Obama

Did President Obama Really ‘Miss an Opportunity’ by Avoiding Sochi? (February 18, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

sochi-winter-olympics-2014-main-image

During a cab ride home this evening, I spent the first part of the trip sort of balefully and resentfully staring at the continued downpour of yet another Winter 2014 blizzard upon Chicago. However my bitter reverie was interrupted by a different irritant of the rhetorical variety. Several local public radio panelists were tearing into President Obama for relatively undefined “missed opportunities” with regard to his absenteeism from the Olympic Games in Sochi. Notably, these commentators were of a liberal bent, which put me in the interesting position of disdaining the meat of the discussion not for its ignorance, but because these individuals ought to know better.

It’s been a feature of the last five and half years of the Obama Presidency that even those media types who ostensibly sit on the left side of the political spectrum have chosen a “fair and balanced” approach that can easily be interpreted as an irresponsible dereliction of duty. In attempting to placate everyone, they ultimately please nobody, and furthermore contribute a distortion of facts every bit as damaging as the reckless demagoguery of Fox News.

So it is with the POTUS’ abstention from Sochi. In mid-December 2013, the website LGBTQNation displayed a comprehensive understanding of the President’s compelling social motivations for snubbing Putin and his arrogant, expensive and delusional display of Russian exceptionalism. Reprinting an Associated Press piece by writer Eddie Pells:

“President Barack Obama sent Russia a clear message about its treatment of gays and lesbians with who he is – and isn’t – sending to represent the United States at the Sochi Olympics.

Billie Jean King will be one of two openly gay athletes in the U.S. delegation for the opening and closing ceremonies, Obama announced Tuesday. For the first time since 2000, however, the U.S. will not send a president, former president, first lady or vice president to the Games.”

We live in a nation where the majority of registered voters support equality, where 17 states and counting have legalized gay marriage. We are a society in which even members of the Republican Party, once dependably able to use the issue as a wedge to avoid serious policy discussion, no longer wants to touch the topic. Homophobia just doesn’t play in Poughkeepsie like it once did.

But let’s move beyond the fact that Putin’s Russia is a human rights trainwreck that leaves the White House’s subtle refusal to legitimize this month’s grandstanding with a personal appearance entirely commendable. Syria anyone? A Reuters report from early this week quotes U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as saying, “The regime stonewalled. They did nothing except continue to drop barrel bombs on their own people and continue to destroy their own country. And I regret to say they are doing so with increased support from Iran, from Hezbollah and from Russia.” It seems those among us who feared that Russia might have us chasing our tails with a 2013 offer to broker a diplomatic end to the long-running conflict in the troubled Middle Eastern country, may have been onto something.

If this isn’t enough to make Obama’s removal from Sochi comprehensible, let’s talk about a consideration that has enjoyed bipartisan appeal lo these last 13 years – national security. NBC News’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel appeared on last Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press, where he observed:

“The most threatened Olympics in modern history has so far been safe, and that’s not just because of the ring of steel around Sochi. We traveled 500 miles from Sochi to the North Caucasus, the heart of Russia’s Islamic insurgency, and saw how Vladimir Putin is using a combination of crackdowns and payoffs to secure the games.”

Safety via temporary efforts of corruption and intimidation don’t really set my mind at ease. I don’t know about you, but for me as a viewer, this is a rare instance where I’ve been unable to divorce what I know about the host country from the objective magic of the Olympic Games. To offer a comparison, I had a lot more luck with the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and we’re talking about China. Would I really stand behind a leader who decided to put on a happy face and pretend that all is as it should be, in a nation that appears to be nostalgic for the Cold War?

My point is there are a lot of issues about which we as liberals can quibble with President Obama. Many of us feel health care reform can never be truly realized without a single payer revolution. Others feel that the emboldened and reckless Tea Party might not have become the force it is without Obama’s misguided attempts to negotiate with hostage takers. And just why is it that former President Bill Clinton has been so much more successful at articulating the Obama vision then the elected man himself?

But the White House’s decision to let the athletes do their thing while avoiding overt support of a regime that has been a veritable thorn in America’s side on so many fronts? Perfectly advisable.

Nate Silver Says Marco Rubio is as Unelectable as Mitt Romney Was (February 19, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

rubio-romney

The name of rock star statistician Nate Silver will be forever linked with the results of the 2012 Presidential election. You may recall that against the tide of Republican strategic hubris, and despite rampant voter suppression efforts taking place in communities representing large populations of poor and ethnic constituents, Silver warned the GOP talking heads that Obama was on his way to a sweeping victory. And he was right. In President Obama’s historic conquest over Mitt Romney, Silver correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Let’s take a moment to savor once more the epic meltdown of Karl Rove on Fox News as it finally sank in that there was zero chance of a Romney presidency.

