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Richard Prince's popular column on the news media, published by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education (www.mije.org).
MAY 15 | 'The First Gay President' -- Not
2012'Hanging Out' With the President
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On Monday, President Obama took interview questions through a virtual "Hangout" on the social networking site Google+.
According to Google, 1.6 million votes were cast on 133,000 questions submitted last week by YouTube users. The president tackled some of the highest-rated questions, with five selected participants on Google+ engaging with him live, and the other questions chosen from submitted YouTube videos. The live Hangout format also allowed the participants to push back on the president's answers.
Moderated by Steve Grove, head of community partnerships at Google+, the conversation touched on concerns for small-business owners, students and veterans. In some of its lighter moments, Obama was asked to perform a jig (thankfully, he declined) and greeted by YouTube celebrity and spot-on Obama impersonator AlphaCat (with the president quipping that the only thing missing from the impression was some gray hair). Here are a few policy questions that made the cut.
In a YouTube video, a 52-year-old Occupy protester in Portland, Ore., explained that she is a taxpayer who has been unemployed for five years. She asked, "Do you have a plan for me?"
Obama first answered that the most important thing he can do to help the unemployed is to grow the economy, pointing to his long-term proposals to give federal incentives to companies that keep jobs in the United States, expanding the America energy industry and changing the tax code so that everyone pays his or her fair share.
"Obviously, for someone who's been laid off and they're 50 and older, it's a lot tougher," Obama said, trying to speak to the woman's immediate needs. He held up as a hopeful example a guest at his State of the Union address who, after being laid off in his 50s, got trained in a new field through a one-year community college program and found employment. "It is possible, but we've got to create more of those ladders of opportunity."
In the Google+ Hangout, a college student questioned the president's push for Americans to pursue higher education at a time when so many are struggling for basic necessities. He asked, "What is your plan to help students pay off all their student loans?"
President Obama clarified that he promotes any education beyond high school, whether it be a four-year institution, community college or vocational training. He also mentioned a new proposal to shift federal aid away from colleges and universities that don't stop increasing tuition and toward schools that do find creative ways to keep costs down.
When the student followed up by asking what advice he has for students worried about amassing loan debt when they might not find a job after they've graduated, Obama said that they have to more responsibly think ahead about what they want to do when they get to college. "Your counselors and other adults can potentially help you to identify what are going to be some of the growth areas of the future so you can make a good investment," Obama said.
Despite the valid concerns of student debt, he said it's still a solid investment to make. "The unemployment rate for folks who only have a high school diploma is multiple times higher than for folks who've got a college degree," he said.
Through YouTube, a homeless veteran in Boston asked, "Why do we send money to places like Pakistan and other places that are known to give money to terrorism ... when we've got guys out here homeless?"
The president first underscored his goal to eliminate veterans' homelessness, partially through increasing the Veterans Affairs budget. On foreign aid generally, he said that the 1 percent of the federal budget spent on foreign aid mostly goes to countries helping us with our national security.
"I do agree that a country like Pakistan is one where our relations have gotten more strained because there are a lot of extremists inside that country, and either for lack of capacity or political will, they haven't taken them all on," Obama said of the veteran's specific question. "We always try to find the right balance, making sure that if we're providing them with aid, they're also providing us with assistance in terms of making our people safer. There are times when they disappoint us in terms of their performance, but we're going to keep trying to engage as many countries as possible."
Cynthia Gordy is The Root's Washington reporter.
In Peace Prize Speech, Obama Proves a Student of War
Accepting the 109th Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway before an expectant world public, President Barack Obama delivered a thoughtful and nuanced speech about the reasons for war and the limits of peace. The Nobel Committee awarded the honor, previously granted to leaders of populist, nonviolent movements such as Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, to Obama just nine months into his tenure as US president. As such--and in the midst of American prosecution of two foreign wars--the speech was fraught with controversy. Ever self-aware, Obama acknowledged his "more deserving" predecessors, and sought to explain away the gap between the "hope" of peace the Nobel Committee cited in its award announcement and his own actions, most notably his decision to send 30,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan:
[W]e are at war, and I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict -- filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.
Obama deserves credit for not backing away from the elephant in the room--and gave a credible lesson in the history of war and the American role in the tumultuous 20th century world order, before insisting that wars--"just" or otherwise--are today inevitable.
I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
Obama also engaged two very interesting philosophical points--about intra-state conflict and about the capacity of world citizens, including Americans, to tolerate the concept of war. He noted that "The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos." This is a very important point. We may not call insurgencies and violent political clashes--what happened in Zimbabwe in 2008, or in Iran in 2009, for example--"war", but the loss of life and security suggest that we cannot call it peace. Responding to new types of conflict will be central to the 21st century world order. Obama maintained this broader definition of war when citing the need for food and climate security later in the speech.
