Tag Archives: Barack Obama

More on same-sex marriage and Romney’s high school “pranks”

Humor, Media, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m having trouble embedding Daily Show videos, so just take a look at this link to see Jon Stewart saying pretty much exactly what I’d mentioned — but in a much funnier and more sarcastic way —  about how far we’ve come in our national conversation.

Secondly, it turns out that the military did not spontaneously combust or cease to exist or explode into a million pieces due to the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” after all:

WASHINGTON, May 10, 2012 – A new report shows the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law is being implemented successfully in the military, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said during a news conference today.

The repeal of the law banning gay and lesbian people from open military service took effect Sept. 20, 2011. The secretary said he received the report on repeal implementation yesterday, and it shows repeal is going “very well” and according to the department’s plans.

“It’s not impacting on morale. It’s not impacting on unit cohesion. It is not impacting on readiness,” he said.

Panetta said he credits military leaders for effective repeal planning.

“Very frankly, my view is that the military has kind of moved beyond it,” he said. “It’s become part and parcel of what they’ve accepted within the military.”

During the same conference, Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he has not seen “any negative effect on good order and discipline” resulting from the repeal.

In response to a reporter’s question of what the military had been afraid of in allowing open service, the chairman said, “We didn’t know.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait at New York expresses some caution (which is different than entirely ignoring it) as to Mitt Romney’s bullying high-school self:

The best way to assess a candidate is not to plumb his youth for clues to his character but to look at his positions and public record. The problem is that this is a harder exercise with Romney than almost any other national politician. He has had to run in such divergent atmospheres, and has thus had to present himself in such wildly different ways at different times, that his record becomes almost useless. There is hardly a stance Romney has taken that he has not negated at one point or another. This makes the fraught task of trying to pin down his true character more urgent, though not any easier.

My cautious, provisional take is that this portrait of the youthful Romney does suggest a man who grew up taking for granted the comforts of wealth and prestige. I don’t blame him for accepting the anti-gay assumptions of his era. The story does give the sense of a man who lacks a natural sense of compassion for the weak. His prankery seems to have invariably singled out the vulnerable — the gay classmate, the nearly blind teacher, the nervous day student racing back to campus. It’s entirely possible to grow out of that youthful mentality — to learn to step out of your own perspective, to develop an appreciation for the difficulties faced by those not born with Romney’s many blessings. I’m just not sure he ever has.

Related articles

The Republican reaction to Obama on same-sex marriage

Politics, , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday, I was rendered nearly speechless (nearly; come on, you didn’t really expect actual speechlessness from me, did you?) with pleasure at President Obama’s long-awaited and extremely tardy announcement of the end of his “evolution” on same-sex marriage. (Granted, this was a completely manufactured and artificial “evolution,” since he supported gay marriage as long ago as 1996 and only changed it when he became more politically prominent — but an “evolution” nonetheless, in the same Orwellian tradition of linguistic manipulation that helped make such ludicrous things possible as “enhanced interrogation techniques” being something other than torture. OK, I’m getting way off on a tangent now. Back to Planet Earth.)

Anyway, the point is that I was extremely happy — giddy, even — over the President’s remarks. But what makes me almost happier, in a less viscerally affecting way but in a calmer and more long-term perspective, is the virtual absence of strong public opposition to this. It’s incredible how muted the response has been. It really is hard to believe how far the country has moved on this in recent years. In 2004, President Bush was campaigning on his support of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage nationally. Eight years later, a sitting President just announced his support for same-sex marriage, and Republicans don’t even dare to mount a serious rebuttal. This lack of a response is, to me, even more newsworthy than the announcement itself. As the New York Times noted:

Conservative social activists and groups that oppose same-sex marriage have been vocal in their disdain for Mr. Obama’s announcement. And advisers to Mr. Romney said in television interviews on Thursday that he would campaign on the issue of his opposition to same-sex marriage.

“Sure. I think it’s an important issue for people and it engenders strong feelings on both sides,” Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, said on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown.” “I think it’s important to be respectful in how we talk about our differences, but the fact is that’s a significant difference in November.”

But Republican officials on Capitol Hill seemed eager to shift the conversation away from the social issue and back to blaming the nation’s economic struggles on Mr. Obama’s policies.

The House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, repeatedly deflected questions about Mr. Obama’s new position on same-sex marriage at his weekly news conference. He said he believed that marriage should be limited to “one man and one woman” and then quickly flicked back to the economy.

