One of the things I find frustrating about Our Only President is how often he says things I agree with. I found it particularly frustrating in 2000, when nearly every major address was two-thirds stuff I wouldn’t mind saying myself. The problem is that I think about half the time he’s simply mouthing stuff he has no interest in at all, and about half he is stating some goal with which I agree, and leaving out the path to get there, having chosen some path that is, in my eyes, far more likely to leave us further away from the goal, or on occasion to get closer at the expense of some other goal I place an even higher priority on.
Ech, what a sentence. F’r’ex, as a candidate, Our Only President often said that one of the highest priorities of his administration was an educational system that Leaves No Child Behind, because it is morally incumbent on us as a society, and particularly as a capitalist democracy, to give every child the opportunities that education provides. I agree, but it was clear that his administration wouldn’t do anything like that. I couldn’t tell, at the time, whether he was just lying to hide his plan to destroy public education in this country or whether he somehow genuinely believed that draining educational resources to comply with ever more testing that doesn’t evaluate either teaching or learning would be a good path to the goal. Come to think of it, I still can’t tell. Anyway, the bits with shared goals turned out not only to have different policies attached but a cabal of dishonest and incompetent cronies attached who could make a hash of anything. Just for fun.
Anyway, Our Only President gave a fascinating and (I think) moving speech the other day, as he was inaugurated into a second term. Again, I think that part of it is lies and part actual shared goals, and it’s too depressing to figure out which. Still, I can’t deny that if Ted Kennedy gave this speech, I would have been cheering. Of course, if our lion had given that speech, it would have been written far more to my taste; I agree with the inestimable Andrew Cline that there was a lot of bad writing in it. Even so, I can’t quite call it a bad speech. First of all, it’s the kind of inauguration speech I like. Inaugurations are different, nigh on unique, and I think that they really should avoid policy details and present a simple vision of the President wants to do for the country in four years. More than that, what sort of country he wants America to be in four years. It’s a vision speech, a chance to get us all agreeing on the goals and then work together to hammer out our policy disagreements with our eyes on the prize. Now, Our Only President went further in the future and further afield, but he presented a vision of the future, and it’s a compelling one.
At the heart of that vision is a sense of America’s role in the world. From a shining city on a hill, he calls to us to be father and mother to the world, to make the world over in our image. And, he admits, not only in our image as we are, but in our image as we want to be. “America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” As a nation, we will thrive only insofar as we can embody our beliefs, because then the world will emulate us rather than rival us. “In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.” What is that meaning? The list is, more or less, “dignity and security of economic independence”, “integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives”, “service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak” and an end to “the habits of racism”.
Digression: I actually really like the phrase “the habits of racism”; stamping out racism itself is a matter for the heart and the family, and must take generations, but stamping out the habits of racism, if no easier, is at least something we can do as a society. It also, I think, points at the insidious habits I have myself without (often) thinking about them, and the similar habits that keep cropping up and form a barrier not only to the marginalized and the persecuted but to anyone seeking to change the inequities of the status quo. And, I think, it helps to point out that Our Only President, for all his flaws, does seem to genuinely ‘get it’, at least personally, on that front. He appears to be as comfortable with African-Americans and Latinos who share his views as with whites; his arrogance is essentially color blind. This doesn’t translate into policies that would extend that color blindness to institutions and systems everywhere, but it is worth noting. End Digression.
We’re not just going to be good role models, of course. We’re going to provide both carrots and sticks, we’re going to judge outlaw regimes, tyrants and “governments with long habits of control”. It’s a tough job, but a good one, and as he says, “The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it.” And I agree. I’d put a lot more emphasis on the importance of living up to our own ideals ourselves and less on judging how well other people have done it, but in fact fighting tyranny of whatever stripe is a goal I share with Our Only President.
The problem, though, is when he says things like “all the allies of the United States can know: ... we rely on your counsel”, which is on the face of it preposterous coming out of his mouth. He relies on no-one’s counsel but his own cabal of incompetents and crooks. The whole point of the Coalition of the Willing was that we didn’t need to take counsel with anyone who wasn’t willing to agree with us. More important, when he makes his claim to fight tyranny everywhere, he very clearly is not speaking about China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or even Libya. So his words are at odds with his deeds, and pretty blatantly, too. I think newly-confirmed Secretary Rice will have her hands full explaining to everybody that he meant only good things for them.
More important (to me) he also clearly doesn’t intend to put action to his words about economic security, integrity, and concern for the weak. He certainly has shown no interest in “sustain[ing freedom] by the rule of law and the protection of minorities” much less “secur[ing rights] by free dissent and the participation of the governed”. The speaker is part of his rhetoric, and in this case works against it. And, of course, the incompetence and dishonesty of his cronies is so overwhelming that even if I could believe he wanted, say, freedom for the residents of Iraq, they are likely to actually get poverty, civil war, and oppression.
I will, though, before I finish, make a more general complaint about the language of the piece, which I found profoundly conservative. That is, the language complacently accepts What Is (or What Was, or What We Like To Think Was) as Divinely ordained and incapable of improvement. He preposterously and ahistorically brags that “From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth.” Um, no, not every man, and certainly not every woman. He claims democracy as “the honorable achievement of our fathers”; I would call it, as he later does, “the unfinished work of American freedom”. “We go forward with complete confidence”, he says. I beseech him to think he may be wrong.
Further, he assumes that America’s “deepest beliefs” are his own. Over and over, he talks about America’s belief, America’s resolve, and America’s ideals. America will do this, America will not do that. He claims the voice of America for his own: “Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world.” America sees you, America will walk with you, America proclaims liberty. He is, in his mind or at least in his rhetoric, America. And what’s good for America is good for him. And vice versa.
