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OBAMA DOESN'T NEED GLASSES--WE DO: PART I.
This entry was posted on 8/16/2010 10:37 AM and is filed under uncategorized.
I've got an old Merriam-Webster paperback dictionary on my desk that I've had since college. Yes I know it doesn't have all the swift new tech-words that modern versions have, and I do use my online dictionary plenty, but I love to just sit here at my desk where I wrote so many books through the years, reach out with my left hand, and grab up that little dictionary, which is still good for all those old-fashioned words.
Like: "FARSIGHTED," which it describes as "able to see distant things more clearly than near."
And it offers up some synonyms, like, "JUDICIOUS," "WISE," and "SHREWD."
So, being the word-lover that I am, I looked those words up, too.
Being "Judicious" means "exercising sound judgment"--and uses such synonyms as "SENSIBLE," and "WISE."
If you look up "SHREWD," you get these synonyms by way of definition, "KEEN," and "ASTUTE."
The word "WISE" pretty much sums it all up, with the same definition as "FARSIGHTED"--"having or showing good sense or good judgment."
Like my battered old pocket dictionary, my Roget's Thesaurus from college (and yes, I do use the online one many times), has the cover torn off and many pages dog-eared, some of them with little book-tabs jutting out, from words I used so much in my writing that I wanted to find a fresh way of expressing them (such is the lot of a thriller-writer--how many words for "fear" can you come up with?)--but it has a synonym for "FARSIGHTED" that I love:
"EAGLE-EYED."
Now, technically speaking, from an opthalmological standpoint, if you are "farsighted," you actually have trouble seeing things up close and need glasses to correct that problem.
But from an ideological point of view, if you are farsighted, then there is nothing wrong with your vision. You are, in fact, a visionary.
This is because you can see things that might take place years or even decades down the road that most other people simply can't see. And when you know, in your heart and in your psychic soul, that these things either WILL happen or SHOULD happen, and there is something you can do to shape that future rather than being bullied by it, and you are a person of talent and brains and principle, then you will do everything in your power to make it so.
And, of course, the whole rest of the world will think you are crazy--or worse. Some may think you are evil. (These are the people who are completely blind about the future and so fear it.) They feel threatened and start looking for ways to stop you.
Some people will believe in you from an idealistic standpoint, and then, when you get into a position of power, they expect you to simply MAKE IT HAPPEN, and when the future begins taking place in incremental steps rather than big sweeping gestures like a wizard might cause with a wave of his magic wand--they might turn on you and call you a disappointment--or worse--a traitor to the cause.
But if you are TRULY farsighted and TRULY a visionary, you ignore those who call you crazy and you ignore those who call you evil and you even ignore those who say you betrayed the dream because things are not happening fast enough or in grand enough ways, because you are not looking at short-term consequences of your actions--you are FARSIGHTED, you are EAGLE-EYED, and therefore, you see far far down the road into a place that is only misty and blurry to the rest of us NEARSIGHTED beings.
I've just finished reading a landmark book on the first year of Barack Obama's presidency: THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One.
It's an absorbing and fascinating close-up-and-personal analysis of Obama's first year in office and covers every single aspect of that year, from the economic crash that confronted his team even before they took office, to the health care chaos, to the overhaul of Afghanistan policy and the outreach to the world's Muslims, to financial, education, and energy reform, to the media wars. The book's author, Jonathan Alter, a political columnist for Newsweek, was given unprecedented access to the West Wing and to Obama himself--with one caveat that he found immensely frustrating--he could not write about the nuts and bolts of the administration's struggles in Newsweek while he was writing the book; he had to wait until the book's publication. But Alter, a Chicago native, had known Obama since his time as a state senator and had interviewed him many times since, so the White House was opened up to him. Alter shadowed everyone there, from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, on down, from the months after the election--before they took office--until the book's publication this past May.
The picture that emerged was one far different from the one that plays out nightly on cable TV--both right and left--and in the news magazines and newspapers.
This is because those of us in the blogosphere and cable-news echo chamber that makes up the D.C. hothouse, are gasping in the heat and humidity because all we can see in our myopic way is the here-and-now of what takes place in that hothouse. We get all worked up about each days' news cycle and the immediate reaction of those venues to political events or even the repercussions of legislation that makes its way to passage.
We hang on poll numbers and punditry and react to each one as if it is the be-all and end-all of events, and even find fault with the president for the fact that he doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat in the hothouse heat while the rest of us wringing out our sopping clothes.
Doesn't he NOTICE what's going on? Doesn't he CARE?
