The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.

I wonder if any Ephs working for the government can comment about this. I’ll be posting it on WSO to see what current students think about this, and whether or not it will influence future career decisions. Full article after the break.

From USA Today

For feds, more get 6-figure salaries

By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.

“There’s no way to justify this to the American people. It’s ridiculous,” says Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a first-term lawmaker who is on the House’s federal workforce subcommittee.

Jessica Klement, government affairs director for the Federal Managers Association, says the federal workforce is highly paid because the government employs skilled people such as scientists, physicians and lawyers. She says federal employees make 26% less than private workers for comparable jobs.

USA TODAY analyzed the Office of Personnel Management’s database that tracks salaries of more than 2 million federal workers. Excluded from OPM’s data: the White House, Congress, the Postal Service, intelligence agencies and uniformed military personnel.

The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker’s pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.

Key reasons for the boom in six-figure salaries:

• Pay hikes. Then-president Bush recommended — and Congress approved — across-the-board raises of 3% in January 2008 and 3.9% in January 2009. President Obama has recommended 2% pay raises in January 2010, the smallest since 1975. Most federal workers also get longevity pay hikes — called steps — that average 1.5% per year.

•New pay system. Congress created a new National Security Pay Scale for the Defense Department to reward merit, in addition to the across-the-board increases. The merit raises, which started in January 2008, were larger than expected and rewarded high-ranking employees. In October, Congress voted to end the new pay scale by 2012.

• Paycaps eased. Many top civil servants are prohibited from making more than an agency’s leader. But if Congress lifts the boss’ salary, others get raises, too. When the Federal Aviation Administration chief’s salary rose, nearly 1,700 employees’ had their salaries lifted above $170,000, too.

The performance of the Bush administration before 11 September of 2001 was miserable. A judge denied the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s request to listen to the telephone of one of the later 11 September attackers, on grounds that the FBI kept asking for wire tap warrants in cases it could not sustain. President Bush himself instructed his National Security Advisor, Dr. Rice, that he had heard enough of Al Quaeda’s threats and wished to hear no more.

The American combination of arrogant complacency and administrative ineptitude has historical precedents. Before the Civil War, southerners in national government deliberately concentrated military resources in the states that later seceded. The northerners did nothing about it.In 1941 the US expected a Japanese attack—but not at our Pacific strongpoint, Pearl Harbor. The FBI intercepted telephone calls from Japan to its consulate in Honolulu asking for the anchorages of the American warships.—but did not tell the Navy. The intelligence officer of the Pacific Fleet informed his Admiral two days before the event that he had lost track of the Japanese carriers. The Admiral: “Do you mean, they could be rounding Diamond Head at any moment?” (Diamond Head is just outside Pearl Harbor.) Some hours before the attack, a US ship sank a Japanese submarine attempting to enter the harbor, but the report was not forwarded to the command. US radar one hour before the Japanese planes arrived detected planes coming from the northwest, but the data was interpreted as US planes from California—which was northeast. The admirals conducted no patrols to the northwest. They explained that they thought of an attack on their headquarters as inconceivable. Apparently, everyone else did so too.

The organizational ineptitude and misjudgement shown at Pearl Harbour were not uniquely American. In the crisis of 1914, the British and French and Russian foreign and war ministries were ignorant of German intentions. No one was prepared (despite the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war) for the technological inferno that ensued.The French and British during the 1938 Czech crisis did not know that the German generals were planning a coup in case Hitler initiated a war which they considered premature. The western powers were shocked by the German-Soviet pact of 1939, despite evidence for months that it was possible. In the war, the French generals could not imagine a German attack in northeastern France. The Germans in 1940 did not anticipate the effectiveness of British air defense—and abandoned the bombing of British airfields when it was about to be surmounted. In 1941, Stalin refused urgent advice from both Churchill and his own generals that a German attack was imminent. The German army was unprepared for winter war in Russia, despite Napoleon’s experience. The American generals told Roosevelt that the USSR was certain to collapse. At war in Europe three years later, they did not envisage the German winter offensive in the Ardennes.

The post-war world, from 1945 was full of similar errors on all sides. Some were of fundamental political judgement, others were produced by consummate ignorance, still others by the internal conflicts and a self-defeating division of labor in the military and political apparatus. Much of what the US attempted failed. Military operations and covert campaigns, each, provoked embittered resistance. Supposedly relying on its very developed wits, Israel has gone from military victory to political self defeat in an accelerating rhythm. The Soviet incursions into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979 were political catastrophes. The obsessive demand of the American unilateralists for ever more force periodically wearies an American public hardly conspicuous for critical reflection—but nothing interrupts the cycle for long.

Millennial American certainty and European wariness, national pride and historical diffidence, democratic consensus and tyrannical fiction, military enthusiasm and sullen pacifism contend continuously. Frequently, contention gives way to an unholy union of ideological opposites. East and West, north and south, geopolitics, ostensibly conducted with illusionless realism has been inextricably joined to cognitive distortion and psychological deformation. The bureaucrats, military officers, politicians nominally in charge are repeatedly overwhelmed by circumstances they cannot master, and which they involuntarily called into being. Just why what they do is designated as a response to “intelligence” is unclear. Whatever our modern elites have possessed of intelligence in the literal sense of the word remains a very scarce good. Some person or persons should be intelligent enough to think about it.

We know, thanks to biographers and historians (and novelists) how the United States constructed its modern empire. Now that its costs are so high, however, and the nation increasingly divided again on how to deal with the world, we Americans know neither how to keep it or withdraw from it.

After continental conquest and continuous warfare, our modern imperial epoch began in 1898, at Spain’s cost. US participation in the war of 1914-18 (like the war with Spain) provoked domestic opposition. German and Irish immigrants were instinctively dubious, agrarian populists and urban socialists were ideologically so. Still, war intensified the assimilation of the millions of Europeans who had arrived before and after the turn of the century. Wilson, the son of a Calvinist pastor, depicted the US as a new Israel—chosen to write history anew, and most Americans assented.

The US emerged from the First World War as global banker and manufacturer. The nation plunged into consumer capitalism, and Armstrong, Chaplin and Hemingway carried our culture nearly everywhere. The isolationists between the wars were not a coherent bloc. Some were motivated by ethnic resentment of the Anglo-Saxon elite, others by politial suspicion of the ruling class, others were ancestors of the later unilateralists. Unimpeded by much public attention, three very internationalist Secretaries of State from the older elite, Hughes, Kellog, Stimson, extended American power by enlisting finance and industry in the task. The military prepared assiduously for the next Great War. Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 began his Presidency as a cautious internationalist.When he succeeded in bringing the nation into war in 1941, he drew upon the banks, law firms and universities to command the new warfare state. The public, remote from the conduct of foreign policy, agreed that war was necessary to defend the economic and social substance of the nation.

The national division of labor that made the Cold War possible was forged not after but before 1945. Ordinary citizens gave, above all, consent—but also taxes for military expenditure. Especially after the mutiny in the armed services in Vietnam, conscription was abandoned. Economic constraints ensured an adequate supply of recruits. The Cold War ended, but the first war on Iraq and the Balkan intervention were followed by Afghanistan and Iraq again. Iran may be next… Islamists, terrorists, rogue states, a resurgent Russia, and an obdurate China (not to mention the familiar Cuban Communists and new antagonists like Chavez) explain the enormous resources invested in our military. (Fifteen billion dollar aircraft carriers are being built despite the fact that our own frogmen climbed onto one and could have damaged if not sunk it.)

Particular wars are criticised by ordinary citizens, our imperial trajectory is not. The arms industry, the public and private bureaucracies of the foreign and military policy apparatus are a permanent imperial lobby. A spectrum of issue groups (from the Israel lobby to defenders of a militant Christianity) argue about priorities but agree on American global primacy.

“The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite that I was ever born to set it right.” Hamlet’s lament moves those who consider that we are not masters but prisoners of empire. We cannot afford it, our attempts to rectify the ills of the world evoke derision and hostility. Supposed threats succeed one another with unfailing regularity, as newer generations systematically repeat the errors of the older ones. The dominant politicians and publicists, and many voters, regard critical scrutiny of our world role as weakness.

