Obama's Tenacity Gap

Yesterday blogger Ann Althouse suggested that President Obama is becoming identified as a ditherer. Usually when such an epithet sticks to a name, there is something to it.

In a superb column today David Brooks argues that the real problem with Afghanistan is not troop levels or even strategy. As he has discovered from his reporting, the real problem lies in Obama's lack of tenacity. To most educated observers Obama lacks the kind of fierce determination, the clarity and purpose, that is essential to defeating the Taliban insurgency. Link here.

Brooks took what should not be a radical step for a journalist. He interviewed a group of the most intelligent experts on counterinsurgency. He discovered that they were not wringing their hands over troop levels or even strategy reviews. They felt that the biggest problem was the growing belief that Obama did not have the tenacity to keep his word.

So, it is not about troop levels; it is really all about character.

Speaking of the experts' view of Obama, Brooks wrote: "... they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know whether he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree."

However much the world likes Obama, the fact that so many people believe him to be ditherer, someone they cannot count on to keep his word, will have dire consequences.

It is not just military experts who doubt Obama's tenacity. People in Afghanistan are voting their disapproval by their actions. As Brooks explains, Afghan villagers are now "hedging their bets," refusing to inform on the Taliban because they do not know whether Obama will stand firm in the face of the insurgency.

He adds that President Karzai is being forced to forge ties with warlords because he might need their support if the United States withdraws. And other countries do not trust Obama either, so Pakistan, Russia, and Iran are obliged to maintain ties with the Taliban.

How did we get to this sorry state of affairs? Simply put, a year ago the American intelligentsia was glorying in the fact that Barack Obama had a more nuanced approach to problems, a more subtle and sophisticated mind, especially compared with the stubborn and simple-minded tenacity of George W. Bush.

No one was willing to praise Bush for his ability to fixate on a simple conviction and to follow through on it, unflinchingly, in the face of gale-force dissent.

Of course, there were a few voices last year who warned against nuance, who saw the difficulties a leader would face if he tried to be all things to all people, or if his mind was too sophisticated to formulate policy and carry through on it. Modesty prevents me from naming names here, but this post from August, 2008 might offer some evidence. Link here.

[If you are interested in this topic, I recommend Peter Wehner's remarks on the Commentary blogsite. Link here.]

Obama's Intelligent Design

Charles Krauthammer is right. President Obama's reading of the current crisis is fantasy. Link here.

In his fantasy the crisis was caused by not enough taxes on the rich, too much energy consumption, not enough health care, too many private sector jobs, too few public sector jobs, and not enough windmills.

Obama wants to solve the problem by raising taxes on the rich, taxing energy consumption, nationalizing health care, growing the government, redistributing income, and building windmills.

The president is saying that we are suffering from insufficient virtue. 2% of us have sinned and have not done proper penance. They will be punished and the innocent 98% will be rewarded.

For Obama the sin lies in competition, especially the kind fostered by free enterprise. To solve this problem, he proposes more forced charity.

That is the only reasonable interpretation of Obama's budget. God help us if he really believes it.

From this fantasy Obama has crafted a fiction. If the policies make no sense, as Krauthammer says, then why are so many people buying into them?

Perhaps the reason is that they have no idea of what is really going on. A fiction is better than nothing.

The fact is, most people do not understand the workings of the banking system; fewer still understand the insurance industry.

Most people's eyes glaze over when they hear about Credit Default Swaps, Collateralized Debt Obligations, and Structured Investment Vehicles. And most did not fully grasp the urgency of unfreezing the credit markets. Most people did not even know that these markets had a temperature.

As has often happened in human history, people who do not know the facts fall back on a fiction. Especially when the fiction absolves them of responsibility for the crisis.

According to Obama 98% of the people bear no responsibility for the crisis. They will receive tax breaks that are going to be paid for by the 2% who gained unjustly from the credit explosion.

In Obama's narrative, the crisis is the wages of sin, the just deserts that a just God is meting out to the people who got rich by exploiting the poor and the middle class.