Well, yes, of course he does--but he doesn't see these things from the same distorted fish-eye lens that we all do. He's seeing waay past the hothouse glass...out into the meadows and down the road and through the woods--all the way into the future. He is seeing much further than the rest of us, and he's seeing it differently.
Alter talks about how the Vulcan Mr. Spock often played a game called "Three-D Chess," on Star Trek, and describes the president's thought processes in this way:
"On many nights he pushed aside the briefing papers and stopped focusing on the immediate issues in front of him. He'd write on his desktop computer (or sometimes by hand) about things 'down the pike,' as he put it, that he wanted his people to think about. Marty Nesbitt (the president's close friend) said the president saw politics as a sequential puzzle. 'He's always thinking, 'If I do this then this could happen--or that could happen.' It's all in terms of cause and effect--like a Rubik's cube.' Anticipating events kept him from feeling swamped by them...'Before everyone else, he's already calculated the relative probability of several different outcomes, so when one of them happens--even though it may be a surprise to others--he's never really surprised.'"
Of all the facts crammed into this book, there is one that stood out for me in bold-faced, backlit type, and that was this one, a direct quote Obama gave the book's author in an interview that concentrated on health care reform:
"'We knew that it would be all-consuming--in the midst of having to deal with this enormous economic crises and two wars--and it would take a lot out of us,' he said later.
"At a minimum, he predicted, it would cost him ten to fifteen points in popularity before passage. And if it failed, he was in deep political trouble. 'I remember telling Nancy Pelosi that moving forward on this could end up being so costly for me politically that it would affect my chances if I were to run for reelection,' the president said. But he told Pelosi that if they didn't get this done now, 'It was not going to be done.'
"So Obama decided early to bet his domestic presidency on health care." (emphasis mine)
Think about that for a minute. We just had eight years of a presidency where Bush's closest political advisor, with his own office just off the Oval Office, had determined that there was going to be a "permanent Republican majority." To that end, he and the Bush administration politicized EVERYTHING, from the Justice Dept (where largely bogus cases were prosecuted that could throw local elections to the Republican) to the Pentagon (where the decision was made that, should Bush invade Iraq, it would help him get reelected because he would then be "a war president.")
After all, who can forget the glorious "golden hour" moment of George W. Bush in his Hollywood-tight flight suit strutting past the "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner draped by the White House across an accomodating aircraft carrier--tailor-made for campaign ads? (Pay no attention to those "thugs" in the white pickups barreling down on the troops and setting IEDs in the road by night.) Or those (cue the swelling music) magnificent Hollywood-ready war heroes who bravely fought off the enemy--Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch? (Pay no attention to those troops who are saying that's NOT what happened, because that messes up the campaign ad-ready war narrative we're shaping for our war president.)
Everything, EVERYTHING, was calculated to prop up the administration. Hacks who were loyal to Bush, no matter how puny their qualifications, were put in charge of everything from FEMA to the creation of a new government in Iraq. Rove held meetings (illegally), in federal departments, explaining how to use grant money and other plums in districts that would help throw elections to Republicans, regardless of need in the country.
Consequently, a great American city was drowned in FEMA inefficiency, while Iraq was plunged into chaos, corruption, crime, and civil war while Bush administration gadflies partied in the Green Zone.
Enter Barack Obama.
When he set his sights on health care reform, NO ONE in his administration thought it was a good idea (counting his closest advisors). Even those who grudgingly agreed that something needed to be done, wanted it done in tiny incremental steps that could be passed through Congress relatively easily. They wanted to concentrate mostly on the economy.
But Obama had maintained from the beginning that for the LONG-TERM health of the economy, there was no way to fix the worst of the problems facing this country WITHOUT tackling health care reform, because the costs were skyrocketing to atmospheric levels, and at this rate, with no reform, the nation's economy was going to collapse at some point in the future--a future OBAMA could see but very few of his closest advisors--not to MENTION his critics--could.
And he RISKED HIS PRESIDENCY on it.
He has said on several occasions that even if health care reform winds up costing him a second term, it will be worth it, because of the good it will do for the country in the long term.
He knew, as the "sausage making" process dragged on, that many of the reforms would not even take place until after the next presidential election, so that he would not likely get credit for changes that would wind up benefitting virtually everybody in the country eventually.
I've never heard of that kind of political courage before. Not anywhere. I've been following politics closely since LBJ was president, and I never saw a president who did not spend his entire first term looking for ways to ensure a second term.
But, to Obama, it was far more important that the good be done--for the welfare of the nation--than it was for him to rack up political points.
