Obama -- FDR or Carter?

Last Updated on Saturday, 30 January 2010 17:55 Written by John Hartwell Friday, 29 January 2010 16:48

From Roy Fuchs

Let me start with a semi-provocative question:  Is President Obama this generation's FDR or its Jimmy Carter?  Is he too willing to try to see the good in everyone and assume that everyone else sees it and will, of course, seek achieve "what's right?"  Is he utterly clueless or terminally cautious?  Are his advisors so wired into "the system" that he believes "change we can believe in" need only address symptoms and not the underlying disease?

To my mind we are where we are today for two broad reasons.  One is that Mr. Obama has elected to ignore the fact that what he is facing is not an innate philosophic or political difference, but rather simple political opposition to him and to everything he stands for.  The other is that while he admonishes the American People to look ahead, and not at what he inherited, conservatives have defined the condition of the country to his disadvantage.  The bank bailout program, as he belatedly noted in his SOTU speech, was a Bush program; if Obama is building a massive government it is by rehiring first responders, teachers and other government employees who had been laid off when tax receipts fell off.  I am not sure that any president has stepped into as many problems as Mr. Obama.  You might push me to say perhaps George Washington, but at least he had the support of virtually the entire nation.  Lincoln did not have a piece of shit economy and FDR didn't have a war or two.

The prescription for the future is to attack the bully, not slink around and try to pretend that the left is so correct that we don't need to engage.

We must also recognize that we already have a third party, regardless of what names we call what we have.  One is a conservative party, the other is a left of center, maybe even a progressive party.  The third is a "flavor of the day party" that spans the center and gives only temporary allegiance to any individual, idea or movement - or that may not even vote if it's not inspired, as we saw two weeks ago in Massachusetts.  At the grass roots level we need to attract the indifferent, to show them why what we offer is advantageous to them individually and to the nation as a whole and to enlist at least longer term support.  At the congressional level we need to publicize the sources of funding and let people know who some of the most egregious elected people represent.  We may not be able to shame Joe LIEberman into voting for his constituency instead of using his position to further his wife's career.  But at least voters will learn about the "why" behind his vote.

Another issue that needs comment is whether KSM is tried in New York or not.  Again, a two prong issue.  One is whether the Constitution is a conditional document we can apply when it fits our mood or whether it is the cornerstone of the US, applicable to all issues at all times.  The second is that while we have massively overspent to build a dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security, the fact is that al Qaeda has won the war that Mr. Bush told us would go on for somewhere between a lifetime and eternity.  Our lives have changed so dramatically since 9/11 in response to that and other attacks before and after, here and elsewhere in the world, that this is a different country.  Most simply, before 9/11 people were generally deemed innocent until proven guilty.  Today we are guilty until proven innocent.  Moving the KSM trial to another location and applying civilian jurisprudence to it is further recognition of al Qaeda's win, and more so would be moving it into the military system.

And while we're at it, we need to understand what Afghanistan is and why it is not Iraq.  Both countries are essentially tribal, and neither is a nation as we conceive the US to be.  There seems to be some sense of nationhood in Iraq, albeit one in which Sunni fights Shia, and vice versa, and the Kurds want to separate from Iraq (the Kurds being the largest ethnic group that does not have its own country).  Not so in Afghanistan.  There "all politics are local."  What we call Afghanistan is a synthetic country that is an agglomeration of tribal cultures.  There is no sense of nationhood.  And though the Taliban have been conflated with al Qaeda, their commonality is that both want to get all infidels off their land.  But the former is a "nationalist" movement whose ambitions are limited to defending its land where it lives, the latter is a global jihadist group.