Americans Support the Obama Doctrine

By Simon Waxman, Al Jazeera America

23 June 14

Popular approval for the president’s conciliatory approach matters more than accusations of weakness

hink back to the third and final debate of the 2012 presidential campaign. It is Oct. 22, at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, and Barack Obama has just trounced Mitt Romney on several questions of foreign policy. It’s not that Obama’s ideas are so much better than Romney’s, but that Romney can’t find anything to disagree with. On issue after issue, the Republican challenger wants more of the same, thereby reaffirming the president’s probity.

The post-debate commentary solidified Obama’s victory: He had overcome the stereotypical foreign policy weakness of Democrats by being tough enough in his first term. He helped to bring down Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and scored a big win when a group of Navy SEALs dispatched Osama bin Laden. He had proved a stalwart partner of Israel’s. The Arab Spring seemed, then, to promise a new day, and Obama was ready to take advantage. Drones were killing enemies of the United States, and still are. Guantánamo Bay was still holding dangerous men, a frustration to anyone who cares about due process, but security hawks were neutralized.

How different today is. Now Paul Ryan says Obama’s foreign policy is “weak and indecisive.” In The Wall Street Journal, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Elizabeth tore into the president, writing, “American freedom will not be secured by empty threats, meaningless red lines, leading from behind, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies or apologizing for our great nation.” U.S. News and World Report says Obama is “disarming America.” In a critique masquerading as reporting, The New York Times’ David Sanger wrote of a “pendulum [that] has swung too far in the direction of nonintervention.” America, according to conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin, “appears off-kilter, unreliable and weak.”

It’s no mystery how we got here in less than two years. Obama is talking to Iran, not threatening military action. He is staying out of Syria and refuses to take the bait in Ukraine. He is continuing to wind down the American military commitment in Afghanistan, even though it would be impossible to claim with a straight face that the Afghan state is prepared to provide for its own security or to suppress fundamentalism. And while the U.S. military may yet intervene in Iraq’s mounting sectarian conflict, Obama has already refused an Iraqi request for air strikes against militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) who have taken over Mosul and Tikrit and are threatening Baghdad.

That conservatives see in these choices weakness, indecision and excessive caution is not surprising. What is surprising is that, at last, in one important respect, America has the president it voted for in 2008, the candidate who struck a markedly conciliatory tone by comparison with his six-gun-and-stirrups predecessor George W. Bush. The Obama that Democrats voted for even as Hillary Clinton tried to scare them with evocations of 3 a.m. phone calls, that the country as a whole elected over John McCain, the most reputable interventionist that Republicans could muster.

It seemed as though Obama the candidate would never reappear, but now he’s here. And while neoconservatives such as Robert Kagan decry a supposed “decline,” Americans are with Obama, as they were when he first offered his less musclebound vision of foreign policy.

Americans have never wanted to intervene in Syria, including in an attempt to back up the faint red line on chemical weapons. Last September, Gallup found, “Thirty-six percent of Americans favor the U.S. taking military action in order to reduce Syria’s ability to use chemical weapons. The majority — 51% — oppose such action.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., complains that “there are no consequences when you defy what Obama’s telling you to do,” but Americans appear to be less worried about credibility than their pundits and public officials are.

Similarly, a Pew Poll finds, “By a roughly two-to-one margin (56% vs. 29%), the public says it is more important for the U.S. to not get involved in the situation with Russia and Ukraine than to take a firm stand against Russian actions.” The attempted détente with Iran is beginning to diffuse American concerns about that country. Even with sectarian war underway in Iraq, a mere 16 percent of Americans want to see troops sent there; most would prefer a U.S. mission limited to intelligence sharing and diplomacy. And an overwhelming majority wants to be done with Afghanistan. While Obama’s overall foreign policy approval is not high, when it comes to military intervention in ongoing conflicts, the public is with the president. On the whole, a majority of Americans believe that the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

Notably, the latter is not Obama’s position. The United States is not minding its own business, militarily or economically. We are pursuing trade agreements and alliances in Europe and Asia, not to mention worldwide surveillance by the NSA and the unaccountable drone war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The world is still dotted with about 500 to 1,000 American military installations, depending on who’s counting.

Yet the low appetite for foreign intervention in both the White House and among the population is undeniable. And this correspondence deserves respect. As Harvard humanities professor Elaine Scarry argues forcefully in her new book “Thermonuclear Monarchy,” the Constitution expressly assigns war-making authority to the body of the people. Article I, Section 8, places the power to declare war in the hands of Congress, the representative arm of the federal government. And the Second Amendment preserves a right to bear arms for the purpose of the collective defense, devolving to the people the opportunity to ratify Congress’s declaration through their own action. (Whether the Second Amendment also protects the right to bear arms for self-defense is an unrelated issue.)

Admittedly, Scarry’s is a provocative reading of our rights, one that arguably supplies justification for selective conscientious objection, which may stir misgivings even in a committed noninterventionist. And, as a practical matter, it’s not clear that a congressional majority agrees with Obama’s foreign policy positions. But the thrust of her argument — that the people should be consulted directly on matters of war and peace, and that our basic laws urge this more stridently than they do direct consultation on, say, school legislation — is powerful.

Popular opinion is not necessarily wise; nor, necessarily, is Obama’s foreign policy stance. But hawks might consider taking more care in condemning supposed weakness. Obama has public support for his policies. And the people don’t seem to be weak, unreliable or indecisive. When it comes to further military engagements, Americans know exactly what they don’t want.

