A Coming Crisis, Take Two
Posted on October 23rd, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
|
Ross remains convinced that Biden’s remarks were a gaffe and a very bad one at that:
He specifically highlighted Obama’s youth as a reason to expect a “generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy,” and specifically compared him to John F. Kennedy – whose perceived inexperience (and poor initial impression on the world stage) was supposedly one of the contributing factors in the Russian decision to send missiles to Cuba. It’s true that all Presidents should expect to get their mettle tested in their first year in office, and it’s true that John McCain’s years working on foreign-policy issues in Washington won’t exempt him from that rule. And maybe that’s what Biden meant to say. But the words he actually uttered seemed intended to cite his running mate’s youth and relative inexperience as a reason why Obama, in particular, would be likely to face an international crisis in his first six months.
I will grant that Biden wasn’t making a generic statement that Presidents often face international challenges early in their first year, but was making the (overconfident?) claim that because Obama is about to be elected we can expect President Obama to face such a challenge. This still seems unremarkable considering the instability in a number of regions where Washington either does or claims to have an interest. He also said that Obama is 47 years old (this is true) and brilliant (many people would agree), so Biden probably thought the latter was reassuring to anyone concerned about Obama’s inexperience. Before that, though, he compared him to Kennedy. The Kennedy comparison is where things get tricky. It’s a bit like comparing Bush to Truman in that the comparison is either a gross insult or a huge compliment depending on your opinion of Truman.
If you believe the hype about Truman, it means that Bush will one day be regarded as a wise and far-seeing President who laid the foundations for the prosecution of the so-called Long War, or if you judge Truman primarily on his generally poor decisions in office you will regard Bush as Trumanesque in the worst sense, a failure and an embarrassment. In this case, I expect that Biden embraces the mythology about President Kennedy as much as most Democrats, so that when he compares Obama to Kennedy he likely does not have the failed summit in Vienna or the Bay of Pigs in mind, and he is probably not thinking of how the Vienna summit and failed Cuba attack directly invited and led to the Missile Crisis. In this mythology that Biden is repeating, ”the world” just decided to test Kennedy, as if his actions had nothing to do with bringing on that test.
The funny thing about this mini-controversy is that McCain has reacted with incredulity that Biden would have said this and seems horrified that this has not become a bigger problem for Obama. In McCain’s eyes, Obama is the erratic, inconsistent one, so why would you want him to be President at a time of crisis? Of course, that’s the central argument of McCain’s entire campaign: he is the steady, experienced hand who will pilot the ship safely through the storm. The trouble is that he has repeatedly shown that this isn’t true. McCain can insist all he likes that his election will not invite international challenges, but the far more troubling thing about McCain is that fewer and fewer people trust him to respond responsibly if those challenges were to arise. Had Biden said these things two months ago, they might have had some impact. However, after having compared the responses of the two men over the last two or three months to at least a couple major crises, a majority would probably prefer a President who will be challenged and proves to be better-suited to that challenge than a President who is able to get by on bluster and reputation for a year or two but is completely unsuited to leading in a crisis when it comes. Of course, none of that guarantees that Obama will be successful, but there is more reason to think that of him than about his opponent, and one way to make that contrast without attacking McCain by name is to remind his audience that the world is volatile and dangerous.
The interesting thing about what Biden said is that it reinforced the contrast between the two candidates in a way that undermines McCain’s central argument, because only McCain’s loyal partisans now believe him to be the safe pick who could offer reassuring, stable leadership. This reminds me of one of the striking things about Obama’s selection of Biden and Obama’s campaign for the last year and a half: Obama has made the Democratic ticket the ticket focused on foreign policy and national security to a much greater degree than past tickets, and he has campaigned throughout the cycle on the assumption that foreign policy is actually one of his strengths despite his lack of experience. Whether he meant to or not, Biden has done something unusual for a Democrat in emphasizing the dangers and potential threats in the world, which reflects a similar sort of confidence that the Democratic ticket is simply better when it comes to foreign policy.
This is virtually incomprehensible to the GOP candidates and their supporters, who keep assuming that this is a major liability for Obama. In a lot of the news and blog reaction to this story, you can see many journalists and liberal bloggers getting back into the “defensive crouch,” as if to say, “Don’t talk about foreign threats, you idiot! We always lose when we talk about that! Don’t remind people how inexperienced Obama is!” Perhaps in a very different world, they might have a point, but this mini-controversy is electorally much less important than it might otherwise be because national security voters make up a much smaller portion of the electorate than those voting on economic issues. Most of the national security voters had already reflexively aligned themselves with McCain long ago (which I suspect is a function of how many Republicans place national security as their top priority, rather than being a result of any obvious McCain edge on this subject), so it’s not as if Biden is going to drive away any votes by saying this. Even Rasmussen’s latest finding, which does show that 59% are concerned about a crisis early in an Obama Presidency, shows that the public is evenly divided on who can be trusted more in an international crisis: 49% say McCain and 48% say Obama. If it were at all obvious that McCain is better-suited to handling international crises, the numbers would not be that close and then Biden’s remarks might have been significant enough to be worth spending all this time discussing.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Dead on– the key point is that 2008 is like 1980. The old cliches are breaking down, and new cliches are being created. Republicans are run and supported by extreme, ignorant, rigidly politically correct loonies, as was said about Democrats up until, oh, a couple months ago.
