"The Obama Method" and Potential Realignment in the Middle East (updated)

As I wrote previously, I was particularly struck by President Obama's description of his approach to the negotiations with Iran as a way to "find openings" that could lead to transformative change. I realized that I had missed how he talked about the same thing in an interview with David Remnick back in January 2014.

Obama, who has pressed Netanyahu to muster the political will to take risks on his own, thinks he can help “create a space”—that is the term around the White House—for forward movement on the Palestinian issue, whether he is around to see the result or not.

Right now it looks like the possibility of a space for movement on the Palestinian issue is not likely during President Obama's term. But it is interesting to note that his approach seems to be creating an opening when it comes to the ongoing civil war in Syria.

With President Bashar al-Assad of Syria facing battlefield setbacks, diplomats from Russia, the United States and several Middle Eastern powers are engaged in a burst of diplomatic activity, trying to head off a deeper collapse of the country that could further strengthen the militant group Islamic State.

Russia, Mr. Assad’s most powerful backer, has built new ties with Saudi Arabia, a fervent opponent, and even brokered a meeting between high-ranking Saudi and Syrian intelligence officials. On Tuesday, the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in Moscow, wrangling over the fate of Mr. Assad.

Unusual meetings have come in quick succession. Last week, the top Russian, American and Saudi envoys held their first three-way meeting on Syria; Russian officials briefed Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem. He then met officials in Oman, whose ties to both Saudi Arabia and Iran raised the prospect of talks between those archrivals. Russia stopped blocking an international inquiry into who has used chemical weapons in Syria, a longstanding American priority.

And then on Friday came this announcement:

Iran is to hold talks with the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on Syria and Yemen in September, a high ranking Iranian foreign ministry official has said.

It is hard for a lot of Americans to grasp what a huge realignment is happening here. The main Sunni/Shia battle lines in the Middle East have traditionally been drawn between Saudi Arabia (a leading member of GCC) and Iran. As such, Iran has typically supported the Alawite (a branch of Shia Islam) government of Assad while Saudi Arabia has a history of funding Sunni terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Furthermore, as we saw in the response to Assad's use of chemical weapons a couple of years ago, Putin has not only supported the Syrian dictator, he has tremendous power and influence over him. If all of these countries begin to see it in their interests to negotiate a consensus on how to end this civil war, that would be groundbreaking - not just for Syria - but for the Middle East as a whole. It is exactly what President Obama laid out as his vision for that region of the world when he talked to Remnick.

Ultimately, he envisages a new geopolitical equilibrium, one less turbulent than the current landscape of civil war, terror, and sectarian battle. “It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” he told me. “And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.

It hasn't happened yet, and the article by Anne Barnard ends with this caution:

As the Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad concluded, with grudges “dug deep over half a decade, with all the blood spilled and hatred that has been spread,” ending conflict among entrenched armed groups will mean “offering concessions and dealing in details, each one of which contains a thousand devils!”

But on the question of what has happened to create a space for the possibility...

Regional news outlets have attributed the outburst of diplomatic activity to the aftermath of the tentative nuclear deal with Iran, which “has thrown a great stone into the region’s waters,” as the Jordanian newspaper Al Ghad put it. The pan-Arab daily Rai al-Youm went so far as to declare that “a political resolution is taking shape with notable speed.”

To the extent that these realignments are successful, what they accomplish is to further alienate the extremists - be they the hardliners in Iran or terrorists like ISIS. As that happens, the pressure mounts on Prime Minister Netanyahu to decide whether he will join in the realignment or further alienate himself as an extremist.

It all reminds me of something Jonathan Chait wrote over five years ago about "the Obama method." In his example, we might soon see Nentanyahu's Israel in the role he ascribes to Iran.

The thing that people haven't figured out about President Obama's conduct of foreign policy is that it's the same as his conduct of domestic policy. Obama believes in the power of negotiation and public dialogue to split his adversaries - Republicans at home, Islamists abroad - and strengthen his own position...

[Obama's strategy] does not presuppose that his adversaries are people of goodwill who can be reasoned with. Rather, it assumes that, by demonstrating his own goodwill and interest in accord, Obama can win over a portion of his adversaries' constituents as well as third parties. Obama thinks he can move moderate Muslim opinion, pressure bad actors like Iran to negotiate, and, if Iran fails to comply, encourage other countries to isolate it. The strategy works whether or not Iran makes a reasonable agreement...

This apparent paradox is one reason Obama's political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.

Balancing Private Wealth With Public Voice

It wasn't until after I had posted an article about big money in politics and the lack of civic engagement that I realized I had forgotten about a seminal article on the topic written by Marshall Ganz. In case you don't know the name, Ganz is currently a senior lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. As a young man, he travelled to Mississippi during the 1960's to work with the Mississippi Summer Project as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1965, Ganz went to California to work with Cesar Chavez for 16 years on organizing agricultural workers. More recently, Ganz worked with the Obama campaign in 2008 to develop the Camp Obama training for field organizers.