It never gets old does it?

In 2010, Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver’s Political Calculus, was presciently licensed for publication by the New York Times. The blog is making news this week with an intriguing post entitled, “Marco Rubio: The Electable Conservative?”

As we know, Rubio is being championed by the beleaguered, delusional and hopelessly out of step Republican Party as the key to returning to mainstream acceptability. Rubio, a Cuban American native of Miami, Florida who rose to prominence after the humblest of beginnings, is seen as the key to making inroads with the nation’s Latino voters. Once a dependable GOP demographic, Latinos have fled the party in droves given its hard-line stance against immigration reform.

Looking to shake the Etch-a-Sketch Romney-style, the GOP has recently attempted to reverse course, proposing to get behind the Dream Act, a plan that would provide a pathway to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. Though many of the partys’  recommended measures are tied to border security improvements, the changes mark a critical pivot for Republicans – and Rubio is offered by the right as the face of that change.

Tasked with delivering the rebuttal to the President’s well-received State of the Union address last week, we know that Rubio stumbled: awkward, sweaty and apparently very thirsty. Rubio’s performance stirred reminisces of the 1960 televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon that many have theorized cost Nixon the election. But really, it was one of Rubio’s first appearances on the national stage. Is it any surprise his rehashed talking points would fail to excite, set in relief against the President’s smooth and energized delivery? The question remains: given more time to develop, could Rubio pose an electable challenge to Democrats in 2016?

Though Nate Silver presents a wealth of data in his piece (naturally) that points to Rubio’s strengths in a Republican primary, he hedges when discussing the senator’s general appeal against more moderate candidates. Silver writes, “This is not to say that Mr. Rubio is extraordinarily popular. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has favorability ratings that are much stronger than Mr. Rubio’s, for example.”

Silver goes on to say, “What makes matters tricky for Mr. Rubio is that, at the same time he is hoping to persuade Republican party insiders that he deserves their support, he will also need to maintain a reasonably good image with the broader electorate lest his electability argument be undermined. This may lead to some strange positions, such as when Mr. Rubio recently critiqued President Obama’s immigration proposal despite its many similarities to his own.”

In other words, a Republican candidate of any color may still have to adopt the 2012 losing strategy of Mitt Romney. Go hard right fringe during primary season to secure the nomination, then try to fox trot your way back to the center so you can appeal to the mainstream.

A full three and a half years before the next Presidential election, Rubio is already being setup to fail as John McCain and Mitt Romney did before him. To return to President Obama’s “lipstick on a pig analogy,” the ethnic makeup of a candidate cannot possibly surmount a losing game plan. Americans wised up to Mitt Romney’s say-anything-to-win strategy and the result was a fantastic drubbing.

The silver lining of the continuing pain of the Great Recession is a more engaged voting public with a distaste for overt manipulation. Until the GOP initiates a grassroots revamp of the outdated platform upon which it stands, it is unlikely to place a candidate in the White House. As Silver concludes, “If Mr. Rubio holds a fairly ordinary (and conservative) set of Republican positions, chances are his popularity ratings will wind up being ordinary as well.”

The Media Gives the Republican Party a Free Pass to Obstruct (January 8, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

GOP-fillibuster

For all the complaints on the right side of the political spectrum, decrying a “liberal media bias” in favor of President Obama, I sometimes wonder if I am alone in drawing the opposite conclusion. That is to say when it comes to reporting on the increasingly partisan deadlock that has virtually consumed Washington, as well as the nation’s inability to accomplish anything beyond an endless train of disappointing stopgap measures, I wonder if the bulk of the country’s media outlets, concerned with mass appeal and the appearance of a balanced approach, have grown too afraid of identifying the Emperor without his clothes.

Case in point, this headline today on Yahoo! News via Reuters:Analysis: Obama shows combativeness entering second term but risks await. The writer, Matt Spetalnick is correct in his observation that before the official commencement of his second elected term, we have seen a President more self-assured and emboldened by poll numbers that consistently reflect an electorate exhausted by Congress’ failure to come together on long-term solutions to real problems, including but not limited to: our national debt, the effect of current entitlement spending on future generations, the systematic annihilation of the middle and working classes, the growing income disparities and education costs that are denying millions of Americans a fair shot at pursuing the American Dream.

