The Freedom Fighter's Journal: Shovel Ready

President Obama has admitted that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects." But the voters have a "shovel-ready project" of their own.

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Commentary by Robert Tracinski

1. The Education of the New York Times

The election isn't even here yet, and the Obama administration is already demoralized and living under a pall of disappointment. The New York Times Magazine recently carried a long profile of the Obama White House, which included some really choice bits of whining from administration insiders. Like this:

The view from inside the administration starts with a basic mantra: Obama inherited the worst problems of any president in years. Or in generations. Or in American history.

In American history? Really? Bigger than September 11? Bigger than the Great Depression and World War II? Bigger than a nation half-slave and half-free? And then there's this one:

In their darkest moments, White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed.

Recognize that one? If you're my age or older, you may remember the last time we heard that. It was during the administration of Jimmy Carter.

I've excerpted some other top passages from the article below, but the upshot is that the Obama administration is not likely to find a way out of its current predicament, because they are still too caught up in the liberal bubble, too convinced that their only problem is they didn't do enough PR—yes, that's right, the guy who was never off of our TV screens all last year didn't do enough PR—and that is was something, anything other than the administration's failed and unpopular policies.

And they can't change this outlook, because they refuse to go out of the liberal "bubble." Here's one last example:

To better understand history, and his role in it, Obama invited a group of presidential scholars to dinner in May in the living quarters of the White House. Obama was curious about, among other things, the Tea Party movement. Were there precedents for this sort of backlash against the establishment? What sparked them and how did they shape American politics? The historians recalled the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, the Populists in the 1890s and Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. "He listened," the historian H. W. Brands told me. "What he concluded, I don't know."

Well, how come nobody cited the obvious historical precedent, the one the Tea Parties pay honor to in the very name of the movement: the Sons of Liberty in 1773?

Oh well, I guess if Obama liked to hang out with the kind of historians who pays attention to the Sons of Liberty, we might not be where we are. And he might not be headed toward the kind of political disaster he is powerless to avoid if this is the best he can do, intellectually speaking.

"The Education of a President," Peter Baker, New York Times Magazine, October 12

While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong — and what he needs to do to change course for the next two years. He has spent what one aide called "a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0" with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called "tactical lessons." He let himself look too much like "the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat." He realized too late that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects" when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead "let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts" so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise.
Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. "Given how much stuff was coming at us," Obama told me, "we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration—and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top—that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and PR and public opinion."...
It would be bad form for the president to anticipate an election result before it happens, but clearly Obama hopes that just as Clinton recovered from his party's midterm shellacking in 1994 to win re-election two years later, so can he. There was something odd in hearing Obama invoke Clinton. Two years ago, Obama scorned the 42nd president, deriding the small-ball politics and triangulation maneuvers and comparing him unfavorably with Ronald Reagan. Running against Clinton's wife, Obama was the anti-Clinton. Now he hopes, in a way, to be the second coming of Bill Clinton. Because, in the end, it's better than being Jimmy Carter....
In their darkest moments, White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed, no matter how many bills he signs. Everything seems to conspire against the idea: an implacable opposition with little if any real interest in collaboration, a news media saturated with triviality and conflict, a culture that demands solutions yesterday, a societal cynicism that holds leadership in low regard. Some White House aides who were ready to carve a new spot on Mount Rushmore for their boss two years ago privately concede now that he cannot be another Abraham Lincoln after all. In this environment, they have increasingly concluded, it may be that every modern president is going to be, at best, average....
That's a refrain heard inside the White House as well: it's a communication problem. The first refuge of any politician in trouble is that it's a communication problem, not a policy problem. If only I explained what I was doing better, the people would be more supportive. Which roughly translates to If only you people paid attention, you wouldn't be kicking me upside the head. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, laughed at the ever-ready assumption that all problems stem from poor communication. "I haven't been at a policy-problem meeting in 20 months," he noted....
While Clinton made late-night phone calls around Washington to vent or seek advice, Obama rarely reaches outside the tight group of advisers like Emanuel, Axelrod, Rouse, Messina, Plouffe, Gibbs and Jarrett, as well as a handful of personal friends....
As we talked in the Oval Office, Obama acknowledged that the succession of so many costly initiatives, necessary as they may have been, wore on the public. "That accumulation of numbers on the TV screen night in and night out in those first six months I think deeply and legitimately troubled people," he told me. "They started feeling like: Gosh, here we are tightening our belts, we're cutting out restaurants, we're cutting out our gym membership, in some cases we're not buying new clothes for the kids. And here we've got these folks in Washington who just seem to be printing money and spending it like nobody's business.
"And it reinforced the narrative that the Republicans wanted to promote anyway, which was Obama is not a different kind of Democrat—he's the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat."...
Still, for all the second-guessing, what you do not hear in the White House is much questioning of the basic elements of the program—Obama aides, liberal and moderate alike, reject complaints from the right that the stimulus did not help the economy or that health care expands government too much.