As Alter put it:
"If Obama had been as weak and overly conciliatory as some of his liberal critics believed, he would have decided during the transition, or after the Inauguration, or in the spring, or in the dog days of August, to hold off on major health care reform until later in his term. Delaying the bill would have been perfectly consistent with his campaign promise; which was merely to sign legislation by the end of his first four years. Once he made up his mind...The reality was something that aides didn't much like to discuss: the president was moving ahead alone." (emphasis mine)
This, my friends, is the true definition of LEADERSHIP.
All through the book are examples of Obama's leadership--what, as Alter points out--the military refers to as "the habit of command."
For example, in National Security Council meetings:
"Where Clinton would saunter in to National Security Council meetings and sit in the middle of the table in the Situation Room, listening to the NSC advisor call on various subject experts, Obama would purposefully stride in and run the meeting from the head of the table. It was if he had consciously decided to inhabit the role of leader. To do so, he had to project not just great confidence, but enough knowledge of the nuances of national security issues to justify that confidence in a room full of smart and experienced advisors. In that, he unquestionably succeeded."
On his decision-making process:
"The time from thought to action is very short, said (Denis) McDonough, a deputy national security advisor. 'He reads something and says, 'I want to change that,' and, 'I want a plan for this.' He would sometimes deliberate for days, weeks, or even in the case of Afghanistan, months, but contrary to the jibes of Dick Cheney, there was nothing 'dithering' about it. Obama would process a series of questions, facts, and insights that built on one another methodically. Penny Pritzker was struck by his capacity not just to absorb information but to use what he learned later. It was a subtle trait; unless you knew he was a good listener it might seem as if he wasn't registering what you were saying...'Within a very short period of time, you see action.'"
Speaking of Afghanistan, during the process of deliberation, after Gen. McChrystal had mouthed off the first time in protest of the president's policies, according to Alter:
"Obama and his senior staff believed this had Mullen's and Petraeus's fingerprints all over it. They were using McChrystal to jam the president, box him in, manipulate him, game him--use whatever verb you like. The president had not yet decided on a policy and didn't appreciate the military sounding in public as if he had."
As Alter points out, it's almost common now for the Pentagon to roust out young, Democratic presidents who do not have military experience--they'd been doing it since the days of John F. Kennedy. But this was one commander-in-chief they hadn't reckoned on. For one thing, he considered Bush's complete deference to his generals to be an abdication of responsibility, but he also knew that to completely overrule them would weaken his effectiveness and hurt morale of the troops in the field. Instead, he decided to take command:
"It was important to remind the brass who was in charge. Inside the National Security Council, advisors considered what happened next historic, a presidential dressing-down unlike any in the United States in more than half a century. The commander-in-chief now undertook the most direct assertion of presidential authority over the U.S. military since President Truman fired General MacArthur in 1951.
"In the first week of October Gates and Mullen were summoned to the Oval Office, where the president told them that he was 'exceedingly unhappy' with the Pentagon's conduct. He said the leaks and positioning in advance of a decision were 'disrespectful of the process' and 'damaging to the men and women in uniform and to the country.' In a cold fury Obama said he wanted to know 'here and now' if the Pentagon would be on board with any presidential decision and could faithfully implement it.
"'This was a cold and bracing meeting,' said an official in the room. Lyndon Johnson had never talked to General William Westmoreland that way, or George H.W. Bush to General Norman Schwarzkopf. Presidents Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton had all been played by the Pentagon at various points but hadn't fought back as directly. Now Obama was sending an unmistakable message: Don't toy with me. Just because he was young, new, a Democrat, and had never been in uniform didn't mean he was going to get backed into a corner."
This sense of authority and command, of setting goals in spite of political consequences and taking action to see it through--even over the objections of his advisors--not to mention his savvy and cunning to work behind the scenes and garner votes for key legislation in spite of the most polarized and obstructionist Congress since Reconstruction--(thanks to more modern filibuster rules that enable a minority to basically shut down government over the smallest of issues, as Newt Gingrich did to President Clinton in the nineties)--has enabled President Obama to accomplish an unprecedented flood of major legislation in his first year in office and to fulfill literally hundreds of campaign promises he had made, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning database, PolitiFact.com, put out by the St. Petersburg Times.
Of those promises, PolitiFact rates 25 as "major," and credits Obama has having fulfilled, by the end of his first year alone, 20 of them. (Major financial regulatory reform came just a few months later.)
In a major and lengthy article in the September Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum, called, "Washington, We Have a Problem," Purdum discusses the strange disconnect between the sweeping accomplishments of a strong new president, and the public perception of him and his presidency. Conservatives fear he has done too much and wants to institute socialism and some kind of bizarre tyranny over the country; liberals think he has not done enough and--far from being socialist--believe he has sold out to corporate and military interests and betrayed his--and their--ideals, and that furthermore, he is weak and unwilling to fight for them.