This is notable. Same-sex marriage has, quite suddenly, become a topic that Republicans are gradually realizing they don’t want to be seen publicly and vigorously opposing. They’d rather talk about just about anything else. And that is a good sign.

Related articles

Rumor mill’s going crazy

Media, Politics, , , , ,
[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/WestWingReport/status/200255518864969729] [tweet https://twitter.com/#!/marcambinder/status/200255049904033792] [tweet https://twitter.com/#!/marcambinder/status/200237187621588992] [tweet https://twitter.com/#!/samsteinhp/status/200251461798608896]

Ha:

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/TimesPublicEdit/status/200249258782367745]

Slate.fr nabs a post-victory interview with François Hollande

French, Politics, , , , , , ,

François Hollande

Fairly comprehensive stuff. A few highlights:

On France’s relationship with Germany:

L’existence d’un couple «Merkozy» a été critiquée en Europe. Quelle est votre position sur ce couple franco-allemand?

Autant je crois au moteur franco-allemand, autant je conteste l’idée d’un duopole. La construction européenne repose sur une relation France-Allemagne équilibrée et respectueuse. Les couples Schmidt-Giscard, Kohl-Mitterrand,  et même Chirac-Schröder ont prouvé que les différences politiques n’empêchaient pas le travail commun. Mais ces dirigeants veillaient à conjuguer la démarche intergouvernementale avec le processus communautaire, c’était la meilleure façon d’éviter que nos partenaires éprouvent le sentiment d’être écartés, ou pire encore soumis.

Cet équilibre a été modifié ces dernières années. Le rapport franco-allemand a été exclusif. Les autorités européennes ont été négligées et certains pays, notamment les plus fragiles, ont eu la désagréable impression d’être en face d’un directoire.

On Barack Obama, and speaking English (and he couldn’t resist a jab at Sarkozy):

Justement, vous allez rencontrer Barack Obama pour la première fois au G8 de Camp David les 18 mai et 19 mai. Une première question, qui pourra vous sembler anecdotique: Mister Hollande, do you speak English?

Yes I speak English, more fluently than the former President. But a French president has to speak French!

Au-delà de la plaisanterie, est-ce que vous pensez que c’est important que le chef d’Etat français parle la langue commune de la diplomatie internationale?

Il a besoin de la comprendre et de pouvoir avoir des échanges directs avec ses interlocuteurs. Mais je suis attaché à la langue française et à la francophonie.

Lorsque je participais à des sommets de chefs de partis en Europe, il a pu m’être désagréable d’entendre des amis roumains, polonais, portugais, italiens parfois, parler anglais, mais j’admets que sur le plan informel, les contacts puissent s’établir dans cette langue. Je défendrai néanmoins partout l’usage du français.

On a nuclear Iran:

Quelle est votre position sur la crise liée au programme nucléaire iranien?

Je n’ai pas critiqué la position ferme de Nicolas Sarkozy par rapport aux risques de prolifération nucléaire. Je le confirmerai avec la même force et la même volonté. Et je n’admettrai pas que l’Iran, qui a parfaitement le droit d’accéder au nucléaire civil, puisse utiliser cette technologie à des fins militaires.

Sur ce sujet, l’administration Obama semble plus souple, plus encline à la négociation, que le gouvernement français…

Les Iraniens doivent apporter toutes les informations qui leur sont demandées et en terminer avec les faux-semblants. Les sanctions doivent être renforcées autant qu’il sera nécessaire. Mais je crois encore possible la négociation pour atteindre le but recherché.

All in all, Hollande’s triumph may signal a rocky future for Europe, especially in French-German relations but even extending beyond that to a more general backlash to the politics of austerity. As some have noted, Hollande’s victory may in fact suit the Obama administration just fine, at least on economic issues. If his election — and the rising hopes of leftists around Europe — can somehow hold back the tide of plummeting stocks and rising bond yields until at least November 6th, he may prove very useful to Obama’s reelection chances. Furthermore, his economic philosophy is, in many ways, closer to that embraced by the United States than Sarkozy’s pro-austerity administration has been. Foreign policy, however, may be a slightly different story.

Related articles

Why I love Joe Biden

Politics, , , ,

An off-the-cuff Biden-esque mistake, or a deliberate olive branch thrown to the gay community by an Obama administration that’s still too scared to officially back same-sex marriage?