Had Biden said these things two months ago, they might have had some impact. However, after having compared the responses of the two men over the last two or three months to at least a couple major crises, a majority would probably prefer a President who will be challenged and proves to be better-suited to that challenge than a President who is able to get by on bluster and reputation for a year or two but is completely unsuited to leading in a crisis when it comes.
Right. McCain partisans want everyone to give the worst possible construction to the Dem VP candidate’s off-the-cuff words, then flip out about them, instead of considering the actions of the GOP candidate for president. No, thanks.
If it were at all obvious that McCain is better-suited to handling international crises, the numbers would not be that close and then Biden’s remarks might have been significant enough to be worth spending all this time discussing.
There are two questions here. First, will Biden’s comments hurt Obama? I’d say no, for the reasons you mention. Second, was it a stupid thing for Biden to say? I’d say yes, simply because it doesn’t frame the issue to the Democrats’ advantage to say, “Obama’s young and will therefore be tested by our enemies early in his first term.” There was no reason he couldn’t have framed it as, “The new president will face major challenges, and will be tested by our enemies. Who do you trust in a crisis–Obama or McCain?”
Anyway, I personally am spending time discussing it because I think it’s fun, and because I genuinely think it was a ridiculous thing for Biden to say, not because I think it has any implications for the election.
Yes, Daniel. I would note in addition, however, that Joe Lieberman’s identical remarks (The next president will be tested, so vote for McCain because: he will be tested . . . ) render toothless McCain’s charge about a Biden’s gaffe. For my part, Biden is merely noting that the “steady” Obama would be superior in such a post-election international test to the lurching and wizened McCain.
As for McCain’s incredulity at this terminal stage in his campaign, it is difficult for me to tease out how much of his emotion is indignation that he’s losing to a relative youngster, or disbelief, or overacting. I say his primary emotions over the Biden remark are anger that he’s losing (vanity) and overacting. And McCain is a terrible actor.
As an aside on the Vienna Summit, you might be interested, Daniel, to read a riveting oral history by Flora Lewis, who covered the summit. I stumbled across it maybe 7 years ago online at GWU’s National Security Archives. Her insights on the dynamic between the bullying, blustering, nearly contemptuous Khrushchev and the tentative Kennedy are fascinating. The brutal cold war encounter with an ascendant ideological foe like the Soviet Union shook JFK to his core, Lewis contends. I can’t think of any comparable dynamic today. Can you?
Charlie, it’s just that, as Daniel alludes, Biden made these comments to a specifically partisan fundraising audience up here in the Seattle area, home of Jim McDermott’s district, and various other strongly “anti-war” constituenties. He wasn’t making it to independent voters or even garden-variety Democratic voters. I’m not as sure as Daniel that Biden was specifically preparing them for Obama action concerning Pakistan (it could just as easily be some crackpot in Somalia or God-knows-where), but it does seem to me that it goes to party unity in the face of some nasty incident that might split NATO into hawks and doves (and where Biden’s audience would more naturally relate to the dove position).
Just all I can say here, Daniel, is thanks. I read Ross’ second post on this subject and just shook my head and thought for the hundredth time what his blog might be like if he allowed comments.
The subtext here is that Douthat is obviously stuck on his need to believe that Sarah Palin is the victim of an egregious double standard vis a vis Biden. And there probably is a bit of one.
But this is just not an example of it. As you lay out, it’s only if you already buy the notion that Obama is an absurd choice for commander-in-chief in a crisis that this tirade from Biden means much. On the other hand, if you’ve been impressed by Obama over the last month and unsettled by McCain, Biden’s comments serve to bring those impressions into focus in the national security sphere. Seeing as how more independents and undecideds are in the latter group than not, this from Biden was far more deft than daft. A prerequisite for a serious gaffe would seem to be that it wasn’t quite possibly a (perhaps unintentionally) wily move.
“The brutal cold war encounter with an ascendant ideological foe like the Soviet Union shook JFK to his core, Lewis contends. I can’t think of any comparable dynamic today. Can you?”
