As I’ve already said, the decision on Afghanistan is going to do serious damage to Democratic morale, so things are going to be far worse than this. Contra Steve, I think panic is fully justified.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
You could be right.
Let’s just see what the decision is and how it’s worded. Everybody knows that there are no good options here. Obama demanded some new options before making a decision. If the one he goes for involves some form of exit plan, many of us might be willing to accept it.
people clinging to helicopter landing gear was “some form” of exit plan.
I disagree. With the economy as bad as it is, nobody is thinking about Iraq or Afghanistan. Seriously, my entire Thanksgiving weekend NOBODY brought up Afghanistan. It’s as if the war isn’t even happening.
I think most Dems may disagree with sending more troops there, but short of a major bodycount that puts it back on the top of the news, it will not be a major factor. Discouragement about jobs and the health care bill and 1 and 2 and everything else is a distant 3rd.
I really am fed up with protecting us from the nasty truth. If Afghanistan isn’t about nuclear weapons then we should bring everyone home because we don’t give a damn about the rest of it. If it is about nuclear weapons, Afghanistan is the center of everything that could go wrong.
IF a health care bill becomes law and major parts do not kick in until 2013, the electorate will be livid with rage before Nov 2010.
But, as in real estate they say “Location, location, location” by next November it will be “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.”
If unemployment/underemployment hasn’t made a serious turn around, a lot of incumbents will not get re-elected.
Obama has been in office now for 10 months. It’s true that in that time he hasn’t succeeded in cleaning up the innumerable Bush messes we ALL regularly declared had set the country back years, even decades. And let’s face it: he’s not now and has never, himself, been a rah-rah, sound-bite driven leader (“Change we can believe in” notwithstanding). He’s not a glazed donut like Bill Clinton who gave you a rush and made you feel so good for a moment before the rush subsided and you had a headache. Obama is the guy who analyzed the landscape, made a plan, made strategic changes to the plan in response to conditions, and got himself nominated and elected while tuning out a cacaphony of criticism from the left about how he was fucking everything up every step of the way.
Politically, it matters a great deal what the zeitgeist is next September-November. But what has been the quiet pattern that’s been revealed lately? That he has more going on behind the scenes than in the public eye. China’s cooperation in Copenhagen, Russia and China’s apparent cooperation vis a vis Iran, laying the groundwork for repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell next year through the appropriations bill, a Stimulus Bill weighted towards job creation in 2010, and what I suspect is an extensive set of backroom deals with Democrats in Congress to make sure something useful on Health Care Reform gets done.
Michael Jordan did not win many games in the first quarter; he made a habit of taking over games in the fourth quarter as needed. I think this is Obama’s mindset. The things that he COULD be doing, about a range of issues, that would have a short-term political benefit are not necessarily the things he thinks he NEEDS to do to actually make changes to the bigger picture. I’m hopeful that on Tuesday he’ll be able to set his decisions about Afghanistan into the larger context of quickly gaining consensus, in the region and globally, for big picture fixes that will stabilize the region. He may have something for us that makes sense, in other words, and gets us out in better shape than we imagined possible. If walking away was just a matter of political courage, he would have done it already.
Then he is a a piece of shit as a politician because that is not how politics works these days to get voters to the damn polls.
Excuse me, but I wouldn’t question his performance as a politician. He analyzed the Clinton operation and proceeded to destroy it, piece by piece, turning some of its chief assets ( Bill Clinton, Hillary’s “Experience”) to dust. He then ran a cool, patient campaign against the Bush and McCain operatives that didn’t allow them to destroy his positives–he went into office with high favorability. He has, I think, maneuvered the Republicans into a fringe party with a purity test. Yes, they’ll turn out voters next cycle, but I’m betting he will have gotten a ton of things done by then and people will respond.
A piece of shit politician!? LOL! That’s funny stuff! I know your handle is MNPundit but you must have been out of the country in 07/08 or you would have seen the best politician named Barack Hussein Obama this country has seen in a very long time. The point BEING waiting to turn it on in the 4th quarter in basketball is often very smart JUST AS getting non-political big things accomplished before an election season is also smart.
No. My point is that this game will be decided at the end of the second (2010 off-year elections). And even if you consider 4th quarter to be the second half of 2010, it will be too little, too subtle, too late to avoid many republican losses making future governing un-possible.
Without the economic collapse and the drumbeat of horrible Palin stories, I think McCain would have won. That is, the Obama campaign did not win the election, they only stayed in the hunt until circumstances pushed them over the top so no, looking back to the campaign does not make me think of him as a successful politician.
Ah yes, the familiar “he won but he didn’t really have anything to do with it” line. He left every successful political operative in the Clinton/Bush/McCain axis scratching their heads saying “I can’t hit that skinny wimp”. In sports, there’s a saying: scoreboard. As I said above, he not only won, he wasn’t dragged down by the Republican hate machine in doing so. He is going to cruise to re-election, and I hope it’s with a portfolio of progressive changes in his suitcase.
You know he doesn’t favor progressive change. C’mon.
All I know is the polls. Obama was slowly sliding in the polls since the Palin bounce killed his convention bounce more quickly. Losing the daily news cycles had taken a toll, you could see a long slow decline as Obama refused to ever win a day. McCain/Palin were succeeding in turning in to the usual election about bullshit dog whistles etc. and because Obama refused to ever do a short term positive thing, he was losing. Then Lehman collapses. Look at the polls, Mcain was being shown ahead for the FIRST time when Lehman’s crumble hit the public consciousness (Friday, McCain ahead the next Monday). It was only when the huge catastrophe was shown that people pushed beyond it. Of course he had something to do with it. Had he not been a far more capable candidate than McCain, had he not campaigned on WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION for God’s sake (though we have seen precious little of THAT) he would not have been able to take advantage of the serious moment the economic crisis engendered.
Also what happened was that Obama began to generate VOWEs, or Visible Obama Win Events. That is, big single media events where he came out looking awesome. Each debate, then his 30 minute bio-buy. If you look, after each, Obama would get a bump in the polls then slowly start to slide until the next VOWE. This was done consistently from September until October. You could see it, and after the 30 minute bio-buy, I wondered if it had been too soon and the VOWE would wear off before the election, and so it did. It had started to slide the sunday-monday after (it was on a wednesday) but it worked well enough.
I credit him for that perhaps he changed his strategy and for being far more competent and showing it, via McCain, but without the economic collapse, McCain had WON by winning the news cycles and we can’t know if the VOWE strategy would have worked.