In the absence of organized public protest (the era of Vietnam seems epochs ago) could the experience of the nineteen twenties and thirties provide a political model? Then, a largely indifferent public allowed the foreign policy elite of the first decades of the century considerable autonomy. Obama, before becoming President, clearly aligned himself with the critical party. In office, thus far, whatever innovative intentions he had have been blocked by the inertia of the apparatus— the manipulative malevolence of his opponents, and the resolute sabotage of many in his own party.

Imperial exit by stealth is impossible. Is a cautious and step by step withdrawal achievable? The President’s plan for sanctions on Iran may be a preliminary to war—but it may also constitute the calculated if unacknowledged construction of an impasse.

The elements for a sustained American effort to reverse course exist.
Plenty of retired diplomats, intellgence officials, and military officers say what their serving colleagues think: the present course is internally and externally unsustainable. The universities are not reduced to intellectual servitude. Even some of the Washington centers of research occasionally function as other than factories for the serial production of cliches. There is a certain amount of independent journalism. One of four members of the Congress can be depended upon. Before our empire crashes of its own weight, an intelligent project to lighten the burden may be tried.

Historical learning is difficult. The Europeans have learned, collectively and nationally, that post-imperial existence is quite bearable. Our history is different and we will take a different path. Unfortunately, defeats larger than Vietnam may be necessary before the public accepts a redefinition of our nation’s role in the world. The Republicans are preparing to retake the Presidency in 2012 with a program of total bellicosity, which could multiply our present disasters, but also increase the dangers to American democracy itself. What is certain is that the world does not at all correspond to the absurdly simplified image of it often voiced on much of American television—and cynically purveyed by those who know better. General Petraeus has just said that the new offensive in Afghanistan will take twelve to eighteen months—implicitly refuting the fiction of an Afghan population eager to be liberated by NATO.

That is a fiction which no longer animates the Netherlands government. The Netherlands Labor Party, insisting on withdrawal from Afghanistan, has shown the old world realism not always evident in the European Union. One hears, in Europe, demands that it assume a world historical task. What about a Netherlands like contribution to the education of the American elite and public alike?

There’s a lot to say about CPAC. This morning the major papers are highlighting Glenn Beck’s speech. I like Glenn a lot and I think he has something to teach us. But not what he offered last night.

…

Third, to admit it is still “morning in America” but a “vomiting for four hours” kind of morning is to diminish, discourage, and disparage all the work of the conservative, Republican, and independent resistance of the past year. The Tea Partiers know better than this. I don’t think they would describe their rallies and resistance as a bilious purging but, rather, as a very positive democratic reaction aimed at correcting the wrongs of the current political leadership. The mainstream media may describe their reactions as an unhealthy expurgation. I do not.

A year ago, we were told the Republican party and the conservative movement were moribund. Today they are ascendant, and it is the left and the Democratic party that are on defense — even while they are in control. That’s quite an amazing achievement. But anyone who knows the history of this country and its political movements should not be surprised. America has a long tradition of antibodies that kick in. From Carter we got Reagan. And from Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama we took back a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, with midterm elections on the horizon that Republicans and conservatives are actually excited about, not afraid of.

To say the GOP and the Democrats are no different, to say the GOP needs to hit a recovery-program-type bottom and hang its head in remorse, is to delay our own country’s recovery from the problems the Democratic left is inflicting.

Indeed. One of the reasons that I voted for Obama is that I hope/predicted that we would see precisely this sort of dynamic.

EphBlog readers will certainly disagree about the Tea Partiers, but surely we can agree that Bennett is a better/smarter conservative than Beck.

This message was sent to Students, Faculty, and Staff on February 19, 2010 by Rebecca Ohm, Williams College Libraries.

Message:
Executive Order 9066 On this day in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Exec. Order 9066, authorizing “removal of resident enemy aliens”, to what were described as “military areas”. U.S. citizens or not, thousands of Japanese-Americans were interned in these camps, ruining lives and livelihoods in the process. MORE: http://www.williams.edu/messages/show.php?id=12644 from Rebecca Ohm, Williams College Libraries

Message details:

For more on this dark period in U.S. history, explore the extensive library collections on this aspect of WWII; search FRANCIS http://francis.williams.edu/ for subjects: Japanese Americans — Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945 Japanese Americans — Reparations World War, 1939-1945 — Japanese Americans

This is a cute little example of political correctness at Williams because it pretends that there is only one reasonable position to hold: That internment was evil. In fact, as with most controversial issues, there are two sides. Curious about the other side? Start with In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror by Michelle Malkin. Note especially the seriousness with which Malkin engages her academic critics.

Best part? The Williams libraries do not own a copy of Malkin’s book! Wouldn’t want to confuse the students . . .

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I don’t mean to accuse Rebecca Ohm of political correctness. I don’t know her. But every member of the Williams library staff that I have dealt with has been knowledgeable and cordial. Instead, I think this Daily Message illustrates an attitude that is widespread at Williams, as Professor Sam Crane’s comment demonstrates.

… the slightly (to put it kindly) unhinged Obama basher of the moment, John Drew.  (If you don’t believe him, you can even see his Williams ID … and be sure to check out who, unsurprisingly, tracked him down in the blog comments … actually, I’m surprised that he and David weren’t buddies during their mutual tenure at Williams).  Drew has achieved some minor notoriety in the extreme right-wing blogosphere via his claim that President Obama expressed … gasp … Marxist sympathies late one evening when Obama was a college sophomore.  Awww, snap!  What is his claim based on?  An unverifiable description of a single conversation that Drew purportedly had with a teenaged Obama, some 30 years ago.  I can certainly recall, with precise clarity, every conversation I had during chance meetings with strangers in the Perry keg line.

This guy’s blog and twitter feed read like they were written by Colbert staffers as a right-wing parody:

• self infatuation? Check … “My own credentials, by the way, were somewhat spectacular since I was the winner of the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association in 1989″ [yes, certainly "spectacular" to have published, apparently, a total of zero scholarly works other than various versions of a thesis written while in graduate school, and to hold down a series of part-time jobs at esteemed institutions like the University of Phoenix ... this guy's resume makes Bernard Moore look like James MacGregor Burns]
• paranoid belief that any and all personal failure is explainable by the pernicious effects of affirmative action (including a demand for “reparations” because he was born white)?  Check.
• religious-style “conversion” from the evils of Marxism to the righteous ways of Conservatism?  Check.
• distaste for Obama’s perceived meterosexuality and attempt to link any critique of Obama, no matter how attenuated (or nonexistent) the connection, to Tony Rezko or Jeremiah Wright?  Check.

Only a matter of time before this guy is doing the rounds with Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, Coulter, Palin, and the rest of the hate-Obama brigade … I love, in particular, that Drew states that he is an “award winning” political scientist who taught at a few of our nation’s “formerly prestigious institutions.”  I can only assume that he considers Williams to be “formerly” prestigious, unlike his more recent employers, like Hope International (the seventh best Christian business school in the country!) and UoP.

UPDATE: ID photo added by DK, along with material below.

(Found via the this New York Times comment thread about Martha Coakley’s election loss.)

John Drew writes:

Republican Scott Brown’s victory in MA is especially gratifying to me because I was once a resident of Massachusetts and active in Republican party politics.

As you may know, I was a young assistant professor at Williams College in MA between 1986 and 1989. While I was there, Williams College had the reputation of being the number one liberal arts college in the nation according to U.S. News & World Report.

As a young assistant professor, I was only one of three registered Republicans on the faculty. While I was there, I was friendly with two of the Marxist socialist professors who shaped the early intellectual life of Barack Obama while he was at Occidental College in Los Angeles – Professors Roger Boesche and Carlos Egan. I had known both Boesche and Egan when they were political science professors at Occidental College, my undergraduate institution.

Personally, I witnessed the damage caused by affirmative action face-to-face as objectively more qualified white faculty candidates were discriminated against in favor of African-Americans without comparable publication or research records. I complained about this injustice at the time…stressing the idea that affirmative action took away the honor of being a Williams College professor.