Rich Democrats Go From Challenging the Status Quo to Embracing It

By Matt Bai, Yahoo! News

23 June 14

o you're a liberal member of the 1 percent, and you've decided to wrest control of the Democratic agenda from change-averse insiders. You want to free the capital from the grip of powerful interest groups. You want to inspire a new set of policies to help America meet the challenges of a fast-transforming economy. Where do you turn for leadership and innovation?

To the teachers union, of course!

At least that's how it seems to have played out at the Democracy Alliance, the group of superrich Democrats who have funneled more than half a billion dollars into liberal groups over the past decade. Earlier this month, the alliance announced that John Stocks, executive director of the National Education Association, would become the chairman of its board.

The move went largely unnoticed by the Washington media and even most Democrats, who could think of nothing at that moment other than the Memoir That Ate Everything in Its Path. But it tells you something — more than Hillary Clinton's book does, certainly — about the direction of Democratic politics right now.

To understand why this decision is such a stunner, you have to understand the vision that guided the formation of the Democracy Alliance a decade ago. I was present at the creation, at least figuratively; I wrote the first magazine piece about the origins of the group and later devoted much of a book to following it.

The alliance grew out of a PowerPoint slideshow assembled by Rob Stein, a longtime Democratic operative, who diagramed what Clinton had famously called the "vast right-wing conspiracy." He argued that a handful of rich, conservative families had funded a network of vibrant think tanks and a "message machine" to spread their ideas.

The thinking behind the Democracy Alliance was to create a venture capital fund for new progressive groups. (The Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America were two of the charter recipients.) A central tenet of the alliance in those days was that it wanted nothing to do with the Democratic Party or elections, per se. The alliance was about creating a bolder alternative to the status quo.

It didn't take long, though, for the alliance to deviate from that course. The Silicon Valley and Wall Street contributors who were most focused on modernization started to drift away, exhausted by the endless conference calls and the knee-jerk resistance to any rethinking of the liberal agenda. The remaining "partners," as the alliance calls them, were overwhelmingly aging boomers who clung to 1960s orthodoxies.

Eventually, the alliance became, essentially, a convener and funder of the party establishment. It welcomed several big unions to the table and took up side collections for candidates. And now it's formalized that role by electing Stocks as its chairman, replacing Rob McKay, heir to the Taco Bell fortune.

To be clear, the problem here has nothing to do with Stocks personally, whom I've never met, and who has been described to me as a thoughtful and open-minded guy. It also has nothing to do with teachers generally, many of whom are nothing short of heroic, and who are struggling to adapt to the turmoil in their industry, same as the rest of us.

But if you were going to sit down and make a list of political powerhouses that have been intransigent and blindly doctrinaire in the face of change, you'd have a hard time finding a better example than the country's largest teachers union. (I guess you could point to the National Rifle Association, if that's really the kind of company you want to keep.) Just last week, a California judge, in ruling against the union, condemned its age-old protections of incompetent teachers, saying the union's position not only was unconstitutional but also "shocks the conscience."

Don't just listen to the judge on this, though. Heed the words of Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based venture capitalist and school reform advocate, who wrote in a 2012 email that subsequently became public: "It is impossible to escape the painful reality that we Democrats are now on the wrong side of every education reform issue. … There can be no doubt in any reasonable person's mind that the leadership of our party and most of its elected members are stooges for the teachers union, the ring leaders in all this nonsense."

As it happens, Hanauer is now a board member of the Democracy Alliance. When I called him last week, Hanauer told me Stocks is a good friend of his, even if they disagree on some issues, and that he's just fine with Stocks as chairman. "In the end, the only thing that matters for the Democracy Alliance is how the partners feel about its direction and its leadership," Hanauer said. "It doesn't matter what you think, with all due respect."

But of course that's where Hanauer is wrong; the Democracy Alliance does not exist in a vacuum. It's viewed by groups in Washington as the main bank for big money on the left, and the signal it sends has a profound effect now on what those groups are willing to say and do.

What kind of signal is the alliance sending by handing leadership to the teachers union? There is no area of policy more important to our economic success than public education, period. And in no area has the Obama administration shown more courage or more willingness to lead. Its Race to the Top program sped momentum toward charter schools and rewarding strong teachers.

What liberal group in Washington that relies on alliance funding is going to champion those kinds of reforms now? What Democratic candidate in the 2016 primaries — just humor me for the moment and assume that there will be primaries and multiple candidates running in them — will vow to carry on Obama's legacy if the party's organized millionaires are standing squarely behind the union that opposes it?

What does Stocks' elevation say to the left, more broadly, about any reform movement in Democratic politics? If you're a group or a national candidate who supports free trade agreements, or who wants to restructure entitlement programs as the boomers retire, are you really going to say any of that and then try to raise money from the Democracy Alliance?

The message is: There is no distance between the party's biggest funders and its 20th-century labor movement. If you don't get that, don't come through the door.

Maybe that's how it always was and was always going to be. But that's not how the Democracy Alliance started, and it doesn't bode well for a party whose last generation still refuses to step aside.

"I do think the D.A. is obviously evolving in a way that is not in the spirit of what we intended," says Simon Rosenberg, founder of the think tank NDN (formerly the New Democrat Network), who helped start the alliance. Like the centrist think tank Third Way, NDN was later cut off from funding. "I envisioned an organization that was interested not just in the big actors in the party or in playing it safe," he says, "but in taking some risks."

The only thing the Democracy Alliance risks, as it stands now, is becoming just another bulwark of the status quo.