Thanks for the question. Honestly, I can’t. The Soviet threat, especially the perceived threat as exaggerated by Kennedy’s talk of the “missile gap” (which the subsequent Missile Crisis actually showed to be misguided), was so much greater in military and ideological terms than anything we face today that I cannot think of anything that comes close. We face a number of second- and third-tier powers with limited, regional objectives for the most part; caliphalist jihadis are out there doing their sinister work, but they are few as they have been for the last hundred years. That is by way of saying that I think the possibility of a repeat of a global crisis on the scale of the Missile Crisis is not as great, so the stakes of Obama’s diplomacy are not going to be quite as high as they were at Vienna. The only that we get to a similar “one minute to midnight” moment is if the government insists on a collision course with Russia over places where we have nothing at stake.
In fairness to Ross, he allowed comments for a long time and they were increasingly filled with the most obnoxious and hateful garbage directed at him personally without any real connection to what he was saying. I can understand why he opted to get rid of them. If my comments sections ever deteriorated into what his became, I might consider the same thing. While I moderate comments, I am happy to report that I very, very rarely have to reject any new submissions. I am very much gratified that my commenters have almost always kept the discussion respectful and at a high level. This is the environment that I have strived to create at Eunomia from the beginning, and I am pleased that it has survived the many changes the blog has gone through over the years.
Turning back to Obama and Biden, I say all of this as someone who has spent a lot of time criticizing Obama, but I would like to think that I have been reasonably fair in taking Obama seriously more or less on his own terms. It seems to me that everyone who invests a lot of significance in Biden’s remarks as a political blunder has not quite come around to taking him seriously, at least when it comes to foreign policy.
Is there a double standard applied to Biden and Palin? Perhaps. I hope I have not been using one, but I think it is natural to have more questions and skepticism of the relative newcomer. Whether or not conservatives want to believe it or not, Obama has received much *more* scrutiny than most nominees, Democratic or Republican, and certainly more than McCain has on the grounds that “we don’t know who he is” and McCain is supposedly a “known quantity.” A crucial difference is that Obama has withstood the scrutiny pretty well, and Palin just hasn’t.
Maybe if everything that has happened in the Obama campaign over the last 20 months had been condensed into two, it would seem different, but even then I’m not sure. Have journalists and many of us in the blogosphere cut Obama more slack? I don’t think I have. It would probably be fair to say that many MSM outlets have tended to give him more of a break, but they were also the outlets that mainstreamed discussion of Wright, Ayers, etc., so it’s not as if it has been the kid-glove treatment, either.
I am much heartened by the recent Joe Klein article on Obama’s meeting with Petreaus in TIME magazine which portrayed him as a moderate cautious man who would be not intimidated in to staying in Iraq. I don’t how much of this is journalistic exaggeration and personal vendetta (Klein was kicked out of McCain’s campy, after all) but that interview was extremely reassuring. Obama, like Huckabee in the primaries, has really grown in maturity.
Daniel, I was going to say pretty much the same thing regarding the comments on Ross’ blog. If anyone is wondering “what his blog might be like if he allowed comments,” just picture the blog as currently written, and then imagine the profane ravings of insane and psychopathic people appended to the bottom of each post.
That is by way of saying that I think the possibility of a repeat of a global crisis on the scale of the Missile Crisis is not as great, so the stakes of Obama’s diplomacy are not going to be quite as high as they were at Vienna. The only that we get to a similar “one minute to midnight†moment is if the government insists on a collision course with Russia over places where we have nothing at stake.
Even putting aside the scale of the threat, Vienna is no longer a good model for thinking about American diplomacy. The only groups truly committed to an endless war with the United States are terrorist groups like al Qaeda that don’t engage in diplomacy with the US government or Americans in general. So they’re different from the Soviets not only in their capabilities but also in their intentions. There won’t be a Vienna-style summit or a Cuban Missile Crisis-style confrontation with al Qaeda. If it feels it has an opportunity to kill large numbers of Americans it will try to exploit that opportunity.
That single-mindedness may make a direct attack by al Qaeda a lot more likely than a direct attack by the Soviets ever was, but it also limits al Qaeda’s overall effectiveness. It’s too reckless and inflexible to, say, take over a national government or even to gain a national government as a committed ally (I guess it’s debatable, but I don’t consider the pre-2001 Taliban “national” or “a “government”).
So good diplomacy these days is less glamorous. It’s less about coming through in high-stakes public confrontations and more about building good relationships with groups and countries that can help us marginalize al Qaeda and its affiliates. That’s why bellicosity and “choose us or choose the terrorists” rhetoric is so counter-productive. It both overstates the threat AND makes it more difficult to deal effectively with the threat.