2. Shovel Ready

One of the amazing takeaways from the New York Times piece above is Obama's admission that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects," a reference to the vast and intricate web of environmental regulations that slow down the initiation of public-works projects. He found this out only after he pushed through Congress a massive stimulus bill spending hundreds of billions of dollars on, you guessed it, "shovel-ready projects."

Well, tell you what: the voters have a "shovel-ready project" of their own: we've dug the grave for Obama's majority in Congress, and in just a few weeks, we're going to pick up our shovels and bury the president's party for another generation.

This wave election continues to build. The latest RealClearPolitics projection, based on averages of poll results for races across the nation, is for a 54-seat Republican pickup in the House, with possible range going as high as 75 seats.

Meanwhile, Obama continues to lose voters who supported him in 2008, and the Democrats are experiencing a sudden deceleration in funding, including the loss of leftist money-man George Soros.

And a few other things are breaking the Republicans' way, like the fact that a dubious Tea Party candidate in the Nevada Senate race may be denied his role as a spoiler because normal ballot abbreviations prevent him from having the words "Tea Party" appear next to his name—which was his only electoral advantage.

And for once, I think we can be pretty satisfied with the fact that the Republicans actually deserve to win. The New York Times analysis below concludes that Tea Party radicals who favor a "strict interpretation" of the Constitution—that is, who actually believe in the limits the Constitution places on the power of government—are likely to win enough seats for form a very influential Tea Party Caucus.

And then there's this gem, from a complaint made by the editorial board of the New York Times: "With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate—including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning—accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming."

That alone is enough to pull the lever for the guy—or gal—with the "R" next to his name.

"Tea Party Set to Win Enough Races for Wide Influence," Kate Zernike, New York Times, October 14

Enough Tea Party-supported candidates are running strongly in competitive and Republican-leaning Congressional races that the movement stands a good chance of establishing a sizable caucus to push its agenda in the House and the Senate....
With a little more than two weeks till Election Day, 33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats.
While the numbers are relatively small, they could exert outsize influence, putting pressure on Republican leaders to carry out promises to significantly cut spending and taxes, to repeal health care legislation and financial regulations passed this year, and to phase out Social Security and Medicare in favor of personal savings accounts....
Tea Party nominees have performed better than expected in many cases, including races in which the establishment candidates they defeated in the primaries were considered the stronger general election contenders. This includes well-known nominees like Rand Paul, running for the Senate in Kentucky, as well as lesser-known candidates like Dan Benishek, running to replace a retiring House Democrat in Michigan....
While there is no official Tea Party platform, candidates share a determination to repeal the health care legislation passed in March....
The candidates also promise to carry into office the Tea Party's strict interpretation of the Constitution....
In a questionnaire for a Tea Party group, Steve Stivers, running for Congress in Ohio, said that only four departments—Defense, Justice, State, and Treasury—perform "constitutional roles," meaning "you could eliminate the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Interior, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy and others to return to a constitutionally pure government."

3. The Law of Intended Consequences

As I've been saying for some time, conservatives let the left off too easily when they attribute the disastrous consequences of big government to "unintended consequences." But what of the intended consequences of government regulations?

The decades-long "affordable housing" push, for example, was deliberately intended to lower lending standards in order to extend cheap home loans to people who would have been denied those loans under normal banking standards. The result was not just the extension of loans to millions of borrowers who have defaulted. It is also the fact that many of these loan agreements are turning out to be unenforceable due to the sloppy or fraudulent paperwork used to generate the loans.

That turns out to be the real significance of the foreclosure moratorium adopted by several major banks after they discovered a series of errors in their foreclosure proceedings. And worst of all, I have to admit that Paul Krugman is the one who brought this to my attention. Jack Wakeland sent me the link to a Krugman article that describes how the foreclosure debacle happened:

Now an awful truth is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn't exist. In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible. These loans were sold off to mortgage "trusts," which, in turn, sliced and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the borrowers' obligations. But it's now apparent that such niceties were frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now taking place are, in fact, illegal.