My own credentials, by the way, were somewhat spectacular since I was the winner of the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association in 1989. See, http://www.apsanet.org/content_4121.cfm

All in all, I’m so pleased to see Scott Brown elected as MA’s next U.S. Senator. If the Democrat party liberals who ran Williams College had been more kind to me, then they might have had someone on the faculty who could have predicted the forces which lead to Brown’s upset victory over Martha Coakley. Instead, it looks like liberal Democrats in Massachusetts (and elsewhere) were shocked and surprised by this result. It’s sad that being the right sex, color and political ideology is now so much more important to college administrators and faculty than being able to explain and predict the political future…

The Iranian leadership is learning, haltingly, the aggressively manipulative flexibility occasionally shown by the USSR in relations with the west. When, under Khrushchev especially, it indicated a willingness to discuss a western proposal, the western capitals became confused, even panicked. The Iranian offer to discuss uranium enrichment abroad has provoked the US and the ever dutiful Europeans to denounce Iranian deceit. There is no western strategy for Iran—only non-negotiable demands, and condemnation, provoking Iranian erraticism.

The US has three immediate options with respect to Iran. The unilateralists nostalgic for the ideological simplicity of Bush and Cheney and,the Israel lobby (it could be renamed the Likud lobby, as signfiicant segments of American Jewry doubt the competence of the Israel politicians now in power) propose to attack Iran, with no delay, after demanding instant cessation of Iran’s nuclear projects. That Iran is developing nuclear weapons is an item of faith for those who make no apologies for using falsified evidence to justify war on Iraq. For them, a prior attack by Israel is neither necessary or desirable. The Israel elite doubts that Israel by itself can successfully attack Iran, and prefers to let the US do so. The previous Israel Chief of Staff, the air force general who led the inconclusive war with Hezbollah, has just warned his nation against over estimation of its capacity to strike Iran.

The second course is the one now being pursued, by Obama. His apparent wavering results from the pressure of the Likud lobby, internal differences in the habitually uncoordinated military-political apparatus, and his being distracted by the economy, and the fall elections. He seeks to defer an attack indefinitely, while giving the impression of pursuing strenuous sanctions.

This approach has an advantage. The US military believes that we cannot attack Iran without incurring disaster when our forces are embattled in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Many officers doubt that any attack on Iran can succeed. The drive for sanctions is compensation for the weakness of our military position, about which both the military and the White House prefer not to speak. The military fear being asked what they are paid for. The White House is afraid of being charged with lack of will, however rational restraint might be. Since conflict in the Gulf would raise the world oil price, that is another ground for prudence.

The trouble is that sanctions are chimerical. China (newly offended by arms sales to Taiwan, an absurdity if it is intended to enlist its cooperation) will not participate, and Russia is recalcitrant. In a phantasmagoric escape from this dilemma, some in and out of the government advocate US pressure for “regime change.” Those who do so are, usually, devoid of any knowledge of Iran. Strenuous US isupport of the Iranian opposition, covert asssistance to it, will fortify the regime. The rest of the world will recall the US attachment to the Shah, encouragement or toleration of tyranny across the globe. One does not have to be as ignorant as Governor Palin to advocate regime change. The experienced and reflective ex-diplomat Richard Haas has just reversed his own position arguing against it, to knowing comprehension in Washington. He is being considered for a post in the government and as President of the Council on Foreign Relations, may in any event wish for rapprochement with estranged donors responsive to Israel.

Curiously, the policy of regime change, for those who wish to avoid war, is as good as the futile pursuit of sanctions. Since it is unlikely to work, it can be prolonged for a long time with the promise that success is just over the historical horizon. The danger, of course, is that the Iranians might recur to their ample capacity for retaliation, and so precipitate conflict.

Obviously, the wisest course for the US is to finally come to terms with Iran’s demand for recognition of the regional power status it already possesses, cure our anti-Islamist obsession, reduce consumption of oil, diminish our swollen presence in the Mid-East, and reduce as well our hypertrophied military budget. We could encourage the Europeans to autonomous policies in the region, and with them, compel Israel to abandon its illusions of omnipotence.

That would require a US President capable of constructing and maintaining a new majority. That was Obama’s initial vision. The west Europeans are of no help to him,. The German Chancellor, Defense Minister cand Foreign Minister endlessly repeat the most banal of Washington cliches. Does no one in Berlin realize that Obama called off his Madrid trip because he was tired of European “friends” who did not grasp how desperate his struggles in the White House? If, by whatever means, he can avoid armed conflict with Iran he will have performed a considerable service to the US, Europe, and the rest of the world. Much of American opinion refuses to recognize that we are no longer uniquely dominant. It is not too late for some European pedagogy.

Extra credit for any Eph references!

UPDATE: McDonnell reply here.

And just because Obama is done speaking does not mean that the political conversation needs to end here. What was the most surprising/enjoyable/annoying part of either speech for you?

After a year in office, the President seems—rather like most of his predecessors—a prisoner in the White House. The New York Times, not conspicuous for its irony, has just written that, other matters permitting, he hopes to do something about unemployment.

Failure to reverse it would indeed make his re-election very difficult in 2012, and is likely to result in large Republican gains in the Congressional elections of November 2010 when the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate will be at stake. The victory in the special election to choose a successor to the late Senator Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts (held exactly one year after the President’s assumption of office) of an unknown and not visibly gifted local politician who campaigned as exponent of the ordinary people’s virtues against the vices of the political elite, shocked the Democrats—who became aware of the danger too late to avert it. The President’s approval ratings in the public opinion polls are not worse than that of many of his predecessors at this period of the Presidency (at the end of January, half the public thought he was performing to their satisfaction) –but the contrast with the large expectations he evoked earlier, the returned confidence of the Republicans and demoralization and pronounced division amongst the Democrats, is very striking.

The relationship between domestic and foreign policy in American Presidencies follows no very standard pattern. In general, a President whose standing in domestic matters is high is freer to maneuver in foreign affairs. That is not always the case, and Lyndon Johnson, a very successful and major domestic reformer, knew that the Vietnam War was unwinnable but did not act on his insight because he feared being attacked as weak. Yet in 1964 he had won a very convincing victory against his opponent, Senator Goldwater (whom he charged with planning to do what Johnson promptly did in 1965, expand the war in Vietnam.) Nixon, per contra, entered the White House in 1969 with a reputation for unmitigated bellicosity, and proceeded to open relations with the People’s Republic of China (refused by the US, absurdly, since the Communists’ assumption of power two decades earlier), engaged in serious negotiations with the Soviet Union, and in effect abandoned our south Vietnamese client state to its fate. As the last President Bush became increasingly mired in what struck an American majority as an interminable and for many, unnecessary, war in Iraq he found that despite his re-election in 2004, he had no majority for his domestic priorities, permanent and structural rather than incidental reductions in expenditure for the American welfare state.

The Obama Presidential majority of November 2008 clearly sought a new beginning in our politics, but how many of the President’s voters shared his complex and differentiated foreign policy perspective is not at all clear. He took his election as a mandate to announce policies which would have been inconceivable under Bush and unimaginable had McCain won: reconciliation with the Islamic world, new beginning of cooperation with China and Russia, an end to hegemonic bullying in the western hemisphere, an invitation to the European Union to propose its own initiatives in world politics (of which it proved incapable), US cooperation in serious measures to control environmental destruction, a new US initiative to bring Israel and the Palestinians to a settlement, and negotiations with Iran on its nuclear project.

The program would have tried the capacities of a Franklin Roosevelt and contrasts with the minimalism forced upon Bill Clinton when he lost the Democratic majority in the House after two years in office, in 1994. Actually, in its comprehensive multi-lateralism and emphases on negotiation and economic and social development, with human rights, the Obama program is an enlarged continuation of the one Clinton espoused, but had difficulty executing. It remains to be seen if, under incomparably worse domestic economic conditions than those of the Clinton era, and with the burden of all of the losses incurred by the Bush government (Muslim hostility and generalized suspicion of our competence and motives), Obama can move forward a much more ambitious set of projects.