I’ll finish here with his own questions, which I think are questions his administration will have to answer: “Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?”
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
When you consider the incompetence of this administration, I would urge you to consider that their goals may be being fulfilled quite well. There is much that has changed in the past four years in almost every arena of our society. This is not the typical result of arbitrary meddling or historical accident.
An old aphorism tells us never to ascribe to malice what could adequately be explained by stupidity. However, as citizens we are the guardians of our government. To fulfill that role responsibly, we must not wilfully blind ourselves to the possibile explanation that the changes in our society are the result of malice, intelligence, and ultimately success as measured on metrics we would never choose ourselves.
yeah we shouldn’t forget that driving the country into debt in order to force social services cuts is a widely used gambit, and it was done here under reagan.
I don’t have links handy, but I’ve heard from libertarian sources that all the evidence so far suggests that the “starve the leviathan” theory (i.e. reduce taxes in order to force spending cuts) has been woefully ineffective, and that small-government conservatives should actually go after reducing spending, rather than just cutting taxes and expecting the spending side to magically take care of itself.
Well, I guess it’s not woeful if you’re a big-government liberal. Or a big-government conservative, for that matter, like the current administration.
libertarians should be, and seem to be, pissed. the get-government-off-our-back “revolution” they endorsed was really about taking the feedbag into the back room where it could be emptied more quickly, into fewer mouths. (frankly if that were my political leaning i’d have bailed or at least been very suspicious of the republicans after the 1-2 combo of the S&L theft and iran-contra.)
i woke up this morning thinking about the speech, though, and the “cause of freedom” – in both senses. i think if we have a success story, then we also present a cautionary tale of greed and of having trouble learning to treat other nations as our equals.
I don’t want to dismiss the idea that the administration may be lying about its goals (I don’t think I do in the original post, do I?), but I also don’t want to dismiss everything they say as lies. For one thing, I think it’s fine to hold politicians accountable for what they actually say, whether or not they mean it. Second, I think that as citizens we (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘I’) fall too easily into dismissing oratory as lies, which licenses the orators to lie, or at least not to worry about truth (or even plausibility). Also, there’s no actual reason, empirically, to believe that politicians to not tell the truth about what they want nearly as often as they dissemble. On the other hand, Michael is right that we always need to keep in mind the possibility that what appears to be failure of the public agenda may mask success of a hidden agenda.
On the topic of starve-the-leviathan, it’s hard to work out the counterfactual. If Reagan hadn’t helped the Democratic Congress to build up a ludicrous deficit, would Clinton’s initial public works budget have gone through? Do we not have high-speed rail because we didn’t want it, because we actually couldn’t afford it, because the deficit makes it appear we couldn’t afford it, or for a variety of other reasons? I’ve always held that the only problems with massive deficits were in people’s perceptions of them, and that as long as we all believed there was nothing wrong with them, there was actually nothing wrong with them. We may at last have hit the point where even the people holding the paper don’t want any more deficits, which would complete the perception all around to make the problem actual. At any rate, the problem for us big-government liberals is that the perception that deficit is a problem (accurate or no) makes it very hard for us to sell new spending on bridges and libraries; the mainstream arguments about spending range all the way from cut a lot to hold steady, with the exception of new spending on “homeland” “security” and “education” “testing”.
Thanks,
-V.
As a follow-up on the “starve the leviathan” discussion, I’ll remind everybody of the discussion a little ways back on the social security surplus, which shouldn’t be left out of any examination of “big government,” “deficits,” and “debt.”
I apologize for not being able to offer any commentary on interpreting the inauguration speech, but I am at the point of being sickened by the man, so I’m trying to limit my exposure.
I would say that I doubt there’s much to be gained by trying to distinguish the truth from the lies in the speech. If we want to know what the real aims of the administration are, examine the policies. If we want to know how the administration is trying to present itself, study the speech. But for this administration, no connection between words and actions is to be expected at all.
what if we take a domestic policy example. today the president said something like: “We’ve got to shed ourselves of bigotry if we expect to lead by example. I’ll do as best as I can as president.”
that sounds excellent, as clear if perhaps not as catchy as the cause of freedom. in reality, though, one can infer that since this broad comment on ethnic relations comes after a storm of trying to convince blacks to stop supporting social security – using GHASTLY numbers in fiendish ways – well, one can infer that the president spends a lot of time being on message.
If we want to know what the real aims of the administration are, examine the policies. If we want to know how the administration is trying to present itself, study the speech. But for this administration, no connection between words and actions is to be expected at all.
Exactly. I’d separate the aspects worth evaluating in this (or any) administration into words, actions, and internal beliefs or goals. And when the words and actions have no connection, the internal beliefs cannot readily be in agreement with both. The perception of this administration as incompetent comes from the disconnect between their words and their actions, based on the assumption that their beliefs or goals align with their words. That perception of incompetence is unsupported if you instead assume that their beliefs or goals align with their actions.
At a news conference today, President Bush said that there should be an independent media, that the media should objectively evaluate his proposals and policies, and that his proposals and policies should be able to stand on their own without paying people in the media to promote them. I fully agree with these statements. Of course, his statements come after it was revealed that another executive branch Department was paying someone in the media, and President Bush himself blamed it on the Cabinet level leadership. Are his internal beliefs (or goals, or policies) about covert internal propaganda reflected in his administration’s words or actions?
or his people’s words about his words