Jack notes a pattern I've described before: "Throughout economic history it has been during crashes that fraudulent financial schemes are usually discovered. They're discovered because the perpetrators who came up with schemes to hide the diversion of gains, cannot hide the gigantic leveraged losses those schemes always produce during a downturn."

"In this case, the fraud is a fraud regarding legal services. The number of mortgages originated every year tripled in the three year period, 2004–2006. The vast volume of routine work for legal filings drew a host of lawyers and document administrators into the field. It also drew a disproportionate share of incompetent practitioners and flim-flam artists."

The result of this new discovery—and of politicians' demands for a moratorium on foreclosures—will be to once again squash any nascent recovery in the housing market, by pulling thousands of homes off the market and preventing any efforts to find the bottom of the housing market and clear the huge inventory of unsold homes.

"Foreclosure Delays: 'Nail In The Coffin For Housing'," Dawn Wotapka, Wall Street Journal Developments blog, October 13

Bank of America Corp. last Friday agreed to halt all foreclosures and foreclosure sales, the first bank to do so. On Tuesday, Wells Fargo said it started a review of all pending home foreclosures in states where certain paperwork was required....
As we write today, foreclosed homes are being pulled from the market, and buyers—especially investors intent on quickly reselling or renting out foreclosed properties—are retreating to the sidelines amid growing uncertainty over the extent to which banks filed fraudulent foreclosure documents.
That's troubling for the market because foreclosure sales have been a big part of recent closings, helping some markets limp closer to stability. Housing can't truly recover until the foreclosure crisis ends.
We now know that's not happening anytime soon. These delays "are just going to cause more chaos and confusion," Alex Barron, a home-builder analyst with the Housing Research Center, tells Developments. "At this point, this is probably the nail in the coffin for housing. I think worse times are still ahead of us."

4. How Not to Fight a Counter-Insurgency War: The Anti-American President

For a great power like America—a nation that cannot be brought down by a lack of material capability—the only real determinant of victory in war is the will to win. As Bush demonstrated in Iraq, we can mess up the war in practically every conceivable way, but if the commander-in-chief still stubbornly insists on finding a way to win, the US military will eventually figure out how to do it.

The problem today, of course, is that we do not have a leader with anything resembling the will to win. We have an anti-American president whose goal is to renounce America's "exceptional" role in the world. And the ominous news is that he seems to be increasing his commitment to American decline with his choice of Tom Donilon as his new National Security Advisor, the top coordinator of the president's national security strategy.

Below, Peter Beinart describes how Donilon is a civilian political hack from the circle of Vice-President Joe Biden—the most foolish foreign-policy "sage" ever to appear in Washington—and explains that Donilon was chosen to lead the Obama administration's "war with the Pentagon." Specifically, Donilon can be expected to insist on an American withdrawal from Afghanistan in the middle of next year, no matter what the conditions on the ground—over the insistence of General Petraeus that the US needs to show a long-term commitment to succeed in a counter-insurgency campaign.

What are the consequences of signaling a desire for American withdrawal at all costs, as opposed to victory at all costs? See the next two items below.

"Obama's War with the Pentagon," Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast, October 10