We have a foreign and military policy apparatus which perpetuates itself and its interests.
Its self-destructive invention, the war on terror, is hardly evidence for its perspicacity—and raises suspicions about the motives of some of the more intelligent of its members The major problems we face are: the proliferation of cultural, economic, ethnic, political and religious conflicts across borders in the absence of anything like reliable institutions of global governance, actual and potential struggles over access to markets and raw materials, major changes in economic capacity, wealth and power between the continents (with the European Union and the United States no longer occupying the commanding heights), the threats of irreversible environmental damage.

The problem of maintaining the high American standard of living is far larger, and far more difficult, than the problems of security—the more so, as many of our national conceptions of security rest on unrealistic notions of invulnerability. Our nation over time has been painfully knit together, but at the moment its cultural and ideological divisions are very acute. What we have of consensus has generally come from economic gains allowing the political and social integration of groups otherwise in conflict, or at least, encouraging explicit or tacit periods of truce in our own war of each against all. We may soon import superior Chinese railway systems (just over a hundred years after importing Chinese peasants to build our own) — a change in the division of international labor with real and symbolic consequences for the society which describes itself as “the greatest nation on earth?” Some of the change has already taken place, undermining for those US citizens able to deal with critical ideas the view that the rest of the world wants nothing so much as American hegemony. The explicit question by the Chinese Prime Minister not so long ago as to whether, in view of its large holdings of US government bonds, China could be sure that its savings were secure disturbed the economic elite. Much of the rest of the nation was and remains too concerned with its own economic condition to notice. In the Massachusetts election, the Republican winner insisted on the economic failures of Obama, while denigrating the idea of governmental action to redress the economy and articulating a primitive free market ideology. Apart from a resolute advocacy of torture for accused terrorists and deriding the idea of ordinary legal procedures for them, he said almost nothing about foreign policy.

When I was at the Harvard University Graduate School (1947-1952) my fellow students were figures like the late McGeorge Bundy, the late Samuel Huntington, Carl Kaysen and Henry Kissinger (as well as rather different persons like Robert Bellah and the late Clifford Geertz). The reigning ideas had to do with “modernization”—a thoroughly ethnocentric view in which there was no need to persuade other nations to imitate us since, given half a chance, they would wish to do so. That the world was marching toward a secular and progressive future, a society of consumption with large amounts of cultural choice, was an item of faith, if with nuances. Kissinger wondered if the US were tough enough for the struggles necessary before the golden age dawned, Bundy was worried that the nation might take democracy so seriously as to dispense with the leadership of those so obviously qualified to exercise it, like the Bundy family. That in the less academic neighbourhoods of Cambridge, Massachusetts (and the rest of the country) our fellow citizens had radically different conceptions of the nation did not trouble the prophets of Harvard and MIT. This year’s electoral surprise to many in our elites has, clearly, historical precedent.

The Cold War did not defend an American way of life, it became the American way of life. National mobilization for the wars in Korea and Vietnam, an enormous expansion of the military and political apparatus, considerable anxiety over resistance without and dissent within, and the singular denials and deformations entailed by preparation for nuclear war produced an atmosphere in which apocalyptic visions and banal careerism merged, The New Deal legacy remained intact, right through Nixon’s Presidency, mainly because a labor force in which one of three workers was unionized was able to claim a decent share of national product and elect sufficient numbers of national and state legislators to maintain governmental measures of social protection. (It was only in the seventies with the gradual decline of American manufacturing that union membership began to fall to its present low of somewhat above ten percent of the labor force.) International economic institutions the US had designed and still controlled contributed to the maintenance of economic supremacy.

The post-war decades certainly brought positive changes in our nation, the integration of the descendants of the great wave of immigration between the Civil War and the World War, a large improvement in the condition of women, and a remarkable increase in racial equality. The years 1945-90 also brought problems now very acute. Manufacturing peaked and then declined, our educational system bi-furcated into one with the most effective universities and the most under performing schools in the industrial world, our sense of a national mission rigidified into an ethnocentric triumphalism. The party of progress remained dominant, but broke in two. More than one half of the nation considered that the American revolution had been achieved, it remained to defend it against the envious and the evil. A considerable minority insisted on the uncompleted tasks of the twentieth century project of social reform—and on the danger to the US of exploitation and oppression elsewhere. Meanwhile, at least a fourth of the citizenry are political and religious fundamentalists. They think climate change an invention by arrogant scientists, resent those who too obviously think in ideas of more than one syllable, conceive of government as coercive and threatening, respond to immigration with xenophobia, and do not accept the legitimacy of the President. In a situation of intensified political polarization (for all of the President’s appeal to reason) they constitute the Republicans’ mass of political maneuver, and account for the opposition party’s decision to seek the political destruction of the President. The irresistible rage which moves the fundamentalists is something other than a critical view of the stratification of the nation and the concentration of power in it. They know enough to sense the contempt and exploitativeness with which our elites treat them. . .

The end of the Cold War brought not a respite but new problems which dismayed much of American opinion, since they seemed by comparison with the confrontation with the USSR intractable, and for many, inexplicable. (“Why do they hate us?”) Obama’s intentions of making a new beginning in our relations with the rest of the world met several sorts of resistance. That large part of the society which does not read Foreign Affairs (circulation, 145,000) remained unreflectively if at first inarticulately skeptical.

Attached on account of the Cold War and the relative quiescence of the decade which followed it to a view of the world in which the United States was in command, it was unresponsive to arguments on the necessity of multi-lateralism—and considered recourse to force of one or another kind part of the order of social nature. The so-called foreign policy community (academics, bureaucrats, journalists, politicians and their staffs, military officers and those in business, finance, the professions with vocational interests beyond our borders) is not a community at all but a set of exponents of quite antagonistic ideological and material interests—united, of course, in wishing to retain its monopolization of the political agenda.

It has been unusually difficult for the President to form and achieve control of his government. A US President names some five thousand officials, his own staff apart. The process is preposterously cumbersome, the requisite approval in the Senate slow and now often delayed or blocked by the Republicans who are following a policy of total obstructionism. The Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Latin America could not take office for eleven months, because the Republicans objected to the President’s open disapproval of the coup d’état in Honduras. Staff appointments to the White House and the executive agencies do not require Senatorial approval but are subject to extreme critical scrutiny by the opposition which has obliged the President to relinquish some of his initial choices. The Israel lobby succeeded in stopping the appointment of one of the most talented of American diplomats to a senior intelligence post because of his lack of enthusiasm for Israel’s occupation policies. There are several hundred Presidential appointments of this sort and if in some areas (the environment and labor and social protection) the President has had a relatively free hand, foreign and military policy remains terrain where strong views and independence of judgment are not always career enhancing.

The President in re-appointing Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and naming Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State sought persons who would protect him against the very large capacities of the foreign and military policy apparatus to sabotage Presidents—and who would also serve as guarantors of his innovative projects insofar as possible. Those possibilities have not been very large and are not becoming larger.

Gates, who will stay for at least another year, was chosen because he had with former Secretary Rice drawn away from the unremitting aggressivity and unilateralism of Cheney—and, prevented Israel from attacking in Iran in 2008. Gates wrote a doctoral dissertation on Soviet foreign policy, and was a relatively competent CIA Director in an office which fells most of its incumbents, He insists on the indispensable political aspects of military action. That, to be sure, is what the newer generation of admirals and generals (most in possession of advanced degrees from the universities) thinks—the question being, what sort of politics are at issue? Gates thinks that US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan can temporarily neutralize adverse political circumstances, giving political processes (and long term projects of reconstruction) time to set matters right. He rebuked (if softly) the US commander in Afghanistan, the special forces general, McChrystal—who had openly challenged the President on the number of troops to be sent to Afghanistan. McChrystal had previously overseen in Iraq the selective killing of adversaries of the occupation, as well as the bribery of others. Under Nuremberg criteria, he would be at severe judicial risk. Now he has intimated a willingness to bring the more cooperative of the Taliban into Afghan government. Like his superior, General Petraeus, he seems unable to imagine that those in other nations who do not welcome American intervention are not necessarily malevolent or, at best, uninformed. It is difficult to avoid the impression that like many others in the permanent apparatus, the generals are indifferent to who is President under them.