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on Sunday that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriages and was heartened by their growing acceptance across the country, a position that moves well beyond the “evolving” views that President Obama has said he holds on the issue.

The comments, which aides described as the off-the-cuff views of a vice president not known for fidelity to a script, sent the White House scrambling to clarify that Mr. Biden was not articulating an official change in policy, a reaction that highlighted the administration’s unease over the subject.

Related articles

And speaking of presidential elections…

Politics, , , , , , , , ,

…get ready for more of this in the upcoming months:

“Certain precincts in this county are not going to vote for Obama,” said John Corrigan, clerk of courts for Jefferson County, who was drinking coffee in a furniture shop downtown one morning last week with a small group of friends, retired judges and civil servants. “I don’t want to say it, but we all know why.”

A retired state employee, Jason Foreman, interjected, “I’ll say it: it’s because he’s black.”

This could get ugly. One of the more interesting aspects of this general election matchup between President Barack Obama and the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, is the fact that they both suffer from two very similar trust deficit problems with large swaths of the American public.

Governor Mitt Romney of MA

First, both Romney and Obama are seen, by significant portions of the public, as un-American. For Romney, this is due to his Mormonism, which 22% of Americans last year cited as a disqualifying factor for the presidency. For Obama, this is due to his father’s Kenyan heritage and his own race, as well as lingering doubts as to his birthplace resulting from repeated lies being perpetrated by some right-wing groups.

Secondly, both candidates supported, and subsequently passed, universal healthcare coverage laws in their respective constituencies: the entire country for Obama, the state of Massachusetts for Romney. And although Romney has vowed to repeal “Obamacare” as soon as he is elected President (which may become a moot point next month if the Supreme Court rules the law unconstitutional), the fact that he passed a virtually identical bill while governor certainly doesn’t help his credibility.

And it is this tension — between the candidates’ political weaknesses and their desire to attack those same perceived weaknesses in their opponents — that should turn what might otherwise be a rather boring general election contest into riveting political theater. It will be interesting to see Obama subtly play up his Christianity and Romney do the same with his, well, whiteness. In terms of who has the edge, I’d give Romney a slight advantage here. Despite the fact that Obama projects an infinitely “cooler” public persona, a significant portion of the American public is still reticent (or racist) enough about his identity to such an extent that Romney can exploit this discomfort for electoral gain. Conversely, while Obama can try to very gently remind Americans of Romney’s Mormonism (to be clear, I find it ludicrous and disgusting that anyone wouldn’t vote for Romney based on his Mormonism, but that probably won’t stop Obama from trying), he likely won’t score as many points with this as Romney can with the “un-American” verbal grenades he’ll be tossing at Obama.

Cropped version of File:Official portrait of B...

On health care, however, I think the situation is flipped. Obama has the advantage here, as Romney has made Obamacare’s repeal a central cog of his presidential election campaign and yet passed basically the same thing in Massachusetts. His problem is one of credibility, especially given the massive attention being paid to the questions of whether he is sufficiently conservative and whether he has a real “core.” Obama, on the other hand, will likely be in a superior position, since it’s a law he passed as President and he is clearly interested in keeping it on the books. His weaknesses are twofold: 1) although individual elements of the law remain popular, the overall legislation is not; and 2) Obama has shown a surprising (and absolutely infuriating) tendency to back away from his own legislative achievements. If he wants to own Romney on the health care question, he needs to be unequivocal in his support for the health care bill he passed. Of course, Romney can then use this firmness to try to showcase how Obama’s out of step with the American public, but again, he’ll run straight into the credibility buzz-saw (since he passed the same thing at the state level).

This could end up being a very delicate tap-dance in the debates. Meanwhile, the TV ads will likely get really ugly, on both sides.

Related articles

Benedict Obama? The increasingly confusing story of Chen Guangcheng

Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

For the non-living-under-a-rock population, here’s what happened in the Chen Guangcheng saga. The question now is whether the United States deliberately hung Chen out to try or if they instead just badly mismanaged the entire negotiating process with Chinese officials. Either way, things are not looking good now:

Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident lawyer at the heart of a diplomatic crisis between China and the United States, telephoned in to a Congressional hearing on Thursday to plead for help in leaving his country.

Via a cellphone held up to a microphone at the hearing, Mr. Chen, speaking in Chinese, said: “I want to come to the U.S. to rest. I have not had a rest in 10 years. I’m concerned most right now with the safety of my mother and brothers. I really want to know what’s going on with them.”

