—the fancy term for analysts of polls and elections—Michael Barone tells us in the introduction to the latest edition of the biennial manual he has been editing for four decades. It’s a useful reminder to Democrats that happy days won’t necessarily be here again if the incumbent hangs onto the White House, as the trends in most of the recent polls seem, for the moment at least, to foretell.
By itself, Obama’s reelection wouldn’t be enough to break the stalemate that has existed on the seemingly immutable issues of debt, revenue, and entitlements, with taxes on the wealthy and on corporations that keep their profits offshore as the most visible flash points of discord (not to mention all the currently shelved issues surrounding climate change and the environment). What happens to the freshmen Republicans in Speaker John Boehner’s and Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s House—whether they retain their seats and discipline—will also be telling. If enough of them survive, the stalemate could just drag on.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In practice, Americans don’t always vote for what they say they want. They balance their fears against their hopes. In the forty years since Richard Nixon won reelection by a landslide in 1972, only one president has been returned to office with both houses of Congress under the nominal control of his own party. Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton fell short of that goal. George W. Bush in 2004 got there, an advantage he soon squandered.
Given this history and the cozy forty-nine-seat margin Republicans now enjoy in the House, Barack Obama can hardly count on seeing the Speaker’s gavel restored to Nancy Pelosi next year. At least as likely is the possibility that our divided government could become even more divided. Nonpartisan prognosticators consider the Democratic majority in the Senate imperiled if only because fewer Republican seats there are on the line in this cycle.
As a matter of logic, which doesn’t count for much in politics, it’s possible that the messy spectacle of the Republican presidential contest—with all its pseudorighteousness, pandering, and on-target assaults on the character of the presumptive winner—will have wrecked enough damage on candidates whose names are followed by an (R) to upset such calculations and drag down some of the House freshmen in marginal seats...[Let us hope so.]
Read more at Joseph Lelyveld
by David Maraniss
Simon and Schuster, 641 pp., $32.50
A white friend told me recently that he heard someone complain that he’d voted for the black guy last time around, did he have to do it again—as if Obama’s election had been a noble experiment we weren’t ready for. Only the big boys can deal with the global economy, so hand the keypad to the White House back to its rightful class of occupants, those big boys who helped to make the mess in the first place. President Obama got little credit from Wall Street for bailing out the financial system. Imagine the criticism had he not or had he tried to institute even more reform at that moment. It was an early display of his administration’s hope to lead by consensus.
Obama’s hold on the middle ground frustrates old liberals and engaged youth. But it remains one of his great assets that the Republicans can’t shove or provoke him from the middle ground. His entrenchment is perhaps why his opponents cannot make him lose his cool, his own understated black swagger. Think of the fierce need among Republican congressmen to try to insult him as chief executive. More so than his record, the accomplishments of his first term, his cool is his campaign’s best remedy for the negative messages that will get under the floorboards of the nation’s consciousness, placed there by Citizens United, the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott.
Read more at Darryl Pinckney
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FROM The New York Times: The Price of Politics,’ by Bob Woodward
Reviewed
Published: September 7, 2012
As a plethora of election-year polls and surveys indicate, Americans are fed up with a deeply dysfunctional Washington paralyzed by partisan gridlock and increasingly incapable of dealing with the daunting problems facing the nation: a White House plagued by infighting, disorganization and inconsistent leadership; a Republican Party bent on obstruction and increasingly beholden to its insurgent right wing; and a Congress riven by party rivalries, intraparty power struggles, petty turf wars and an inability to focus on long-term solutions instead of temporary Band-Aids.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many aspects of this book’s portrait of Mr. Obama echo reports from other journalists and Washington insiders: a president who has not spent a lot of time cultivating relationships with members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, and who has similarly distant (if not downright tense) relationships with business executives; an idealistic but sometimes naïve and overconfident chief executive with little managerial experience and little understanding of the horse-trading and deal-making that make Washington run (skills that, say, Lyndon B. Johnson possessed in spades).
[The book] examines the aftermath of the failure of the president and Speaker John A. Boehner to reach a “grand bargain” in July 2011 involving cutting the deficit, rewriting the tax code and rolling back the cost of entitlements. Large swaths of this book concern the depressing blame game the administration and Congressional Republicans waged against each other after talks...abruptly collapsed. What caused that collapse? Depends which side you believe.