The market crash would then be justice, a purge of the bad actors that will necessarily lead to a new reign of justice. Many of Obama's followers do not mind taking a hit to their retirement accounts because they do not have retirement accounts. Those who do, console themselves by watching vainglorious former investment bankers driving cabs and waiting on tables.

This reminds me of pre-scientific communities where people believed that they could cure diseases, make the crops grow, and even win wars by purifying their faith through ritual sacrifices.

People who were mired in superstition used to believe that epidemics-- think, the Black Plague-- were God's way of punishing those who had offended him. They tried to cure the sickness by prayer and sacrifice, to say nothing of scapegoating groups that were supposed to have poisoned the wells.

Modern medicine has overcome such superstitions. Or so we thought. Darwin notwithstanding Obama's policy prescriptions suggest that he believes that an intelligent designer has sent him to solve the crisis by righting wrongs, punishing the guilty, and rewarding the innocent. He must believe that by being right with this designer he will lead us out of the wilderness and back on to the road to salvation.

If it does not produce any economic growth, at least it will produce spiritual renewal. Isn't that what Obama's faith, hope, and charity are all about?

The Best and the Brightest

First, it was David Brooks. Then, it was Sen. Robert Byrd, of all people. Their worry: that the Obama administration is concentrating power in a few bright aides and czars who are operating out of the White House. Link here.

Clearly, the administration was elected to take charge of the financial crisis. It is trying to do so. But concentrating power in the hands of a few-- which the ancients called oligarchy-- rarely benefits anyone but the few.

What can we look forward to?

The best and the brightest:

1. Know better than you and I.

2. Want to impose their superior vision on an inferior world.

3. Refuse to allow their work to be judged by reality.

4. Blame others when their policies appear to fail.

5. Work tirelessly to maintain themselves in power.

To do this, the best and the brightest:

1. Demean the intelligence of anyone who does not accept their claim to superior wisdom.

2. Refuse to negotiate with people who disagree with them or to compromise with reality. They make grandiose promises that cannot possibly be kept. Examples: the administration is going to give more people more and better health care for less than it costs now. And: the administration is going to solve the energy crisis by building more windmills. (Apparently, the best and the brightest never read "Don Quixote.")

3. Proclaim that their approach is working even if it is not. For this it helps to have a well-oiled propaganda machine.

4. Select a group of possible scapegoats that can be blamed when anything appears to go wrong. Among them will be George Bush, George Bush, and George Bush. Also, Herbert Hoover, Margaret Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Republicans, the vast right wing conspiracy, and the Mossad.

5. Stay in power, no matter what. If that requires fiddling with the census, so be it. If their vision has not lead to Heaven on earth, we will be told that our faith in the great leader is being tested. To pass the test we must give him more power.

David Brooks may be right to say that if the Obama program fails it will discredit liberalism and lead to a revival of conservatism.

But that was not what happened during the New Deal. And if it worked for FDR why wouldn't work for Obama.

Let's hope Holman Jenkins was prophetic when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago: Obama "kids himself if he believes that he will be allowed to preside over a depression without being politically blamed for it. The public is different now-- the world is different-- and he will own the 'Obama depression' sooner than he thinks."

Afterthoughts on the Election

Now that the election is history, I want to review some of my previous hypotheses to see how they worked out in practice.

Politics is a boon to executive coaching. It provides a large and open laboratory where upcoming, and even seasoned, executives, can go to school.

If you follow this blog you know that I believe that good leadership must be based on clearly-defined policies. Policies define actions; they define actions down the chain of command. They must be intelligible and workable. Otherwise, no leadership.

I also suggested that people will vote for a candidate whose policies are clear and wrong over one whose policies are obscure and correct.

I believe that the election bears this out. Obama was always on message. He told us exactly what he was going to do as president. McCain was rarely on message; his campaign was inefficient, ineffective, and filled with psychodrama.

Where Obama told us he was going to lower taxes for the vast majority of the populace, that he wanted to build more windmills and solar power plants, that he will make nice with friends and enemies alike, and that he will spend more money on rescues, bailouts, and handouts.

Now, what was McCain's message. According to his ads, it was: Obama was not ready to lead. That, my friends, is not a policy; it did not tell us what a President McCain would do in office.