James Jones is out as national security adviser; Tom Donilon is in. What does it mean? Among other things, that we may be headed for one of the greatest civilian-military showdowns in decades.
If you haven't read Bob Woodward or Jonathan Alter's accounts of Obama administration Afghan policy, here are the CliffsNotes: Since the moment Obama took office, the military, led by David Petraeus, has been pushing for a full-on counterinsurgency effort. In other words, a lot of troops for a very long time. Obama, from the start, has resisted, raising awkward questions about why we're expending massive amounts of blood and treasure in Afghanistan when Pakistan is the country that really matters. Vice President Biden has gone further, warning that given the mind-boggling corruption of Hamid Karzai's regime, committing to an Afghan counterinsurgency war would be lunacy....
General Jones was chosen, in part, because Obama knew this fight was coming. He wanted someone who could communicate with the generals and keep them from knifing him in the back. Jones didn't entirely succeed in that effort, which is one reason people in the White House never embraced him as one of their own. But if Jones was unable or unwilling to extinguish the flames of civil-military conflict, Donilon is the political equivalent of dousing them with gasoline.
From the military's perspective, Donilon is worse than a mere civilian; he's a politico. He was a party operative before he was a foreign policy wonk, which is one reason he worked so well with Rahm Emanuel, the man who pushed Jones to hire him as his deputy. At the White House, Donilon's political savvy was considered an asset. But within the military, his prominence was seen as evidence that the White House subordinated national security to crass political concerns....
Jones told Donilon that "you have no credibility with the military" and warned him to stop mouthing off to generals about topics he knew little about.
Donilon, after all, is a Biden guy. He worked on Biden's 1988 presidential campaign, worked for him in the Senate, and then worked on his 2008 campaign. His wife is Jill Biden's chief of staff. Biden is the administration figure most determined to limit the Afghan war and the figure who most prides himself on not being intimidated by generals. And there is evidence that Donilon shares his views. At one point in Obama's "AfPak" review, according to Woodward, Donilon bolstered Biden's contention that the Taliban, as opposed to Al Qaeda, poses no real threat to the United States. According to Politico, Donilon has been a strong defender of the summer 2011 deadline for beginning to withdraw US troops that Obama laid out when he announced the Afghan surge.
From the moment Obama made that announcement, the military brass has been undercutting it, suggesting that if America hasn't turned the tide against the Taliban by next summer, the troops will stay. With his decision to simultaneously surge and announce a withdrawal deadline, Obama essentially deferred last year's civilian-military showdown until next year. And assuming that the tide in Afghanistan hasn't turned—which is a pretty safe bet—the showdown is likely to be brutal, especially with Petraeus now directly running the Afghan war, and therefore even more invested in showing that the counterinsurgency doctrine on which he made his reputation can work there.
The conventional wisdom is that Obama chose Donilon because he's already the guy who makes the trains run on time. But it's also possible that he chose him because Obama knows that he is headed for a bureaucratic knife fight over Afghanistan, and in that internal struggle, he no longer wants someone like Jones who plays both sides. Instead, he wants someone who will help him wind down America's Afghan adventure, no matter how hard he has to fight Petraeus and company to do it.

5. How Not to Fight a Counter-Insurgency War: Terms of Surrender

In purely tactical military terms, we can win in Afghanistan, and we are winning. A recent article in the London Times (by way of The Australian, which gives us a chink in the paper's subscription wall) describes the optimism on the battlefield. The whole article is worth reading, particularly these gems:

The best Taliban commanders are dead or captured. Their men are harried and subject to constant attack and betrayal. They are under-equipped, overwhelmed and demoralised. In a word, the Taliban are losing....
"The Taliban are getting an absolute arse-kicking," said one top-level Westerner deeply involved with Operation Ham Kari, the latest big push by US and British forces in Kandahar. "It's been their worst year since 2001-02. We're taking them off the battlefield in industrial numbers. We're convinced that the initiative has really shifted."...
"The Taliban are broken and defeated here," Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the President and the south's most powerful Afghan leader, told The Times yesterday. "They are in a miserable state. Their best commanders are all dead and their fighters run here and there. Their casualties are high and they can barely fight."...
"We see an organisation that looks like any other army in reverse," said the official. "They say that their higher headquarters don't get it, that they haven't got the people, they haven't got the equipment. No ammunition. No detonators. Suicide bombers are failing to show up. Locals no longer agreeing to bury their dead or help the wounded to aid stations. Their leadership and logistical train has broken apart. The organisation is so chopped up that we are seeing mailroom guys trying to run the corporation."

Nice, isn't it? I particularly like the part about how "We're taking them off the battlefield in industrial numbers."

So what can go wrong? Well, our commander-in-chief could signal that we're going to bug out less than a year from now, so that the Taliban think all they need to do is to hold on and survive a little longer, and we'll leave and let them take over. And our local allies, anticipating this, could start trying to cut their own deal with the Taliban to let them back into power in the hope that the Taliban will eat them last.

That's what is so disturbing about the news of attempted negotiations with the Taliban. It's all part of good counter-insurgency strategy to negotiate with local tribal supporters of the Taliban, to hold out to them the prospect of a better life—not to mention a much longer one—if they cooperate with US troops and the Afghan government. But the ominous prospect here is for a negotiated peace deal with the Taliban leadership, which would leave the organization intact, give it a breather, and worst of all—according to some rumors—give it representatives in the Afghan government who would serve as a Trojan horse for a Taliban takeover.

As I've said before, the thing about these negotiations is that, if you do them right, you're negotiating the enemy's terms of surrender, but if you do them wrong, you're negotiating our terms of surrender.

The pattern descrised in the article below is partly beneficial—a stepped-up round of airstrikes and special forces raids meant to kill large numbers of Taliban, which is always a good idea. But the ominous part is talk about using these strikes, not to destroy the organization, but to pressure it into making a peace deal—which President Obama could then use as cover for a precipitous US withdrawal, of precisely the sort advocated by his new National Security Advisor.