Since I have been reading Ross, (and all of the Atlantic blogs) there have not been comments. To this date, I can’t see what would convince someone initially inclined toward comments to retreat. Do blog comments constitute sticks and stones? Perhaps it’s a certain provocativeness borne of ill consideration that Douthat experiened the consequences of. After all, Yglrsias has never needed to suspend (much less end) comments on his blog. McArdle and Coates are constantly contending with their comments sections. To me, it seems Douthat is closer to their level than Sullivan, who is a legitimate legend and would take his blog elsewhere if conditions became unhospitable to him (ie comments were mandatory). Is Douthat at that level? Apparently he sees himself as such.
Daniel,
I think that the significance of Biden’s remarks are actually deeper than just the comment about being tested. If you look at the extended context, he’s actually making a a-priori appeal to the base for support of “unpopular” decisions that Obama might need to make in the foreign policy sphere. Given your many critiques of Obama’s interventionalist tendencies (tendencies which as a pragmatic liberal interventionist myself, I tend to agree with, though this puts me at severe odds with most mainstream liberals), I think you’ll have no trouble imagining what Biden might be alluding to.
Further to that point, I’d like to mention immodestly that I’ve predicted back during the primary season that no Democratic president would actually withdraw totally from Iraq, despite the rhetoric aimed at pleasing the leftist base.
Since I have been reading Ross, (and all of the Atlantic blogs) there have not been comments. To this date, I can’t see what would convince someone initially inclined toward comments to retreat. Do blog comments constitute sticks and stones? Perhaps it’s a certain provocativeness borne of ill consideration that Douthat experiened the consequences of. After all, Yglrsias has never needed to suspend (much less end) comments on his blog. McArdle and Coates are constantly contending with their comments sections. To me, it seems Douthat is closer to their level than Sullivan, who is a legitimate legend and would take his blog elsewhere if conditions became unhospitable to him (ie comments were mandatory). Is Douthat at that level? Apparently he sees himself as such.
He was consistently being accused, without evidence and regardless of the topics of his posts, of being a racist. The comments were consistently full of profanity, ad hominem attacks directed against Ross and other posters, and commenters impersonating each other. I don’t think you need to be a “legitimate legend” to decide that a comments section of that kind is worthless (or worse) and to shut it down. Just because McArdle, Coates and, to some extent, Yglesias get some sort of satisfaction out of fighting with (or just enduring) their trolls doesn’t mean anyone else is obligated to do likewise.
Ross still has a public email associated with his blog, so he’s not insulating himself from readers’ reactions. I know he reads those emails because he’s referenced a couple of mine on his site. So if various people believe it’s very important to insult Ross on a daily basis they’re still able to do so. But if they were more interested in turning their contempt for him into performance art they no longer have a platform for doing so paid for by theatlantic.com and maintained by Ross. Seems like a perfectly fair trade-off.
I know some bloggers (McArdle comes to mind, again) have a kind of philosophical aversion to shutting down or heavily moderating their comments. At the point that you’re hosting a comments section that resembles an open sewer more than a spirited debate that kind of dogmatism is counter-productive.
In response to Daniel’s remarks upthread: So good diplomacy these days is less glamorous. It’s less about coming through in high-stakes public confrontations and more about building good relationships with groups and countries that can help us marginalize al Qaeda and its affiliates. That’s why bellicosity and “choose us or choose the terrorists†rhetoric is so counter-productive.
Again, precisely. I’m struck that the neoconservatives and the national greatness strategists express kind of a longing for the glamor of conflict. It seems to underpin much of what passes for strategic thinking among them. Perhaps the hope is that worthy and hyperpowerful foes make us worthy–make war worthy.
So when the United States ends up, as it did with Al Qaeda, with these anomalous, nonstate enemies that are difficult to combat in traditional ways, the neocons force them to take on shapes they do not really have, so they conform to familiar and even comforting dangers that evoke red phones, shoe-banging UN tantrums, and so on from fifty years ago.
This kind of thinking really is, when you come down to it (to echo the findings of the 9/11 commission, IIRC), a “failure of imagination”–one, obviously, we can’t afford today.
Not all of the Atlantic bloggers or other bloggers get the kind of response Ross apparently did. The fact that he did should lead him to consider what about his views provoke such ire. I think it looks ridiculous to have comments and then shut them down. Obviously others may disagree. For the record: McArdle routinely announces her intention to ruthlessly police comments, but then doesn’t do it. Don’t know what that’s about. I have no problem with just declining to have comments from the outset, or with strictly policing them for being on topic and civil. Just turning them off is lame though.
But I’ll defer to prevailing opinion here, not having had a blog of my own of any kind, to say nothing one popular enough to attract any substantial amount of personal vitriol in comments. I should walk a mile in those moccasins before pronouncing.