That is why John McCain is returning to the Senate.

If this feels trite, consider that the eminent political consultant, Dick Morris, predicted that a series of last-minute ads connecting Obama with Jeremiah Wright would tip the election toward McCain.

Of course, this same Dick Morris insisted that McCain's histrionic gesture of suspending his campaign to return to Washington to provide leadership in the financial crisis was a great idea.

Most sentient individuals believe that that gesture doomed McCain's candidacy.

Now I would add that Obama also took control of the narrative about the financial crisis. Policy and narrative are not the same thing. The first tells what you are going to do; the second tries to explain what went wrong in the past.

While Obama offered his view that the crisis was a verdict on Bush administration policies, John McCain offered a populist narrative blaming Wall Street and Congressional earmarks. His narrative did not comprise the scope of the problem; thus it fell flat.

Life is not a narrative. Yet, in time of crisis, when we endure trauma, when our routines are interrupted, we use stories to provide a semblance of meaning. Stories bridge the time before we can return to our normal life rhythms.

We should not get too carried away with narratives, especially the one that has currently captured the imagination of the world. In that one, the world has been changed by the Obama victory because his own personal story, within the context of the American narrative about race, has a transcendent quality that will inspire and elevate us, while healing and saving the world.

So we have two competing perspectives: narrative and policy. Is the world going to feel uplifted by the Obama narrative or is it going to pass a different judgment on the Obama policy prescriptions.

Clear policies do attract votes, but they are subject to another judgment. Not the judgment of the public opinion polls, but of the marketplace.

As readers of this blog know I have been suggesting that the stock market crash that began in late September was discounting an Obama victory. It coincided directly with Obama's ascendancy in the polls.

For those who did not believe that there was any correlation, the markets have sent an even stronger message these past few days. On the two days after the Obama election the Dow threw down the gauntlet. It took Obama at his word and gave a vote of no-confidence in his economic agenda.

It is a good time to recall the early days of the Clinton administration. At that time, Robert Rubin explained to Bill Clinton that his fiscal policies were going to be judged ultimately by the bond market. To which we should add.... the stock market, the commodity exchanges, and the foreign exchange markets.

No politician can paper over the verdict of reality with soaring rhetoric. In the battle between narratives and the market, the markets, being real, will always win out.

The question we are now facing is this: will Obama understand the vote of no-confidence he has just received and change fiscal course? The world awaits his decision.

Notes on the Passing Strange

A good coach must know how to help a client to read a situation objectively. They he must help him to formulate a plan to deal with the situation, and to put it into action.

Whether the problem concerns personal or professional life, the structure is the same.

You may not be a CEO, but you ought to be the CEO of your own life. And rest assured, if you cannot manage your life, no one is going to want you to manage their company. But if you have no sense of how a CEO functions you will have great difficulty dealing with your everyday life.

Coaching is about leading people to take action. It is not about reading minds, you own or anyone else's. And it is not about gaining a richer fantasy life. If those are your goals, stick with psychotherapy.

An effective coach must first know how to analyze a real-world situation objectively. That means not overlaying it with fantasy, not turning it into a mythic narrative, and not becoming emotionally overwrought.

A coach learns this through experience. But, he or she also learns it by observing and analyzing situations that are in the public domain. Contrary to what therapy seems to imply, there is more to your existence than your private life.

You hone your objective analytic skills by working on those in which you have no direct personal involvement. If you cannot analyze a situation in which you do not have an immediate emotional stake, you will be at a loss when you need to deal with a person problem.

Take the election. Some people have so little interest in politics per se that they have decided to make a public spectacle of their emotional reaction to Sarah Palin.

Theirs is a good example of what not to do. One among many newspaper articles has described their reactions as running the gamut from incandescent anger to visceral hostility to a desire to "vomit with rage."

It is a sad day when political debate has been reduced to a my-paroxysm-is-bigger-than-yours contest. In my view the two clear winners of this contest are Sarah Bernhard and Naomi Wolf. Bernhard wins her award for a torrent of misogynist obscenities that are unfit to link. Wolf wins hers for giving Palin a starring role in her own paranoid delirium.