Neither perception is anywhere NEAR the truth, and the problem with that most likely lies in the conundrum of being farsighted and yet having to deal with a nearsighted populace. Purdum describes it this way:
"The pace of the modern presidency—or, rather, the pace of modern life, as amplified by the media and by the impatience of the public for action of any kind—has the perverse effect of making the most measured of politicians seem out of sync, and the most visionary policies seem incremental and thus unsatisfying. By definition, it will take years for the result of changes in the nation’s health-care system, or its energy policies or education policies—or anything else of note—to be fully in place, much less fully understood, much less proven effective. Anyone who risks taking on the toughest problems automatically risks being seen as not having done enough about them to get any credit by the time the next news cycle, or election cycle, rolls around. It’s a conundrum that vexes any president: there’s no short-term gain for long-term wisdom."
[...]
"Durable achievement demands a long time horizon—something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can’t wait for the carrots to grow—we keep pulling them up to see how they’re doing. Thus, deeply complex problems, from illegal immigration to the BP oil spill—problems that by definition have no quick or easy solution, despite their obvious urgency—become easy emblems of presumptive failure, whatever the president may actually be doing to address them."
[...]
"It’s Obama’s conviction—you hear this from the most senior White House aides again and again, because it reflects the thinking at the top—that by keeping his head down and doing his job he can also pursue a different strategy, one that doesn’t aim to win the day or the week but that looks toward victory in the long run. “You can do your job well,” as Axelrod puts it. “You can bring the troops home from Iraq, and you can move forward on things that will strengthen the economy, and you can hope that over time people say, ‘He had a vision that made sense, and he didn’t play by the crazy rules of that game.’” In this view it doesn’t matter so much whether polls show the public hated the stimulus plan. What matters is that it saved jobs and helped get the economy going again. It doesn’t matter so much that the public is skeptical about health-care reform. What matters is that people start getting access to better options.
"Obama has suffered for his patience, but he has profited from it, too, and whatever you think of his policies, his conduct of the presidency may be an object lesson in how to elude the loonier aspects of our age. From the day he declared his candidacy, the press—and, by extension, much of the Washington insider culture—has underestimated him, and that trend has continued in office."
In this blogpost I've explored the definition of leadership and how President Obama has shown it time and again in ways that might not necessarily break through to his critics--much less the general public. There is a startling statistic in Alter's book that blew my political-junkie mind, I can tell you:
Those who regularly watch Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, Comedy Central, or CNBC or listen to NPR amount to ONLY TEN PERCENT OF THE ELECTORATE WHO VOTE IN GENERAL ELECTIONS.
10%. That's everybody COMBINED.
If you want numbers, that boils down to 12 to 15 million serious news consumers--compared to 110 million voters.
So that leaves it up to those of us who are seriously committed, particularly to this president and his administration and the things they are and have been fighting for, to educate ourselves to the truth about this man who was elected by 53 million people. He is a visionary, and he is unruffled by the ups and downs of daily poll numbers and the media circus as he concentrates on accomplishing as much as he possibly can in however much time is allotted to him.
In my next blogpost I'm going to examine some of the more controversial legislative accomplishments, such as health care and financial reform, from the point of view of what was actually going on inside the White House and Congress--not what has been speculated. I'm also going to get into the media whirlwind faced by this president (which no other president in history has ever had to confront, thanks to the rapid 24-7 development of the Internet as well as cable news--Fox News didn't even exist when Bill Clinton was president, for example, and during the Bush years, it acted as a megaphone and cheerleader for his every fart, which, as we know, is exactly opposite of what Obama must deal with).
And I'll discuss the image that has so provoked commentary--that he is somehow unemotional or uncaring or unresponsive to the public's needs.
I'll provide some interesting statistics that I had not seen before, that say more than anything else what is true and what is not. Because we are facing a mid-term election that carries grave consequences for those of us who would be deeply disturbed to see a Speaker John Boehner or Majority Leader Mitch McConnell--not to mention the far-reaching results should more Republican governors take office and thus control the all-important redistricting, which could hand Republicans even more seats.
I know many liberals have been disappointed in the president. Some are angry. But we all need to focus on one thing, and one thing only right now: THIS IS OUR PRESIDENT. THIS IS OUR TIME.
And unless we want to turn the clock back to the days when Republicans literally shut down the government in defiance of a Democratic president AND THEN IMPEACHED HIM--coming only one vote short of removing him from office--then we need to understand not only what the stakes are in November, but just what we've got to be thankful for.
Right here. And right now.
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