The President engaged in a long and somewhat audible period of reflection with his advisors on Afghanistan, and finally agreed to send McChrystal a large number of troops—accompanied by a very weak undertaking to start withdrawal in 2011. Given Afghanistan’s capacity to defeat invaders who intrude on its perpetual civil war, it is exceedingly unlikely that the American military operation there will succeed. The President is threatened by entrapment in a situation which can only worsen. He has explicitly denied the similarity to Vietnam, but the similarity is obvious. Kennedy refused the military and political advice he was given and was on the point of withdrawing US forces from Vietnam before he was murdered, possibly on that account. Neither Johnson or Nixon or Ford could extricate themselves before total defeat. Whatever their geopolitical miscalculations (and they were considerable) their primary motivation was fear of domestic political criticism.

Actually, Obama may have had more scope for reducing the American engagement than he allowed himself: It is now an open question of whether it is too late for him to devise a retreat. The public is not enthusiastic about the Afghan war, and is incessantly told on television that the real problem is in any case Pakistan. Some senior Congressional figures have criticized the escalation in Afghanistan, and we may have a debate on its funding. The attempted destruction of an airliner over Michigan has shifted attention to Yemen, an environment even more inhospitable to intervention than Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President finds himself making war in five Muslim nations: Iraq, where little is clear except that Iranian influence has greatly increased, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He had previously called for increased US involvement in Africa—but instead of a program of development (in which China is already a very effective competitor) the US may find itself engaged in a limitless struggle against Islamism there too.

Who, on a daily basis, helps the President in these circumstances? The staff of the National Security Council is quite large and in effect it is a miniaturized intelligence agency and Department of Defense and State, with some domestic security functions as well. It is staffed by a mixture of diplomatic, intelligence and military officers and others recruited from the congressional staffs and the universities. The National Security Advisor, the former NATO commander General Jones, casts himself as a bureaucratic coordinator. Jones shares an advantage with the President, he grew up abroad (in France) before attending university in the US. Jones’ workmanlike approach may be due to a trait he shares with many other Roman Catholic officers, a certain sense of the limits of the legitimate and practical uses of military power (rather evident in the pronouncements of the intelligent and sober head of the armed services, Admiral Mullen.) The President is his own chief strategist —with occasional public support from the Vice-President, who was the Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and who thinks (correctly) that many US foreign military and political ventures end either badly or ambiguously.

Senator Kerry, as his successor at the head of the Committee, seeks a large public role but is curiously reluctant to express decided opinions. The Chair of the House International Relations Committee, Congressman Berman of Los Angeles, is a persistent ally of Israel His opposite number, the senior Republican member, Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, is the voice of those of the Cuban émigrés who wish no opening to Cuba. The Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Levin, is aware of the need to control both the costs of the military budget and the Napoleonic fantasies of some of the senior officers. What he says is rational and reflective, which accounts for the fact that he is not much listened to, a condition he shares with the Vice-President.

Much of the experience, intelligence and knowledge possessed by staff of the National Security Council seems often not to rise through a compartmentalized and hierarchic structure to end in the Oval Office. The President has recurred, clearly, to his domestic political advisors—whose interest is in the immediate domestic consequences of foreign policy decision. The chief of staff, former Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, is a very strong supporter of the right in Israel, from which his family emigrated. The senior political advisor, David Axelrod, appears to be more skilled at elections than at governance. In any event, he has no foreign policy profile.

Secretary of State Clinton has surprised critics of her conventionalized foreign policy utterances as Senator and Presidential candidate. She has demonstrated not only a grasp of the ambiguity and complexity of issues like human rights, and nuclear proliferation, but a willingness to undertake the education of a public usually exposed to vulgar simplifications. On problems of economic and social development and relations with, variously, China, Iran, Russia, she expresses the multi-lateralism, the emphasis on collective security and long term negotiation, of the progressive Democrats and the Republican realists descended from Eisenhower (their leaders are the older Bush National Security Advisor, Scowcroft, Colin Powell and the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Lugar—who is almost as inaudible as his Democratic colleague, Kerry.)

It remains to be seen what influence she will have on the President himself. Perhaps she has not abandoned intentions of running again for the Presidency, either in 2012 should Obama decide to retire or in 2016 if he runs in 2012. If so, she seems to think that the views originally uttered by the President from which he has at times walked or run away might still have political advantages. As long as she is in office, of course, she cannot contravene the President. The increased attention to the domestic economy devolving upon the President as the mid-term elections approach (and as the economic situation, with well over ten percent of Americans unemployed and others threatened, with whole sectors like public employment devastated, shows little sign of fundamental improvement) entails increased autonomy for the Secretary of State. She shows no inclination to excessive modesty and is clearly prepared to enlarge her role.

His Cairo speech promised reconciliation with the Muslim world. The President’s recent reluctant repetition of the rigid language of the war on terror, if with warnings about the priority of liberty, is evidence of how difficult the project has become. The campaigns of assassination in Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Yemen—whether by attacks from the air or by American special forces and their local allies —may or may not eliminate important cadres of Al Qaeda. They are certain to enflame broad fronts of resistance. American reflection on the origins of Muslim disaffection amongst the Muslim diaspora communities in Europe and the US is mostly absent—and what there is of it is often marked by shallowness when it is not pure charlatanry. The very language of discussion assumes that there is a unitary movement against the west which has nothing to do with the imperial European past or expansionist American present. Here, the Israel lobby if less omnipresent than before misses no chance to stimulate fear of Islamism.
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The American alliance with the Pakistan army, government and public is exceedingly troubled. Relations with Turkey and even the Saudi royal family are strained. US pressure on Israel to take serious steps toward negotiation with the Palestinians is so ambiguous that different parts of the government do and say different things. Still, the special envoy for Israel and Palestine, Senator Mitchell, has threatened Israel with reductions in economic aid—a step not actually taken by a US government since the senior Bush and Secretary Baker dared to do so two decades ago. US projects to exact flexibility from Israel have usually been sabotaged by Israel’s supporters in the government and the Congress

The situation is different now in three respects. It is difficult to imagine the President, if he wishes to advance his general plan for reconciliation with the Muslim world, accepting further rebuffs from Israel. The American Jewish community is itself increasingly divided, with the monopoly of leadership hitherto exercised by those who unhesitatingly take instructions from west Jerusalem challenged. Meanwhile, the previously restrained restiveness of other segments of US opinion, particularly in the foreign policy apparatus, has become more audible: there is more open critical discussion of Israel’s disproportionate influence in the US…

It is true that even a full and rapid solution to the problems between Israel and the Palestinians will not end the many conflicts between the US and the Muslim world. Without it, however, other changes remain both improbable and unlikely to last. Israel’s supporters, meanwhile, are intent on aggressive unilateralism in general, and particularly critical of negotiating Iran rather than attacking it.

It is to the President’s credit that he has indeed left open the possibility of treating Israel in terms of independent criteria of our national interest. In a long delaying action, he has held off the demands by Israel (and the entire spectrum of unilateralists) to attack Iran. The delay has allowed Iran’s domestic crisis to surface. China and Russia may profit from an eventual American confrontation with Iran, but a new Mideast conflagration would hardly leave them untouched. It does not follow that they will support sanctions but it is likely that they will assist the President in extending negotiations with Iran (even indirect ones) as long as possible.

The President has been bitterly criticized for his supposed recalcitrance to press China and Russia, as well as Iran and Cuba and Venezuela, on human rights. Many of the critics are unconditional apologists for Israel’s occupation of Palestine, many are quite selective in their (feigned or real) moral indignation. Obama’s experience of the world, his Kenyan and Indonesian families (as well as American origins in New Deal Kansas) have taught him, clearly, that the world does not tell time to American clocks. What he has not done, yet, is to embark on a serious and sustained campaign to re-educate the nation. He has not stated with the bluntness of John Kennedy (10 June 1963) that as we share the world with others, we cannot impose our model of society upon all or most of them. He has hinted at this, his omnipresence on the international stage (as in his admirably unscripted intervention at the Copenhagen climate conference) is intended to demonstrate to the nation that there are profound and permanent grounds for responding to the world in ways which mark a rupture with the assumptions that prevailed since 1945—but the nation has not gotten the message.