However comments like this leave this reader curious as to whether the meaning of “analysis” has been lost on some of those who write about the political machine for a living: “Some critics say Obama now runs the risk of overreaching when he should instead be building Republican bridges to resolve the next looming budget confrontation.”

I do not have to ask Mr. Spetalnick for a list of his sources to hazard a guess as to who some of those “critics” might be: John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, an assortment of Tea Party crackpots or anyone working for these folks, immediately come to mind. As a long-time journalist, I completely understand the need to represent both sides of the story, but I was also under the impression that one of the driving tenets of journalism is to educate the public, to bring issues to light that might otherwise go unresearched by a general population preoccupied with the business of daily life.

I do not mean to single Spetalnick out for special scorn. There are far more egregious examples of bland, wall-sitting journalistic hatchet jobs disguised as legitimate reporting, and we could have a whole separate discussion about the ways in which the consolidation of corporate media and the lower profit margins of traditional journalism have affected the way we receive our “news.” But with that said, analysts and reporters are under no obligation to surrender their insights for a pair of rose colored glasses, and at some point we have to stop letting them get away with it.

Exactly what kind of “bridges” should Obama be building with the GOP? What happened to the one he tried to build in the summer of 2011, the efforts to strike a Grand Bargain with House leaders over the raising of the debt ceiling limit, which included what many liberals considered an unwarranted gift of borderline austere spending cuts? The same one that Republicans ultimately rejected in favor of last month’s manufactured fiscal cliff crisis? The real truth is my friends, nothing short of absolute capitulation on tax policy, spending and limited government would satisfy the current Republican party, and to take that one step further, the party’s platform is BAD for America by almost any standard of growth or savings.

In a true, functioning democracy, when a special interest group has lost perspective and reasoning and turns to policy development that serves a small minority, the end result is marginalization and ultimately, disintegration. With every Presidential election, the GOP moves itself farther away from laying claim to representing the will of the people. Voter turnout and statistics back this conclusion. But now, at the inception of President Obama’s second term, with looming fights in front of us over a host of issues that demand attention and reform, it is time for members of the media to surrender their own manufactured centrism in the interest of moving the country forward.

Dick Cheney Reminds Us That Romney Still Has Stateside Messes to Clean (July 31, 2012)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Last week was a big week for Mittens and the damage control is in full swing. Remember back in 2008 when one of the biggest criticisms leveled against then-candidate Obama was that the junior Senator was light on foreign policy experience? The last three and a half years have generated many criticisms from the right but the POTUS’ deft handling of a variety of thorny issues such as last year’s Arab Spring Awakening and his wise choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State (not to mention the killing of public enemy #1 Osama bin Laden) has gone a long way toward establishing the President as a reasoned and thoughtful statesmen.

Mitt Romney has been a part of the American political canvas for nearly 30 years and yet to witness him committing unforced errors last week, like his offensive comments directed at London’s level of Olympic preparedness, was to experience a sense of Palinesque deja vu. Is there any weigh station between Mittens brain and his mouth? Wouldn’t you think he and his handlers might develop one after three decades? Even Pavlov’s dog was capable of learning. But after that mess, Romney wasn’t satisfied with just one pile of international dog doo. He also managed to wade into the long-running Israel/Iran conflict in a a manner that made him appear like a trigger-happy ignoramus while paying Palestine’s socialized health care system a backhanded compliment, oblivious to its implications again his “war” on Obamacare.

If it weren’t such an embarrassing week for America, I suspect those of us rooting for an Obama re-election would be engaging in a much-deserved happy dance. And yet today, the Crypt Keeper himself, former Vice-President Dick Cheney, popped out of his cryogenic chamber to remind the voting public that there are still plenty of Stateside imbroglios to which candidate Romney must attend. Truly it’s getting difficult to account for all of the issues to which the former Governor refuses or simply cannot respond with a satisfying answer.

In an interview with writer Jonathan Karl for Yahoo News, the topic of Romney’s cloak and dagger intrigue regarding the release of his tax returns was broached. When Bush and Cheney occupied the Republican ticket in 2000, both candidates saw the wisdom is releasing 10 years worth of returns. Romney as we know, will not budge on releasing above two years worth of information. The Cheneybot’s predictable response?