Back in 2007, Ganz wrote an article titled: Organizing for Democratic Renewal. He begins with this quote from Prof. Sidney Verba.

Democracy is based on the promise that equality of voice can balance inequality of resources.

That indicates that this question about the influence of big money in politics vs the lack of civic engagement is absolutely central to our understanding of democracy.

Ganz goes on to review some of the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville about American democracy. He summarized those observations as follows:

In other words, he saw that we had learned that choices a few people make about how to use their money could be balanced by choices many people make about how to use their time.

But only by joining with others could we come to appreciate the extent to which our fates are linked, gain an understanding of our common interests, and make claims on the political power we needed to act on those interests.

This is an important reminder that our individual voices will never provide a balance to the inequality of resources. That only happens collectively. Ganz then goes on to provide a history of civic associations and social movements that have facilitated that collective voice. Rather than attempt to repeat that analysis or summarize it, I'll suggest that those who are interested should go read it for themselves. But here's where it all led us in the 1970's and 1980's.

About the same time a market driven approach to advocacy and electoral politics also emerged, fueled by new targeting, fund raising, and information technologies that replaced constituency based organizing with direct marketing techniques. Advocates of many causes also eschewed associational organizing around common interests to focus more narrowly on “issues.” Professional activists began mobilizing individuals to support their causes by contributing money rather than organizing them to act together. And familiar forms of association were shunned in favor of local, unstructured and spontaneous activity. The effect of all this was simply to reinforce the power of money over time and reduce collective action into the expression of individual “preferences."...

By the time the smoke began to clear in the 1980s, the progressive social movements had won major changes in how we treat race, gender, youth, and the environment. But the conservative movement had seized the moral or ideological initiative, won control of major political institutions, including the Presidency, and channeled its energy into a deep restructuring of the relationship of public institutions - and the organized groups to whom they afforded influence – to private wealth. New challenges facing government, rather than providing an impetus to reform, became an excuse to outsource its functions - to the private sector if there was money to be made, to the nonprofit sector if there was not. And these institutions, whether for profit or not for profit — and whether large scale or small scale — assumed a traditional corporate form. As a result, the scope of citizenship itself as way to balance private wealth with public voice, narrowed, as we became “customers” of the private sector or “clients” of non-profit funders.

I appreciate this analysis because it indicates that the problem is more systemic than simply a matter of how MUCH money is involved in political campaigns and/or how MANY people do/do not vote in an election. It also shines a difficult light on the way progressive activists and nonprofits have bought into the idea of money as the necessary currency of politics rather than collective action. Finally, it notes that as "customers" and/or "clients," citizenship is stripped of power and we become the objects who are acted on rather than the drivers of action.

Of course Ganz can't write an article titled "Organizing for Democratic Renewal" without offering some hope. He identifies four signs that may be giving organizing a new lease on life.

1. First, elections have been very, very close. Even the most media oriented of political consultants recognizes that in close elections, effective grassroots mobilization can influence outcomes.

2. Second, the promise of “connectedness” via the Internet is an invitation to a dance that has yet to begin.

3. Third, the recommitment to organizing by the labor movement during the 1990s, especially by SEIU and its associates, afforded thousands of young people an opportunity to learn organizing skills, acquire experience, and make a real difference.

4. And finally, at some level, we may finally be coming to understand what De Tocqueville saw — the promise of democratic politics is in people’s ability to enter into relationships with one another to articulate common purposes and act on them.

And so I'll end with the second quote Ganz used to introduce this article. This one is directly from De Tocqueville:

In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.

Pundits and Trump-Mania

There were quite a few pundits who had to walk back their claims that Donald Trump would be toast with Republicans after he dissed John McCain. What happened next was interesting to watch. The bandwagon a lot of pundits got on was ridiculing anyone who predicted that any of Trump's nonsense would ever hurt him. The essence of the argument was, "See, I told you...Republicans are getting exactly what they want with Trump and he has a complete teflon shield to say anything."

That kind of analysis relied on a caricature of Republican primary voters and completely missed the fact that - even at his peak so far - Trump was only at about 20-25% in the polls. Since he has no problem with name recognition, that means that over 75% of likely Republican voters were not buying the Trump-mania.

Until we got actual polls following the Fox News debate, I listened to the reaction of my Republican friends on Facebook (very unscientific, I know) to get a read on how it played. Based on that, it looked like Trump took at hit but wasn't down for the count yet, with the real winner (in addition to Carly Fiorina) being Marco Rubio - who climbed back into "top tier" status. Some recent polls are now confirming that take.