The most important advantage we can have in a counter-insurgency war is persistence, the sense that we aren't going away and that everyone had better get on our side if they want to survive and prosper. Our commander-in-chief began his counter-insurgency campaign by throwing away that advantage—and ceding it to the enemy.

"US Uses Attacks to Nudge Taliban Toward a Deal," Dexter Filkins, New York Times, October 14

Airstrikes on Taliban insurgents have risen sharply here over the past four months, the latest piece in what appears to be a coordinated effort by American commanders to bleed the insurgency and pressure its leaders to negotiate an end to the war....
The stepped-up air campaign is part of what appears to be an intensifying American effort, orchestrated by Gen. David H. Petraeus, to break the military stalemate here as pressure intensifies at home to bring the nine-year-old war to an end. In recent weeks, General Petraeus has increased raids by Special Forces units and launched large operations to clear territory of Taliban militants.
And it seems increasingly clear that he is partly using the attacks to expand a parallel path to the end of the war: an American-led diplomatic initiative, very much in its infancy but ultimately aimed at persuading the Taliban—or large parts of the movement—to make peace with the Afghan government....
For all the efforts, American and Afghan officials were quick to play down any suggestion that peace was at hand—or even remotely near. Most of the Taliban leaders, if not the movement's foot soldiers, have given no sign that they are willing to make any sort of deal....
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and his advisers have been trying for months to engage the Taliban's leaders about the possibilities of ending the war. In part, Mr. Karzai and his team are motivated by concerns about Mr. Obama's plan to begin reducing the number of American forces here by next July....
For their part, the Taliban's leaders have mostly dismissed the possibility of making a deal with Mr. Karzai's government, declaring—not without reason—that time is on their side....
General Petraeus appears to be following a template that helped him pull the Iraq war back from the cataclysmic levels of violence that engulfed the country after the American invasion. Beginning in 2006, American commanders simultaneously opened negotiations with insurgent leaders while killing or capturing those not inclined to make a deal.

6. How Not to Fight a Counter-Insurgency War: "An Easy Bite for Terrorists"

To show how important the sense of American persistence is, observe how a failure of persistence can endanger even a counter-insurgency war we have already won, which is what is now happening in Iraq. The New York Times reports that former Sunni insurgents are beginning to feel they have been abandoned by the US and targeted by sectarian Shiites in the Iraqi government—and some of them are defecting back to al-Qaeda.

It's quite possible that the new defectors won't be enough to destabilize Iraq, that most of them will not want to ally themselves with al-Qaeda again after their brutal experience of a few years ago, and that Iraqi politics will veer close enough back toward sanity to keep the insurgents' legitimate grievances from festering. But that isn't something that should be left to chance.

Counter-insurgency war has a long tail end in which the amount of military force required to maintain a victory is relatively small—but overwhelming force has to be a constant threat in the background, and tireless diplomatic and political pressure has to be applied to keep the cause of the conflict from bubbling back up. In his rush to withdraw from Iraq, to stop asserting US interests abroad, and generally to ignore foreign policy, President Obama has not provided the leadership necessary to preserve victory in Iraq.

"Sunnis in Iraq Allied With US Rejoin Rebels," Timothy Williams and Duraid Adnan, New York Times, October 16

Members of United States-allied Awakening Councils have quit or been dismissed from their positions in significant numbers in recent months, prey to an intensive recruitment campaign by the Sunni insurgency, according to government officials, current and former members of the Awakening and insurgents.
Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters—many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military—appear to have rejoined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of them, covertly aid the insurgency.
The defections have been driven in part by frustration with the Shiite-led government, which Awakening members say is intent on destroying them, as well as by pressure from Al Qaeda. The exodus has accelerated since Iraq's inconclusive parliamentary elections in March, which have left Sunnis uncertain of retaining what little political influence they have and which appear to have provided Al Qaeda new opportunities to lure back fighters....
During the past four months, the atmosphere has become particularly charged as the Awakening members find themselves squeezed between Iraqi security forces, who have arrested hundreds of current and former members accused of acts of recent terrorism, and Al Qaeda's brutal recruitment techniques....
Leaders of the Awakening, who so far do not appear to be among those leaving, say they are not surprised about the defections given what they call the group's marginalization by the government and its abandonment by the American military....
Muthana al-Tamimi, head of the provincial council's security committee, said Awakening members were clearly returning to the insurgency, but that Baghdad should share the blame.
"The Awakening needs government support," he said. "They're not getting it, so they're an easy bite for terrorists."