“If he had two years out, they’d want four. If he had four years out, they’d want six. If he had six years out, they’d want ten,” said Cheney. “It’s a distraction,” he added. “I’d say do what he feels like doing. If this is his decision, fine. Let’s get on with it.”

Dick Cheney was always a great believer in the Jedi Mind Trick. Just tell Americans that the Patriot Act, a revocation of their basic liberties, is necessary for national security and they’ll go along with it, the sheep. 9/11 is a great excuse to foment a war of choice in Iraq! And since the wealthy can be painted a job creators, let’s pass some unaffordable tax cuts while we’re at it. The American people won’t know the half of it. They’re too busy watching American Idol! It’s genius. Bwa ha ha!

Nope, not this time Cheney. The post-2008 electorate, better informed and inspired by a candidate who is not overrun by internal cynicism, won’t have it. For the last time, wanting to understand a man’s personal finances as a litmus test for predicting his handling of the country’s budget is not a distraction.

But thanks for reminding us that Romney can be every bit as disingenuous here as he can overseas.

Obama’s Election Team Needs A Bit Of Newt Attitude (February 5, 2012)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

obama-gingrich-300x224

Disclaimer: The author of this column is in NO WAY advocating for the Presidency of Newt Gingrich. He is a delusional narcissist of epic proportions, whose previous House “leadership” provided ample 1990s evidence that he shouldn’t be trusted to make decisions about where to order takeout (Tiffany to-go boxes anyone?) let alone guide the nation. And yet….

“But for those tempted to once again predict the speedy collapse of his campaign, consider yourselves forewarned. I’ve known this guy long enough to realize that the only three species destined to survive a nuclear holocaust will be cockroaches, Cher and Newton Leroy Gingrich.”

– Joe Scarborough, Politico, 1/27/2012

In a 2012 Republican Presidential campaign that will be forever remembered for its absurdity, it is still easy to pinpoint the most amusing candidate. This year’s election is deadly serious, with so many elements of our social, political and economic fabric at stake. The nation’s middle class has been besieged from all sides for the better part of 35 years. Whichever party assumes control of the legislative and executive branches of government this fall will determine whether America backslides toward the one percent-friendly policies of George W. Bush, or continues the incremental change momentum the POTUS has painstakingly secured.

In a different field of Republican contenders, I might feel considerable anxiety. Obama is vulnerable on a number of fronts: some real (health care reform), some imagined (see accusations of “European-style socialism”). There is a long way to go, and many national mood shifts to expect, before the polls open in November. And yet, given the uncanny ability of GOP hopefuls to stick their feet in sewage or exhibit double-take ignorance, this appears to be the President’s contest to lose.

This state of affairs affords me the latitude to sit back and admire the utter chutzpah of Newt Gingrich. It is clear by now that even amongst members of his own party, few believed Mr. Gingrich to be a viable contender when he announced his candidacy in May of last year. However Newt has demonstrated for over 25 years that he is Washington’s answer to the Playskool Weeble, and here were are in 2012 waiting with bated breath. The suspense has been  heightened by Mitt Romney’s failure to create a personality or a cognitive weigh station that might prevent him from blurting out his indifference toward the poor. Still let’s not take anything away from Gingrich.

Because really in another context, Newt Gingrich’s immunity to poll numbers, conventional wisdom and the agenda of his own party would be quite admirable. Newt possesses the kind of single-minded determination Democrats could only dream of last summer. While enduring the tragic debt ceiling debate and the added caveat of “Yes, we can…but only if John Boehner says so,” many liberals may have yearned for a little of that Gingrich magic, the ability to barrel through roadblocks like so many pieces of balsa wood.

I have lost count of how many times Newty has come back from the dead, and though his smug delusions of grandeur are often tough to swallow, I would argue that it is his complete indifference to popular support that has gotten him this far. With an overflowing reservoir of self-regard, he simply doesn’t need anyone’s love.

Whatever one’s opinion of Gingrich, I wouldn’t have minded a little more indifference toward Gallup from the Obama team subsequent to the 2008 inauguration. A eye toward the play in Poughkeepsie has, on occasion, led to much dithering and inertia.   Like him or not (most of us not), you don’t run that risk with Newt.

Late-January’s State of the Union address signaled the possibility of a messaging pivot from the White House. But the President’s inner circle needs to do a lot more than just issue confident statements. After a bruising three years, and an achingly slow vindication of policy, they need to display some real swagger. At the risk of inviting mountains of hate mail, may I suggest an internal mantra for the re-election team? WWND. What Would Newt Do?