If this is the way they all deal with problems in their everyday lives, this can only mean that they have overdosed on therapy.

Now, take a step back and look at Bill Clinton's remarks about Palin on The View: "My view is... why... say anything bad about a person. Why don't we like them and celebrate them and be happy for her elevation to the ticket? And just say she was a good choice for him and we disagree with them."

Why, indeed. The answer is not that difficult. Where Bill Clinton speaks from a depth of political experience, the celebrities and attention-seekers have none. Where Bill Clinton would revel in the chance to debate policy, most celebrities do not have either the knowledge or the intelligence to debate anything at all.

I have already blogged about the notion that policy, not personality, will be decisive in the election. Some complementary views have been expressed by Jacob Weisberg and Christopher Hitchens, both on Slate.com.

Weisberg argues more persuasively than I did that winning candidates most often have a clearer message, call it a slogan, that sticks in people's minds and tells the world what they are going to do when in office.

And Hitchens offered a similar point, declaring that with John McCain having a very bad week Obama should be running away with the election. The reason he is not, Hitchens avers, is that he has nothing like a message, he has never stated clearly what his policies will be.

Weisberg and Hitchens explain this differently. Weisberg suggests that it is lack of executive experience. Hitchens believes that Obama does not really want to win the election, because he had never intended to be the candidate.

To know this you would have to be a mind reader, so I prefer Weisberg's explanation.

The fact is, McCain, Obama, and Biden are all legislators. And legislators spend their time trying to get noticed. They do not have to watch what they say because everyone knows that their words do not risk becoming policy.

Last week McCain tried to be decisive about the financial crisis, and he sounded like he was flailing. When you solution to a seized-up credit market is to fire the head of the SEC, it means that you do not understand what is going on. This does not inspire confidence in your leadership.

McCain's flailing undermined him, even while Obama was retreating into gauzy populist platitudes.

Of course, Joe Biden has been the champion of this season's gaffes. This also demonstrates a lack of executive experience. His best was the assertion that when the market crashed in 1929 FDR went on television to address the nation.

Of course, the only candidate who has remained on message is Sarah Palin. Perhaps because she is the only one who has exercised executive authority.

I will mention in passing that understanding leadership does not just matter to executives. Every individual has domains where he or she must exercise leadership. Perhaps it is in organizing a household, perhaps it is in choosing a course of study, perhaps it is in getting a group of friends together to throw a surprise party. And you must know that these are not the times for tirades and tantrums.

As for the policy/leadership question look at the debate surrounding the Paulson bailout plan.. Let us stipulate that I do not understand very much, if anything, about the financial system, and so will nor presume to offer an opinion about whether the plan is good, bad, or indifferent.

One thing I will say: it is clear, concise, and to the point. It requires exactly one and a half pages. It is an action plan. It represents an effort to do something, not everything.

That was, until it hit Congress. There it looks as though our Solons are engaged in public posturing. One day Chris Dodd says the plan is unacceptable, and then, the next morning Charles Schumer says that it will likely pass Congress.

The great thing is that Congress-- on a bipartisan basis-- has introduced layers of nuance and obscurity, thereby confusing the markets.

What they should do is heed the advice offered by Franklin Roosevelt in May, 1932-- that is, before his nomination, before the election, and before the invention of television. Speaking in Georgia FDR said this: "The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But, above all, try something."

Forever Nuance

You would have thought that one of the great lessons of the 2004 presidential election was: whatever you do, do not do nuance. Apparently not.

The word has recently been floated as the best explanation of Barack Obama's less than stellar performance last week at Saddleback.

When the candidate did not give straight answers to Pastor Warren's straight questions, the pundits lined up to explain that his mind was so subtle and so brilliant that it sees all sides of all issues. Only a great mind can see the complexities of all issues and weight all of the possible and imaginable considerations. The pundits want us all to think that Obama's answers exist on a higher plane, one that would barely be intelligible to people from Kansas. That plane is the plane of nuance.