Obama's second important acknowledgement was about the politics of war. As 9/11 recedes, the vaguesness of terrorism, the lack of direct sacrifice for the majority of Americans, and the remoteness of the foreign theaters where we prosecute war has led to a resurgence in anti-war sentiment under the president who promised change. Battling to defend his decision to escalate in Afghanistan to a weary crowd at home, Obama also took the opportunity to defend America to a skeptical world public:
...In many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower....But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions -- not just treaties and declarations -- that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.
Overall, the speech successfully blended historical context, powerful imagery, and a hard-headed defense of force in a chaotic world. But don't let the Nobel citation fool you: This speech was as much about war as the president's December 1 announcement on Afghanistan. He pointedly separated the work of activists from his job as a "head of state." Nevertheless, Obama leaned heavily on King in the closing moments of his speech, a call to action and to "an expansion of our moral imagination":
The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached -- their fundamental faith in human progress -- that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
For if we lose that faith -- if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace -- then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.
Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."
Watch the speech here:
--DAYO OLOPADE
Bill Clinton Up Close: Former Prez Dishes on Obama, Afghanistan and Climate Change
Former President Bill Clinton spoke to a group of reporters at his Clinton Global Initiative gathering in New York this week. With the backdrop of the United Nations General Assembly and the G20 summit around the corner, Clinton was voluble, direct and full of expertise on issues ranging from health care reform (“We should fight like crazy to make the bill as good as we can”) to Afghanistan (“This is an away game, right?”) to the rights of women and girls worldwide (“You’ve got a Secretary of State that thinks it’s the most important thing going.”)
Framing the motivations behind the CGI (now in its fifth year), Clinton said:
Most of the time we were in politics we only debated two questions: What are you going to do and how much money are you going to spend on it? … Nobody ever asked the third question: How do you propose to spend whatever you have to maximize your good intentions in concrete results? …We strive for a min of speeches a maximum of conversation about what to do.
The private conversation with Clinton began and ended on the future of energy--also the subject of President Barack Obama’s address to today’s United Nations summit on climate change. Clinton, hoping to lead the conversation on the global green future, stressed over and over that the politics of environmental action is not a matter of tree-hugging but of dollars and cents:
We’re trying to disprove this myth that still has a grip on Congress, especially Democrats from traditional industrial states: that this is a net negative for the economy. … It is a huge myth that still as a stranglehold. I am convinced it’s the greatest economic opportunity we have.
Clinton is right. For every 900 jobs created from nuclear energy, and every 800 from coal production, 2,000 jobs are created in solar generation and 6,000 jobs in weatherization and retrofitting. Lower-income and immigrant workers “can be trained quickly and mobilized quickly, and there is no limit to what you can do,” he added. The former president also repeatedly brought up Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain and Germany—the industrialized nations who were comparative economic successes in the 2000s, with new jobs, rising median incomes and reduced inequality. What do they have in common? “They’re going to beat their Kyoto targets,” he said.
Needless to say, the U.S. didn’t ratify the Kyoto Protocol under Clinton in 1997, and China—along with the U.S., the largest emitter in the world—is at the United Nations to seek some kind of absolution before the thorny December climate change negotiations in Denmark. It’s clear, said Sen. John Kerry at a Climate Week event on U.S. / China dialogue, that “there isn’t going to be an agreement” without both nations.
But while Chinese President Hu Jintao, addressing the UN for the first time, will have a bit of cover—China has leaped ahead of the U.S. in the development of solar and other renewable energy—Obama is tied down by domestic indifference toward climate action. Indeed, in his speech to the UN today, Obama garnered applause for affirming that “we have put climate at the top of our diplomatic agenda when it comes to our relationships with countries from China to Brazil; India to Mexico; Africa to Europe.” Still, he had to admit that
As we head toward Copenhagen, there should be no illusions that the hardest part of our journey is in front of us. We seek sweeping but necessary change in the midst of a global recession, where every nation’s most immediate priority is reviving their economy and putting their people back to work. And so all of us will face doubts and difficulties in our own capitals as we try to reach a lasting solution to the climate challenge.
Yesterday, Clinton also acknowledged the slim odds of victory on a cap and trade bill, currently languishing in a Senate committee—precisely because of the political energy being spent on health care reform. (Kerry also said as much). He encouraged doing bits and pieces of the change America needs, such as mandating efficiency for 15 everyday electronics. And Clinton was visibly disappointed about the green opportunities in the stimulus bill that passed Congress in February: “I wish [Obama] had gotten at least another $100 billion and put 100 percent of it into clean energy production,” he said wistfully.