Mr. Chen, according to the English translation of his comments, also asked to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was in Beijing. “I hope I can get more help from her,” he said. “Also, I want to thank her face-to-face.”

The call, apparently made from Mr. Chen’s Beijing hospital room from which American officials have been barred, was another dramatic turn in a case that had for a short time looked like a deft achievement to secure Mr. Chen’s safety by American diplomats. That achievement has unraveled, leaving the Obama administration open to attacks from rights activists and Republicans that it had failed to adequately protect Mr. Chen after he left the sanctuary of the United States Embassy here on Wednesday.

There are many weird aspects to this case. First of all, American officials have been barred from the hospital, and yet Chen remains free to converse with as many media and political figures as he likes. Perhaps the Communist Party higher-ups are just biding their time until the media circus blows over, but this is still a slightly odd circumstance. Secondly, was the U.S. actually shocked by Chen’s quick reversal (first he wanted to stay in China, and now he wants to leave for the States with his family), or did American officials simply not care what happened after he left the embassy? Also, what was the point of arranging such an elaborate pickup of the dissident far from the embassy’s entrance, even going so far as to protect him from a Chinese security contingent, if they were just going to release him back to the authorities soon afterwards anyway? (Or was the entire “car chase” sequence part of an American image repair campaign after the Chen affair went terribly wrong?)

It seems impossible that President Obama and Hillary Clinton could have so badly miscalculated the resolve of the Chinese Communist Party to regain physical control of Chen, and yet it looks like that’s exactly what they did. I tend to agree with Robert Wright over at the Atlantic, who writes:

The Obama folks may be cynical, but they’re smart enough to have known that if Chen walked into a bait-and-switch, that would be a big problem not just for him but for them. It doesn’t make sense, even in Machiavellian terms, that they’d have wanted to seriously mislead him.

James Fallows, meanwhile, suggests remaining cautious:

Quite a lot about this situation is confusing and contradictory, to put it mildly. But I would caution readers against drawing an inference, from headlines like the ones above on US-based analyses rather than on-scene reports, that (a) it is clear that U.S. officials so clearly mis-handled, or coldly handled, this case, or (b) there was something much more clearly successful or satisfying that they could have done. It’s possible that both those things will prove to be true, and the Obama Administration and its representatives in Beijing will deserve criticism. But that is far from clear now — and I worry that a pileup of headlines of this sort can give an initial shape to the story that is hard to change, and that the complicated facts don’t support.

And lastly, the New York Review of Books (in an article to which Fallows links) proffers the idea that, in the end, it’s not up to the United States to change China’s pattern of human rights violations. In any case, here’s hoping the media spotlight stays bright for awhile until some sort of agreement can be hashed out.

Related articles

The joy of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal

Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday’s online Wall Street Journal edition included a column by Daniel Henninger, its deputy editor of editorials. The article, titled “Memo to the Youth Vote,” begins by asking: “Why would anyone under the age of 25 vote for Barack Obama in November?”

This seems an unlikely question to ask. A Harvard poll released about a week ago revealed that Obama leads Romney among the young by 17%. So perhaps the more appropriate question would be, “Why would anyone under the age of 25 vote for Mitt Romney in November?” But even leaving aside this curious opening line, Henninger later uses economist Robert Lucas to critique Obama’s economic policies:

He then looked at the levels of U.S. social-welfare commitments, including the new Obama health-care entitlement, and ended with a simple observation: “Is it possible that by imitating European policies on labor markets, welfare and taxes, the U.S. has chosen a new, lower GDP trend? If so, it may be that the weak recovery we have had so far is all the recovery we will get.”

In what alternate universe has Obama imitated European policies on…any of these things? European tax systems are different, welfare is extremely different, and in general the labor markets are more rigid on the Old Continent than they are in the U.S. Going a step further, Obama’s stimulus package is proof positive that he differed strongly from his European counterparts, who have united behind the austerity-advocating trifecta of David Cameron, Angela Merkel, and Nicolas Sarkozy.

But Henninger doesn’t stop there. He then proceeds to discuss the disarray of European universities, never bothering to devote a single sentence to how this relates to the U.S., which has most of the best universities in the world. He finally closes by suggesting that, given high unemployment levels, young Americans may end up needing ObamaCare after all. Indeed they might, Henninger. That’s kinda the point of universal coverage.

Related articles