The defense is similar to one offered by James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly. Fallows declared that Obama was not very good in the candidate debates because he was the thinking person's candidate. Just like Pres. Adlai Stevenson.

Nuance did not work last time and it will not work this time... and not because it's a French word.

A president leads by setting policy, not by inspiring people with lofty thoughts or impressing them with how smart he is. A candidate must tell us what he is going to do. When he traffics in nuance people think that he is inviting them to wallow in his indecision.

Perhaps this appeals to people who have done a lot of therapy. They, in particular, have learned to refrain from taking action, the better to introspect, to free associate, to express their feelings, and to develop their poetic side. If you follow those guidelines strictly you will not become president, you will become dysfunctional.

If the candidate does not have a clear policy to address a problem then people will rightly assume that he is either not going to do anything or that he is going to make it up as he goes along.

If public policy were based on nuance then we would be writing the history of the Cuomo presidency. Policy has to be clear, precise, concise, and intelligible to large numbers of people. Otherwise how will the staff understand what it is supposed to do.

Given the choice between a wrong policy and no policy, an intelligent electorate will usually choose the former. Not for lack of intelligence but because they are smart enough to know what makes for leadership.

Most people would rather do something than nothing. In 1948 Harry Truman ran a successful campaign against a do-nothing Congress.

Deep thinkers love nuance. They love to get lost in their thoughts because then they feel that they are masters of their domain. The more detached they are from reality the more they love nuance.

They love it when a candidate offers nuanced answers because that makes them feel that he is one of them, and that he is raising their status in the world. They love it when they can feel that he is bright like them. Unfortunately then end up supporting candidates who would rather be bright than president.

Policy is like what Hollywood producers call "high concept." Anyone who has ever pitched a screen play knows that it must have a concept, a one-sentence plot synopsis. An effective script, like an effective presidency, must have a unity of action.

A policy is not a theme; it is not an inspirational message. To grasp what it is, take a few examples. Among the better know policies is: containment. George Kennan first proposed this one-word policy as the guiding principle of American conduct of the Cold War. It was surely different from the allied policy in World War II, which was: unconditional surrender.

The New Deal was a series of policy proposals. So was the Contract with America. In 2006 Congressional election Democrats ran on an end-the-war policy. Republicans seemed to be running on more-of-the-same. Of course, the Democrats won.

Both McCain and Obama became presumptive nominees because they articulated clear Iraq policies. McCain revived his candidacy by proposing a policy called: the surge. Obama rode his policy of "end the war" to the Democratic nomination.

Of course, that policy debate is now past history. Both candidates now need to redefine themselves by proposing new policies to address other issues.

This is being played out in the current debate over energy independence. McCain and the Republicans have been winning the debate because their policy: Drill here; drill now... is much clearer and actionable than any Democratic alternative. We may not be able to drill out way out of the problem, but we are certainly not going to think out way out of it.

I invite anyone to explain the Obama energy policy in four words or less. The Democrats may be right; they may be wrong. They are not going to win an election on an incoherent set of contradictory ideas that appear to be a grab-bag for special interest groups.

Despite what David Brooks says, I do not think that the Obama campaign needs a theme. I also do not think that it has been losing ground because it has been ineffective at counterpunching. And I do not believe that Obama is being dragged down by the company he kept in the past.

No, Obama's problem is that his candidacy is not defined by any policies. His master themes are not policies. "Change" is not a policy; "hope" is not a policy. A grammatically incorrect book title-- I hope I am not the only one who has noticed that The Audacity of Hope is incorrect in English grammar-- does not lead to policies.

For the Obama convention to succeed it must go beyond stirring rhetoric and inspirational messages. As the McCain campaign has already figured out, these easily lend themselves to ridicule. Obama is running for Commander in chief, not pastor in chief.

Success or failure will be measured by whether or not you can say after the convention what Obama's policy proposals are.. in one sentence or less. If you cannot do that, get ready for Pres. McCain.

When democracy is at its best political debate and decision-making concerns alternative policies. Isn't this more uplifting than the notion that it is all an exercise in psychological manipulation, whether through a duel of competing personal narratives or a contest between alternative dramatic spectacles?