America doesn’t want to lose its standing in the world … We’ll look long in the tooth as a country and look like yesterday’s country. We need to be tomorrow’s country. We need to give the president a tailwind going into Copenhagen.
—DAYO OLOPADE
Obama's Money Machine: Now Running Foreign Policy?
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is considering the nominations of two men to represent the United States in East Asia: Republican Governor Jon Huntsman of Utah, and Democrat John V. Roos of California. But it's the Democratic appointment who is selling out Obama's promise.
The nomination of Huntsman as ambassador to China was sheer political brilliance on the part of Barack Obama: He exiled a potential 2012 electoral opponent, neutralizing one of the few promising moderate, business-minded, "family values" politicians that the Republican party has left. And Huntsman, whose Mormon mission and longtime business interests have taken him repetedly to China over the years, will bring a skilled hand to his new posting.
The claim to fame for Roos, on the other hand, is that he raised a lot of money for Obama's campaign. Roos, a powerful lawyer in Silicon Valley, bundled some $500,000 to support Obama's election and inauguration (under George W. Bush's system of rewarding cronies, he would have been a "pioneer"). As thanks for the massive haul, Obama gave Roos the lead diplomatic posting for America's closest ally in the Pacific: Japan.
Peter Baker wrote about this practice in the NEW YORK TIMES when the first slew of underqualified ambassadors were announced:
The new ambassador to France? What is his qualification? Does he speak French?
“He does,” [White House Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs said.
And the new ambassador to Britain? What is his qualification? “He speaks English,” Mr. Gibbs said.
Mr. Gibbs was kidding, but mastery of English may be one of the most relevant items on the résumé of Louis B. Susman, the new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Mr. Susman, a retired investment banker, earned the London posting not through diplomatic service but by collecting big checks for Mr. Obama’s campaign. Charles H. Rivkin, an entertainment mogul who once headed the company that created the Muppets, is heading to Paris for the same reason.
These men are unlikely to engage in hardball diplomatic negotiatiations with Britain or France, whose leadership has always been quite close to the White House. But using important diplomatic postings as high fives for various political allies is bad form. Why? Senator Jim Webb of the Foreign Relations Committee, made the obvious point in his statement introducing Huntsman, Roos, and several other nominees to the region:
Over the past twenty years, the United States has confronted a series of challenges critical to our interests in Asia, such as long-standing territorial disputes, contentious trade disputes, nuclear proliferation, environmental destruction, and a changing regional balance. The region is transforming as a result of its economic integration, the spread of Islam, competition over natural resources, and emergence of China as a regional power.
Despite these changes, the United States has continued to approach the region with a limited, short-term scope.
Quite obviously, then, you want the best and the brightest, those steeped in the nuance and delicacy of regional politics. After all, Japan is a member of multiparty talks to walk North Korea back from the brink of nuclear armament. Has Obama seen proof that John Roos, whose law practice focused on technology and startups, knows the first thing about these issues?
Granted, as Laura Rozen of FOREIGN POLICY pointed out to me yesterday, Obama's dubious motivations are hardly the backslapping free for all that characterized ambassadorial appointments under Bush. But it's a reminder that despite all the talk of Obama's online money machine, lots of old-fashioned check-cashing was going on behind the scenes. And it is certainly disappointing to see Obama make such a smart move on Huntsman, followed by a politics-as-usual play with the remainder of his diplomatic selections.
–DAYO OLOPADE
Swagga Goes International
Is Jay-Z George Bush? SLATE sister site FOREIGN POLICY recently compared hip hop to geostrategy. Mark Lynch takes on the recent back-and-forth between rapper Jay-Z and less successful (though still famous) MCs like The Game, Nas, and 50 Cent, using Jay-Z's diss tracks, and his responses to those of others, to form a crudish theory of American global authority.
Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) is the closest thing to a hegemon which the rap world has known for a long time. He's #1 on the Forbes list of the top earning rappers. He has an unimpeachable reputation, both artistic and commercial, and has produced some of the all-time best (and best-selling) hip hop albums including standouts Reasonable Doubt, The Blueprint and the Black Album. He spent several successful years as the CEO of Def Jam Records before buying out his contract a few months ago to release his new album on his own label. And he's got Beyonce. Nobody, but nobody, in the hip hop world has his combination of hard power and soft power. If there be hegemony, then this is it. ...
But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?
Now, by meddling with less-famous rappers—most recently and notably in his hit "Death of Autotune," Jigga is doing both: He uses his respected flow and megastar platform to jump into the conversation about the future of hip hop and pop music. That would be the US winning WWII, using overwhelming force in the first Iraq War, or, perhaps, taking out the rogue pirates in Somalia earlier this year. On the other hand, Jay-Z is diluting his brand somewhat with silly tracks that just react, relying on external reference points he hasn't chosen. That would be getting suckered into Iraq II without realizing it was going to cost, mad cheddar, hard-earned credibility, and now more than 5,000 lives.