One reason is, of course, the conviction by many in the foreign policy apparatus (and those who seek to join it) that they can justify their privileges only by espousing a simplified triumphalism. It is an interesting question as to why a nation composed of immigrants (still a majority from Europe) should be so ignorant of other nations and their histories. It is unclear, indeed, how much of authentic as opposed to mythicised American history they know. When we add to the elite’s rejection of Edmund Burke’s conception of their legislative functions, their frequent dependence on ideological and material interest groups of every kind, we can apprehend their anxious immobility in a world escaping their control. Like Johnson in Vietnam and Nixon and Kissinger after them, they think it politically perilous to say aloud what some of them, surely, know.

It is regrettable that, neither in domestic or foreign policy, has Obama been willing to experiment with calling to government at least a few of our own dissidents— or even those who take the dissidents seriously. His failure to insist on the appointment of Freeman denied the nation the services of a thinker in direct line of descent from George Kennan, and with direct experience of both China and the Islamic world.
. He allowed his White House staff to force the departure of his own Counsel, the experienced and reflective foreign policy veteran Gregory Craig. Craig’s error was to have insisted on more rigorous adherence to the Constitutional protection of freedom than his colleagues thought compatible with the anxious state of public opinion. (Craig, probably, will be called back in some future, and inevitable moment of crisis when a senior member of the present staff will have to be replaced.)

In explanation, if not defense, of the President –he cannot be expected, alone, to reverse the accumulated errors and illusions of the last century. Our admirals and generals are definitely not fighting the last war: some recognize that they have new ones to lead. The President is fortunate, in fact, to have as the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen—who has dared to say on national television that the nation’s financial stringency will compel new forms of military economy. Many in the foreign policy elite are victims of their own self-importance—but are sufficiently at one with ordinary citizens to share their ethnocentric provincialism. A grotesque peculiarity of American argument has intensified: those most strident in calling for “strength” have never been in the military, whose officers are usually far more restrained. . There is something of moral onanism about the desktop heroes who crowd the opinion pages of our media.

The President is constrained by the domestic situation. Quite apart from a real unemployment figure which is probably closer to thirteen or even fourteen percent than ten, one of eight Americans (and one of four children) are using government food stamps. His majorities in the Senate and House are uncertain, as numbers of Democratic legislators represent districts which voted for McCain and in any case, reject the New Deal’s welfarist and internationalist legacy. Severe budget reductions which would reduce our substantial welfare state, however, will increase the present domestic despair.

That the President has not, in the situation, called for a re-evaluation of our costly military and political expansionism (we have one thousand bases in over one hundred countries) is evidence for his caution. In his autobiography, he evoked two learning experiences. As a younger community organizer in Chicago, he learned to admire the older black pastors in an impoverished and under-privileged community: they knew that they could not do much for their congregants, minimal gains apart, but they kept at their tasks. He later reflected on what he had learned of the law at Harvard. Its function, he said, was to inform those at the bottom that things were so arranged that they were bound to remain there. Very occasionally, however, the law could be used to improve matters.

Were Obama to act less like a minimalist, his life might be in more danger than it is in already. Given the onslaught of hatred and stupidity he faces, however, he might be led to appeal over the heads of our elites to the majority which a year ago gave him their confidence and is now, clearly, disappointed. In this setting, one would wish for strong support for American alternatives from Europe. Alas, the only European voices recently heard here in Washington were those of Bildt and Rasmussen (in the Washington Post on 8 January) assuring the US of Europe’s inexpugnable solidarity with the American Afghanistan invasion. It is possible to imagine an article yet more unrealistic and servile—but only with difficulty.

Europe is important to our foreign policy makers insofar as it assents to what is asked or ordered of it. As far as the public is concerned— Brown, Merkel, Sarkozy and Zapatero could walk without escort from the White House to the Capitol down the Mall and would not be recognized except by a European tourist. Merkel with respect to Israel and Iran diligently repeats every crude formulation of the Israelis, and the singular meeting in Berlin of the German and Israel cabinets had some lines in our press. Sarkozy’s criticism of the Afghan adventure had none. It remains to be seen what impact Spain’s European Presidency may have. Disparagement of Obama for seeking to “Europeanize” the US has diminished since some in the media dared to report that, on account of their welfare states, the nations of the EU (especially in western Europe) may not have fared too badly in the economic depression.

I write as the President prepares to deliver his annual State of the Union address to the Congress and the nation. Large cuts in the Federal budget are to be announced (the large spending of the Pentagon and the huge new sums spent for internal security are to be exempted.) That represents a strategic retreat in the face of the relentless and successful Republican charge that the stimulus outlays with which he began the Presidency a year ago were largely wasted—a total fabrication exploiting the distrust of government of those who in fact are dependent upon it, but do not wish to be told so.

It is clear that the Republican counter attack on the Presidency, based not least on white America’s conviction that the Obama Presidency represents its dispossession, has thus far succeeded. Only if the President defends himself by initiating recovery from the economic disaster he inherited will he be able to win time and space for larger and long term foreign policy projects. One is reminded of Franklin Roosevelt, who inadvertently reversed recovery from the Great Depression by cutting New Deal spending in 1938—with the result that the US, with over ten percent of the labor force still unemployed, had to wait wartime spending from 1941 onward to put its people to work. Total mobilization to send, for instance, a million soldiers to Afghanistan and Pakistan is for the moment unthinkable. What is all too possible, however, are changes in southwest Asia which will endanger the forces already there, a severe confrontation with the Pakistan armed forces, and the necessity for a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, US officialdom thinks that it can count on Arab hostility to Iran to contain Iranian influence and power—even if Iran should acquire nuclear weapons, which is discreetly and tacitly assumed to be inevitable Those who recall the German-Soviet pact of August 1939 will not be surprised by an arrangement between Saudi Arabia, and possibly Egypt, and Iran. As for the rest of the world, Obama and Clinton have rightly put a good deal of effort into constructing a stable relationship with China. The new Asian empire, however, has its own objects. In the fifteenth century, a great Chinese emperor sent fleets of huge junks to Arabia and his admiral wanted to proceed to Europe. The ruler called off the venture, since he said, the barbarians abroad were of little interest or significance and at home, he had to keep the peasants contented. His successors might still think that—and after revaluing their currency, begin the accumulation of Euros. The consequences for the US economy of a large dollar devaluation are imprevisible and in the short term, damaging. There are more ways to cause panic in the US than to threaten it with missiles.

Political speech was free, or almost free, when the first amendment was passed, in two different ways: not only did the law now protect it, but the production and distribution of written materials (the only ones then available) was extremely cheap. In the early nineteenth century, yours truly might have started and turned out a weekly broadsheet almost as easily as I now turn out this blog. The point is not whether material like Hillary can be produced–of course it can, although it testifies to the decline of American political discourse in the last half century–the point is who will have the money to advertise it and broadcast it on cable television. Just as Anatole France remarked that the law impartially forbade both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges, the law now impartially allows David Kaiser, the heads of Citibank and Goldman Sachs, and Glenn Beck to make their views available on television to audiences of millions. The problem is that only three of them will be able to do so. The reformers of the 1900-80 era did not need rocket science to figure out that increasingly expensive modern forms of communication would obviously give incredible advantages to the rich and powerful and thus had to be regulated to give ordinary citizens a chance to be heard. A 5-4 Supreme Court majority has now thrown out a century of tradition and returned us to a form of political Darwinism (see my earlier posts on social Darwinism several years ago, easily located by a search at the top of the page.)

The current crisis in American life, I have been saying here now for five years, will lead either to a kind of New Deal revival or to a return to the Gilded Age. Karl Rove understands this and cited William McKinley as his political hero. The court just brought us immensely closer to a return to McKinley’s age.