Republicans have argued that the White House, nervous about how Congressional Democrats and the party’s base would react, “moved the goal posts” at the last minute, requesting an additional $400 billion on the revenue side.
Democrats have suggested that Mr. Boehner walked away because he could not rally Republican support for the deal. Within the White House, Mr. Woodward writes, many of those involved in the negotiations argued that Mr. Boehner “did not come close to steering his own ship”: “Instead of being a visionary trying to make a grand bargain, Boehner had, almost all alone, crawled out on a limb and watched as Eric Cantor and the Tea Party sawed it off.”
Read more at The New York Times:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AND WHERE WILL WE BE:
Darryl Pinckney Continued:
No matter what, the Republicans are promising to bring Obama’s first term to a close with another budget crisis. The first term is becoming the story, the referendum. Meanwhile, Obama’s fight for a second term has had the curious effect of making books about his rise somewhat passé. We are familiar with the exoticism of his story: the absent African father; the young white anthropologist mother in Indonesia; the basketball team in Hawaii. We know about Chicago, the discovery of the black community and the future First Lady. YouTube has him when at Harvard. And then that Speech.
read more at Darryl Pinckney
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Heartland New York Review of Books
April 26, 2012 Joseph Lelyveld
The class of freshman Republicans that swept into the House of Representatives at the start of 2011 followed a decisive shift of voter sentiment over Barack Obama’s seeming failure to master the economic crisis he inherited. Ever since, it has typically been portrayed as a disciplined force of Tea Party ideologues sworn to resist any compromise acceptable to the tax-and-spend liberal, or leftist, or socialist—the epithets tended to escalate—illegitimately occupying the White House.Now, as the eighty-seven freshmen Republicans—who account for more than one third of their party’s 242 seats in the House—prepare to face the voters in November, bearing both the advantages and burdens of incumbency, the picture of intransigence they’ve drawn of themselves will present no problem for those in right-leaning districts; in other words, most of them. But in a campaign that still has seven months to run, just enough seats will be up for grabs to make the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s rosy claim that the party is edging into a position to take back the House appear wishful, dubious, but not altogether outside the realm of the possible.*
The relentless, rat-a-tat “conversation” that fills the twenty-four-hour news cycle bears so heavily on the presidential race that it’s easy to forget the depth of the hole the Democrats dug for themselves two years ago when the Republican share of the vote for all House seats soared to 52 percent. For the Republicans, this was “their best showing since the election of 1946,” the psephologist—the fancy term for analysts of polls and elections—Michael Barone tells us in the introduction to the latest edition of the biennial manual he has been editing for four decades. It’s a useful reminder to Democrats that happy days won’t necessarily be here again if the incumbent hangs onto the White House, as the trends in most of the recent polls seem, for the moment at least, to foretell.
By itself, Obama’s reelection wouldn’t be enough to break the stalemate that has existed on the seemingly immutable issues of debt, revenue, and entitlements, with taxes on the wealthy and on corporations that keep their profits offshore as the most visible flash points of discord (not to mention all the currently shelved issues surrounding climate change and the environment). What happens to the freshmen Republicans in Speaker John Boehner’s and Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s House—whether they retain their seats and discipline—will also be telling. If enough of them survive, the stalemate could just drag on.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In practice, Americans don’t always vote for what they say they want. They balance their fears against their hopes. In the forty years since Richard Nixon won reelection by a landslide in 1972, only one president has been returned to office with both houses of Congress under the nominal control of his own party. Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton fell short of that goal. George W. Bush in 2004 got there, an advantage he soon squandered.
Given this history and the cozy forty-nine-seat margin Republicans now enjoy in the House, Barack Obama can hardly count on seeing the Speaker’s gavel restored to Nancy Pelosi next year. At least as likely is the possibility that our divided government could become even more divided. Nonpartisan prognosticators consider the Democratic majority in the Senate imperiled if only because fewer Republican seats there are on the line in this cycle.
As a matter of logic, which doesn’t count for much in politics, it’s possible that the messy spectacle of the Republican presidential contest—with all its pseudorighteousness, pandering, and on-target assaults on the character of the presumptive winner—will have wrecked enough damage on candidates whose names are followed by an (R) to upset such calculations and drag down some of the House freshmen in marginal seats...[Let us hope so.]
Read more at Joseph Lelyveld