In Iowa, it's important to note that up until recently, Trump was trailing Scott Walker there. Suffolk University released a poll this week that reversed that trend. Trump leads in that poll with 17%, followed by Walker at 12% and Rubio at 10%. But look at what they found in response to the debate:

The race was closer among viewers of last Thursday’s debate: Trump and Walker were tied at 14 percent, with Rubio (11 percent), Carson and Fiorina (tied at 10 percent), and Cruz (9 percent) close behind. However, among likely caucus voters who skipped watching the FOX NEWS debate, Trump (21 percent) led Carson (10 percent) by a wider margin, with Rubio and Walker tied at 8 percent.

“In the absence of a debate, Trump’s lead widens because he swallows up the political oxygen, but when that oxygen is spread out more evenly in a debate, it breathes life into the other candidates, and the race gets closer,” said Paleologos...

Both Rubio and Carson benefited from strong debate performances and are within striking distance of the leaders. When debate viewers were asked which candidate was most impressive, Rubio led with 23 percent, followed by Carson with 22 percent.

(On a side note: remember that the RNC specifically reduced the number of primary debates this time around because they reflected so badly on their candidates in 2012. They may be regretting that decision right about now.)

Rasmussen found pretty much the same thing nationally.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Trump with 17% support among Likely Republican Primary Voters, down from 26% in late July before the first GOP debate. Senator Marco Rubio and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush are in second place with 10% support each, in a near tie with Fiorina and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who both earn nine percent (9%) of the likely primary vote.

Other than Fiorina, the only candidates who improved their standing from July to August were Rubio (who went from 5% to 10%) and Carson (who went from 5% to 8%).

Overall, Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight analyzed 7 post debate polls and lists the winners as Fiorina, Rubio and Carson and the losers as Walker, Trump and Bush.

Contrary to pundits who are caught up in Trump-mania, what I have noticed among my Republican friends is that there is a pretty large contingent who reject Donald Trump. They are still perusing their options. Confirming Enten's winners and losers from the debate, neither Bush nor Walker seemed to impress that crowd with their debate performance. But Rubio, Carson and Fiorina sure did. It might be that their post-debate "bounce" will be short-lived. But that simply underscores the fact that this race is extremely fluid. Anyone who pretends to know the mind of the Republican primary electorate right now is kidding themselves.

When do we stop relying on physical dominance as the answer?

Years ago I worked as a family therapist at a shelter for runaway and homeless youth. Our receptionist at the time was a young woman (late 20's) who had worked as security detail for Prince and was a bouncer at First Avenue (the nightclub where Prince got his start).

Because we sheltered youth, occasionally a parent (usually a father) or even a pimp would show up in a rage demanding to see one of the residents. These could easily turn into loud and potentially violent confrontations. But our receptionist told the "muscle guys" on staff that when it happened, she did NOT want them showing up in the lobby to intervene. Her point was that if they did, it was an invitation for the confrontation to get physical. She was completely confident in her ability to utilize her verbal skills to de-escalate the situation and didn't want anyone interfering.

That young woman taught me a lot. And I think of her often as we talk about the problems in so many of our police departments. A lot of it boils down to the fact that too many officers think of themselves as the "muscle guys" whose job it is dominate a potentially dangerous situation with the threat of physical force.

In many ways, it is not that different from the neocon fantasies of many Republicans when it comes to foreign policy. They assume that the answer to any threat is to bring in the "muscle guys" of the military and attempt to dominate the situation. It is precisely why so many people were drawn to George Bush's "swagger" after 9/11.

And so I ponder this whole idea of our attachment to physical dominance as a problem that stretches from the lobby of a shelter for runaway and homeless youth to the streets where police officers encounter potential threats to the Commander-in-Chief developing foreign policy.

We obviously have a current occupant of the White House who has some of the same skills our young receptionist did at the shelter. But I wonder how long its going to take for people to value those skills...and to learn how important they are in finding a way to address some of the violence we're seeing here at home.

Justice

Is the Root of Our Problem Big Money in Politics, or a Lack of Citizen Engagement?

Ever since former President Jimmy Carter said this to Thom Hartmann, I've been pondering his remarks:

Responding to his thoughts on unlimited campaign financing, Carter told Thom Hartmann on the "Thom Harmann Program" that, "it violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system."

"Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the President," Carter said. "And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members."

There is certainly a lot of truth to what he said. And Carter is not the first one to notice. But it raised some questions for me that I don't think many people have considered. The big one being whether the problem of money in politics is the root of the issue or the result of a much deeper problem.

We know that for too many politicians, money donated to their campaign provides access. But that has been a problem for a long time now. What's new on the scene is Citizens United and the influence of SuperPacs on elections.

It's important to keep in mind that people with a lot of money to invest in politics do so in an attempt to influence how people vote. It may sound obvious but, when it comes to elections, money can't actually vote. And no matter how much money they have, the Koch brothers still only get to vote once.