Those like me who never have and never will abandon the New Deal principles they learned in their youth inevitably mourn the likely eclipse, for the rest of our lifetimes, of those principles. But once again my training as a European historian at least enables me to say that things could be much, much worse. Although the Republicans have frequently bent the law (most notably in 2000 and again this week), they have successfully undid the work of our parents and grandparents mainly through legal means. There is no Fascist movement or dictatorship on the horizon (although one could still emerge.) It was the America of the Gilded age to which my paternal grandfather came around 1900, making my own life possible. The liberal tradition will survive, even if will only be revived years after the Boom generation has passed from the scene. (I do not exclude the possibility that my own side might still prevail even in this crisis, but it does not look at all likely.) If the Founding Fathers managed to design a system that can preserve essential liberties and survive even severe swings to the right and left, they will still deserve our thanks.

Emphasis mine. Read the whole thing here.

The central theme of the recent book Packing the Court by Prof. James MacGregor Burns is the undemocratic and unconstitutional rise of Supreme Court power. He writes (emphasis mine):

In retrospect, the court has far more often been a tool for reaction, not progress. Whether in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century or the Gilded Age at the turn of the twenty-first, the justices have most fiercely protected the rights and liberties of the minority of the powerful and the propertied. Americans cannot look to the judicial branch for leadership.

Confronted with what he calls “unelected and unaccountable politicians in robes”, Burns proposes that the only way to break judicial power is for the democratic branches of government to challenge it, either through a constitutional amendment, or a somewhat more daring strategy:

Confronted by a hostile court repeatedly striking down vital progressive legislation, a president could declare that there is no place in a modern democracy for unelected judges to veto twenty-first-century laws. The president would announce flatly that he or she would not accept the Supreme Court’s verdicts because the power of judicial emasculation of legislation was not – and never had been – in the Constitution. The president would invite the partisans of judicial supremacy to try to write that authority into the Constitution by proposing a constitutional amendment. Through their representatives in Congress and the state legislatures, the American people would be given the choice denied them in 1803: to establish in the Constitution the power of judicial supremacy, or to reject that power. Only by this route could judicial rule be legitimated, “constitutionalized.” In the meantime, until the matter was settled, the president would faithfully execute the laws the Supreme Court had unconstitutionally vetoed.

It would be a risky strategy, an open defiance of constitutional customs and the myths and mysteries that have long enshrouded the court. Traditionalists would be outraged. Professors of law would express their concern in learned treatises. Powerful interests with a stake in the status quo – business groups, conservative lawyers, and their supporters in the political class – would spearhead a campaign of opposition. There might even be demands for impeachment. In the ensuing turbulence, though, the president would have an enormous strategic advantage. He would need only to sit tight. The burden would be on his adversaries to initiate the new and momentous amendment to the Constitution and to obtain a mandate for judicial rule. For once it would be the foes of reform, not the reformers, who would have to go through the constitutional hoops of amendment, with all the traps and delays.

Above all, it would be a test of leadership, of the president’s ability to mobilize followers behind a transformational goal, as FDR had so markedly failed to do in 1937. He would present the idea for what it was – a revolutionary challenge to judicial business-as-usual, to minority rule by a handful of judges, a fight for the Constitution as the people’s charter, not a lawyer’s contract.[...]

If judicial rule was not ratified by the people in the amending process, the Supreme Court’s exclusive grip on constitutional interpretation would be broken. Shorn of its supremacy, the court would still retain crucial tasks. It would still be called upon to interpret ambiguous statutes, adjust conflicting laws, clarify jurisdictions, and police the boundaries of federal-state power – virtually all of its present responsibilities except that of declaring federal laws unconstitutional. It would simply be brought closer to the role the Framers originally envisioned for it.

Quotation above taken from the Epilogue, “Ending Judicial Supremacy”, to Prof. Burns’ book.

Burns seems to expect that a constitutional crisis of this magnitude will occur at some point in the future, perhaps in the near future. With Citizens United, the opportunity for the democratic branches of govt. to reform judicial power may have occurred before even he would have expected it. What are the chances that the Democratic leadership in Congress and the White House will challenge the court?

To the Editor:

A year ago, if we had read in the paper that employers were hiring again, that health care legislation was proceeding without a bump, that Afghanistan suddenly became a nice place to take your kids, we would’ve known we were being lied to. Back then, we recognized that the problems Obama inherited as president wouldn’t go away overnight.

During his campaign, Obama clearly said that an economy that took eight years to break couldn’t be fixed in a year, that Afghanistan was a graveyard of empires and would not be an easy venture for us.

Candidate Obama didn’t feed us happy-talk, which is why we elected him. He never said America could solve our health care, economic and security problems without raising the deficit. Instead, he talked of hard choices, of government taking painful and contentious first steps towards fixing problems that can’t be left for another day.

…

It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything.

Ellie Light

Williamstown

Indeed. The College Democrats ought to invite Ellie Light to give a talk on campus. I bet that it would be very interesting . . .

(thanks to nuts for the link)

Soybean subsidies keep the Midwest economy going with food on the table for families and the world filled with plastics and culinary imitations, while EphBlog readers complain about the recent increase in the fresh tuna price at Dean and deLucca!

Question those senatorial hopefuls, hwc! And be sure to include the all-important soybean conjecture!

His Globe piece is presumably a good way to assess his platform. And it highlights all the bankruptcy of the current conservative establishment. Take a couple of issues. He starts by listing national problems:

Public debt has reached $12 trillion and counting, and Washington politicians want to borrow trillions more.

His solution?

My plan for the economy is simple: an across-the-board tax cut – in the tradition of John F. Kennedy – for families and businesses that will increase investment and lead to immediate new job growth. More tax increases will hurt our recovery. That’s why I have taken a no-new-tax pledge. My opponent will raise taxes.

Does anyone see the contradiction here? Without any tax increases, indeed with more taxcuts, the spending reductions required to reduce the debt will be fantastic: massive cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. Where does he outline these spending measures? Nowhere. Fiscally, he’s as fraudulent as Bush.

More absurdity here:

It’s time to admit that while the $787 billion stimulus had the best of intentions, it failed to create one new job.

Even if you believe that stimuli are wasteful or inefficient, I know of no sane economist who believes that $800 billion did not create one new job.

Then he’s in favor of the Massachusetts universal health insurance reform, on which Obama’s is based, but for some reason against the one for the country. Why?

But the healthcare bill under discussion in Washington is not good. It will raise taxes and increase spending. If you are a senior on Medicare, it will lead to a half trillion dollars in cuts to your care.

So Brown supports health care exchanges, a mandate, and universal care … but opposes healthcare exhcanges, a mandate and universal care. He is worried about the debt but actually opposes the proposed cuts in Medicare that can make universal insurance affordable – let alone the cuts necessary to bring us back from the fiscal abyss.

He is, in other words, a parody of the brainless bush Republican, mixed with Romney-like cynicism.

Left wing media supports Coakley .

Or this evidence that her opponent might be a dick/IRS cheat . Apparently, the health care coverage is less important than the fact that he’s making his staffers pay their own taxes so he can avoid payroll tax.

Or there’s Vicky Kennedy’s endorsement to consider .

Or the huffington post gets mad at centrists flip flopping .

And now, back to your regularly scheduled ephblog…

Riding a wave of opposition to Democratic health-care reform, GOP upstart Scott Brown is leading in the U.S. Senate race, raising the odds of a historic upset that would reverberate all the way to the White House, a new poll shows.

Although Brown’s 4-point lead over Democrat Martha Coakley is within the Suffolk University/7News survey’s margin of error, the underdog’s position at the top of the results stunned even pollster David Paleologos.

“It’s a Brown-out,” said Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s Political Research Center. “It’s a massive change in the political landscape.”

Unbelievable (almost). Losing Curt Schilling probably doesn’t help, nor telling Catholics that they should not work in emergency rooms.

I want Coakley to win because she is an Eph. But I also remember Gerald Amirault. Do you? Amirault remembers Coakley.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight is a remarkably good polling analyst. When he calls it a toss-up, I tend to believe him.

Here’s the Pollster.com aggregated chart:

Go read the whole thing.

via David Weigel, who notes:

All of that comes after Coakley, roused from what Democrats admit was a fairly lazy campaign, launched new TV ads.