For the middling or insurgent power (think Iran, India, Brazil), the calculus is different:
[The Game] would routinely go out of his way to say that he was not dissing Jay-Z even when it sounded like he was ("before you call this a diss, and you make Hova pissed, why would I do that, when I'm just the new cat, that was taught if a n****take shots to shoot back, defending his yard, yeah standing his ground, I'm sayin if you gonna retire then hand me the crown.") Think of him as a rising middle power (#13 on the Forbes list, down there with Young Jeezy, he helpfully explains on I'm So Wavy) eyeing the king, ambitious and a bit resentful, and looking for an opening.
So should Jay-Z (and the US) get mixed up in the affairs of every last wannabe MC? That's the central question facing foreign policy hands today: Why Afghanistan and not Darfur? Why Bosnia and not Burma? Disarmament or democracy? Economic growth or human rights? Matt Yglesias chimed in with the following: "Even when restraint can be identified as the best strategy, it’s often emotionally difficult to choose this path." Indeed; sometimes you just want to give another rapper (or coworker, or acquaintance, or sovereign power) a proper smackdown, but cannot.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton touched on these themes in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations this week, wherein she discussed the need to ensure "states have clear incentives to cooperate as well as strong disincentives to sit on the sidelines." She critiqued nations that "stand in the way of turning commonality of interest into action," and spoke plainly about American hegemony: "Just as no nation can meet these challenges alone, no challenge can be met without America."
While she offered a vision of change, "away from a multipolar world to a multipartner world," the secretary still offered a call-out to our enemies that would have made diss track authors proud:
Not everybody in the world wishes us well or shares our values and interests, and some will actively seek to undermine our efforts.
In those cases, our partnerships can become power coalitions to constrain or deter those negative actions. And to these foes and would-be foes let me say our focus in diplomacy and development is not an alternative to our national security arsenal. Our willingness to talk is not a sign of weakness to be exploited. We will not hesitate to defend our friends, our interests and above all our people, vigorously and when necessary with the world's strongest military.
Who's going to argue with that?
—DAYO OLOPADE
Obama Delivers "Real Talk" on Islam at Cairo University
President Barack Obama's major speech in Cairo, Egypt lived up to the hype; not that, as the president said at the city's Al-Azhar University, "a single speech can eradicate years of mistrust," but that Obama is uniquely comfortable speaking plainly in the most uncomfortable of situations. And here—in a Muslim country not yet fully democratic, before an audience of skeptical, but cosmopolitan Egyptians and a noisome public at home—was an uncomfortable situation. Yet the 50-minute speech delivered on a campaign pledge to reach out to the Muslim world. Watch:
And, unlike the campaign, during which Obama showed repeated insensitivity toward Muslim-Americans, the president didn't shrink from the instinctive discomfort and the threat of domestic political backlash. Rather, he freely quoted the Islamic Qu'ran throughout his speech, using suras promoting peace and nonviolence, and citing at one point "the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer."
Obama's reverence for Muhammed got a huge round of applause from the packed hall—though perhaps not as loud as his assertion that he's closing the US prison at Guantanamo Bay. Indeed, the earliest reactions suggest that results, rather than warm rhetoric, will keep better and thus travel farther than the audience of Arab elites in Cairo.
Nevertheless, the president trotted out the best of America's history with Islam, including Thomas Jefferson's personal Qu'ran, and John Adams' writing that "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims." Obama himself pledged "to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear," and insisted that America "cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism." Above all, the stylistic message he sought to impart was apiece with Colin Powell's stirring call for greater religious tolerance: "Islam is part of America."
From a policy perspective, Obama again took guidance from the Islamic holy text: “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.” The meat of his speech addressed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, religious freedom, women's rights, and the unending conflict in the West Bank. The president did not break any new policy ground, particularly on Israeli-Arab peace, but was surprisingly blunt about US unpopularity, and the culture of avoidance and blame that persists in the Middle East, and impedes regional peace. And the optics of him speaking honestly and with reason to an assembly of Egyptians (just as America has grown accustomed to) were remarkable.
The effect of the president's liberal borrowing from Islamic, Christian and Jewish histories and rhetoric was a clever hodgepodge of influences that in the end seemed quintessentially American. Indeed, Obama made an explicit comparison between the patient suffrage and resistance of black Americans and what is needed in Palestinian territories:
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.
What do you make of the comparison? And of the speech in general?
—DAYO OLOPADE
(Home Page photo, via Getty Images: Iraqi men in Bahdad watch a live broadcast on satellite television of a speech delivered in Cairo by US President Barack Obama on June 4, 2009.)
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