What I think President Carter left out of his analysis is that too many Americans have disengaged from the political process - leaving a vacuum that has been filled with monied interests. One way to look at that is in the percentage of people who vote. Even in our last presidential election, only 57.5% of those eligible voted. But the real damage happens in midterms. In 2014 that number was down to 36.4%.

When it comes to the role of money in politics, it's important to remember that those last two elections are the first to take place with full implementation of the Supreme Court's decision on Citizens United. As I've pointed out before, even with over 40% of the population not voting in 2012, the consensus was that the big SuperPac's spending had almost no impact. But in 2014, with almost 2/3 of the public not voting, we saw a different story altogether.

But the public's disengagement from politics is about more than voting. We've all seen surveys/polls that give us information like this:

* Asked which party has the most members in the House of Representatives, 38 percent said they knew the Republicans are the majority, but 17 percent responded the Democrats, and 44 percent reported that they did not know.

* Asked which party controls the Senate, 38 percent correctly said the Democrats, 20 percent said the Republicans, and 42 percent said they did not know.

Combine that with a conservative news media that actively keeps people uninformed/misinformed and you have a public that is ripe for manipulation by monied interests. But whether or not they are successful is probably dependent on the extent to which those interests are aligned with what conservative media is promoting. For example, with right wing activists in rebellion against the Republican establishment right now, it remains to be seen whether Jeb Bush's $100 million will get him the nomination.

On the other side of the equation, the night President Obama was elected in 2008, he began his victory speech with this:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

We had just witnessed a Black man with the name "Barack Hussein Obama" run a grassroots campaign funded to an unprecedented degree by small donors beat both the establishment Democrat and Republican candidates. The implications of that are still reverberating through Democratic campaigns.

That is why I believe that a reinvigoration of our democracy isn't simply a matter of getting big money out of our elections. It has as much to do with what President Obama talked about in his speech at the 2012 Democratic convention...citizenship.

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's what we believe.

Manipulating the Narrative

We're all learning these days that we have to be critical thinkers when it comes to consuming the news. While it is completely ironic to hear someone like Bill O'Reilly talk about his "no spin zone," he's tapped into the reality that "spin" is part of how the news is reported. Sometimes that is a conscious effort to influence public opinion and sometimes the media's own bias simply seeps through.

Recently James Fallows found an excellent example. He noticed a NYT headline that read: Obama Battles Pro-Israel Group, Raising Worries of a Lasting Rift. It's a story about the disagreement between President Obama and AIPAC over the Iran nuclear agreement. Fallows notes:

As we learn in linguistics classes, and understand even without the classes, word order matters, as does subject/object placement. Dog bites man versus man bites dog. What’s interesting in this case is that three possible subject/object placements, with very different implications, could all fit the facts the story describes.

Here are the three possibilities he points to:

1. “Pro-Israel Group Battles Obama, Raising Worries ...”
2. “Obama, Pro-Israel Group Battle, Raising Worries ...”
3. “Obama Battles Pro-Israel Group, Raising Worries ...”

Of course, the NYT chose the third headline. As Fallows points out, it implies that Obama picked the fight. Which raises a fascinating assumption:

This is true mainly if you believe that he [Obama] promoted the Iran deal because he knew that AIPAC would oppose it. And the diplomatic and reputational risks the story describes therefore mainly are Obama’s responsibility because of the battle he has intentionally taken on.

You may think that both Fallows and I are getting too far into the weeds over a simple headline. But it's important to note that these kinds of things work on a very subtle level to influence how we understand a story.

Last week, following President Obama's speech on the Iran agreement, NBC's First Read did something similar. Here's how they summarized it:

Finally, our takeaway from President Obama's big speech yesterday on the Iran deal is that he tried to turn the debate into a Democrat-vs-Republican issue.

For most of us, that one is much more obvious. The idea that it is Obama who is trying to turn the debate about the Iran deal into a partisan issue is ludicrous given the fact that:

• 47 Republicans signed a letter to Iranian leaders suggesting they ignore our President's attempt to negotiate an agreement,
• Republican opposition to the deal (including the letter noted above) started BEFORE it had even been finalized,
• Republican candidates for president have said that if this agreement is approved, President Obama will become "the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism" and that he will "take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven."

And yet, according the NBC's First Read authors, it is President Obama who is trying to turn this debate into a partisan issue with a speech he made last week. 

Neither the NYT nor NBC are conservative news outlets who purposefully set out to distort the President's record. But I would submit that these are two good examples of how the media has embraced an implicit assumption that "both sides do it" in order to blame both Republicans and Democrats for our current political polarization. In order to reach that conclusion, they manipulate the narrative by the choices they make about what to include/exclude from the story. But as any good journalist knows, the old axiom is still true...context matters.