The really surprising thing about this poll? While Brown has made his campaign explicitly about the chance Massachusetts voters have to block the health care bill, Rasmussen finds a solid majority of voters in support of the bill. According to the internals, 52 percent of voters back “the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and the congressional Democrats” to only 46 percent who oppose it. A plurality, 41 percent, of voters say the stimulus package has helped the economy–only 23 percent say it’s hurt. Coakley’s bumbling campaign can’t close the deal with an electorate that agrees with her on the issues.

Also, thanks to Cameron Henry ‘09 for pointing us to this article:

GOP candidate in Mass. Senate race says he raised $1.3M in 24 hours

Of course this other poll, commissioned by the Boston Globe, has Coakley ahead by around 15 points.  RedMassGroup blogger Rob Eno had this to say about the Globe’s poll:

The Boston Globe/UNH poll shows Coakley up 15 points among what they call likely voters. However even their poll shows the race tied amongst motivated voters. This is a special election.  Motivated voters go to the polls. Non-motivated voters do not.

But this is spin, at least to a certain extent – the poll report from the UNH survey center does show a 47-47 dead heat between Coakley and Brown amongst voters who report being "extremely interested” in the race (the word “motivated” is not used – cute spin, though!), but Coakley crushes Brown among voters reporting being “very interested.”  Since “interested” =! “motivated”, who’s to say what the difference in turnout motivation will be between those who report being “very" interested and “extremely” interested?

Another fun tidbit from the poll report – Coakley seems to do best in Western Mass AND “inside 128” [non-Mass people: that means Greater Boston, essentially], with weaker support in Central Mass and the Metrowest suburbs.  My admittedly limited understanding of Mass politics makes me think that’s kind of odd, since Republicans are supposed to do better the further away from the Boston area and I-495 you get…  Perhaps she’s got the native-daughter factor working for her, since she’s from North Adams?  Can someone with more [read: any] experience in Mass politics maybe comment on this, correct me if I’m wrong, and add some nuance either way?  Also, some on-campus relevance – since Coakley’s support is that strong out in Western Mass, and she’s from Western Mass, they should have a strong turnout operation for Coakley out there.  Current Ephs, get involved.  It’s fun!  And important.  But fun!

With the crazy variation in these polling numbers, and given the fact that it’s a special election…this campaign will probably end up being a nailbiter through to election day, even if it ends up as a twenty-point blowout, because nothing is certain, and there are a lot of Democrats in Massachusetts (and everywhere, really) who are upset with the way Democrats in DC have been handling things – as evidenced by the recent resignation (and reregistration as an independent!) of the town Democratic chairwoman in Framingham, MA.

A Jan. 4 Rasmussen poll of likely voters found Coakley leading her Republican challenger, state Sen. Scott Brown, by a smaller margin than expected – nine percentage points.

In the poll, 50 percent favored Coakley and 41 percent chose Senator Brown. The general election is Jan. 19.

Coakley was strongly favored coming out of the Dec. 8 primary due to the heavily Democratic nature of Massachusetts: Blue voters outnumber their red counterparts 3 to 1 in the state.

It’s funny how points is considered huge in some races and small in others.  Maybe it’s a bit of a surprise in a state with a 3:1 Democratic registration advantage, but nine points is still nine points.  But polls aren’t elections.

In elections with low turnout – and special elections like this one usually qualify – it’s true that such leads can evaporate when the election goes to the ballot box.  We saw that on election night in my home state of New York last November, when challenger Bill Thompson made up most of a 14+ percentage point deficit (looking at the Pollster average) to nearly unseat NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg (see Pollster.com’s graph here).  The gap separating Thompson and Bloomberg was just 4.6% on election night.

That being said, I remember most of the crazy upsets and near-upsets from election night ‘09 favoring insurgents against incumbents – times are tough, and people, more than being angry at any particular political party (though there’s definitely some of that) are angry at the folks in charge of things.  So, for example, 2009 was a very bad year to be an incumbent county executive in my neck of the woods.

This is where I tend to disagree with comments like this, from a consultant cited in the CSM article:

“He’s offered himself up as a protest candidate: ‘If you don’t like the way things are going in Washington, vote for me,’ ” says Dan Payne, a Massachusetts-based Democratic media consultant. “The winds are blowing against the Democrats right now.”

Granted, the Democratic brand has taken a big hit, but my bet is voters blame those in charge way more than newcomers – so, while incumbent Senator Chris Dodd in Connecticut bowed out rather than face a very tough reelection fight, Democratic Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is expected to hold that seat for Democrats easily.

Coakley ’75 is an attorney general running for U.S. Senate, not an incumbent senator being flogged with the Senate’s recent run of incredibly bad press.  So I don’t think she’s in for the world of hurt folks in the media think Democrats will be facing.  As for whether this poll indicates she’s in danger – nothing’s certain in politics, and a great field campaign combined with low turnout and a demotivated Democratic base could potentially pull an upset, sure.  But I wouldn’t bet on it, and I’m sure Coakley’s campaign is working hard and taking no chances.

I hope someone on campus is organizing to get out the vote for Coakley, though!  Working to get out the vote on election day is something everyone should do at least once.

Update: Sign up to follow the blog for the Real Mayor here. If you have “stories or anecdotes” to tell about the gas station or Art, the researchers are looking for input.

The Participants are:

• Andre Carson, the youngest Democratic member of the House and the second Muslim to serve in Congress, after Keith Ellison. He previously worked for the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.
• John Conyers, the second longest serving incumbent Congressman, and is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
• Danny Davis, a member of Congress since 1996, who also has the dubious honor of being considered by Rob Blagojevich as a possible replacement for President Obama. Bernard Moore, the event’s initiator, is a Senior Policy Adviser for Congressman Davis.
• Barbara Lee, a member of Congress since 1998, is the current Chair of the CBC, and was the only Member of Congress to vote against the Authorization of Force after the September 11th attacks.
• Diane Watson, who joined Congress in 2001 after a long time in California’s State Senate and a brief Ambassadorship.
• Bill Cosby needs no introduction.
• Wole Coaxum ‘92 is a Senior Vice President at JPMorgan Chase.
• William Spriggs ‘77 is Chair of Economics at Howard University and Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Labor.

Video of last fall’s event is here.

The Seattle’s mayoral race is too close to call, with environmentalist attorney Mike McGinn leading T-Mobile executive Mallahan in the first count of ballots released by King County tonight.

With 85,000 ballots counted, McGinn is currently up by 910 votes.

As McGinn came out to talk at his party at The War Room, supporters burst into huge cheers, hugged and high-fived chanted of “We like Mike.”

If the results hold it would be an upset for McGinn, who was outspent by more than 3-to-1, opposed by the city’s biggest business and labor groups, and seemed to back down on his biggest campaign issue — opposition to the deep-bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct — two weeks ago.

King County Elections officials predict a 56 percent turnout. In Seattle, a total of 210,000 votes are expected.

The McGinn campaign says it’s not too late to vote.

More images from the McGinn war room at the Stranger.

(h/t Andy Goldston)

Also, Stephen Colbert did a segment on this story a couple of weeks ago:

Today, Morgan and other activists are conducting a sit-in at the Environmental Protection Agency to protest mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. Live-blog here.

Derek Catsam ‘93 and Vermando ‘05 try to make a case for the prize. Chad Orzel ‘93 thinks that they’re trying to make American right-wingers’ heads explode. More discussion on WSO.

Sam Sommers ‘97 has an interesting psychological take:

Most of the pro-Obama crowd I’ve read, heard from, and talked to is surprised as well. And nervous to boot. Because even the most ardent Obama supporter has to admit that he’s still shorter on accomplishment than on promise, and they’re worried that this award will only fuel the fire of the style-over-substance critique.

If you ask me, this is the issue that should concern the Nobel Committee, given their apparent goals for today’s announcement. Because, yes, source credibility matters. But so does your audience. And when your preaching surprises and even distresses the choir, you may have a backlash problem on your hands. Not to mention the risk that all your future selections will be dismissed out of hand as well in some quarters, based on the precedent of this year’s choice.