James Fallows

Will get to security-state news of all sorts later today. For now, quite a remarkable illustration of the spread of the "false equivalence" outlook. For background on that concept, start here. The gist is:

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

To overgeneralize, in foreign policy I consider Susan Rice and Samantha Power to be "liberal interventionists." What is American power for, if it is not to do good in the world? (Rice at center, Power at left in Reuters photo.)

In case you missed it on my previous 20 mentions, my story about Jerry Brown, the past-present-and-future governor of our largest state, is now on line. But of course it looks better in the magazine (subscribe!).

I am mentioning it so often because, first, Brown is a genuinely interesting public figure, and, second, because I really threw myself into this story as a way of reckoning with the changes in California from the time of my childhood, in the small-town Southern California of the Pat Brown era, and my sons' experience now as they begin their families in San Francisco and LA. I don't always feel, on finishing a story, that I've made all the points I hoped to, but in this case I think I've had my say about California-and-America, and on what a lifelong pol can teach us about the importance and limits of professional politicians.

Several reader points. First, about whether there is any prospect of replicating the life-long store of political/policy knowledge that Jerry Brown brings to his second stint in the governorship. A reader writes:

I moved to CA in 1983 and saw the transition from a highly functional state under the previous Brown administration, to the social Darwinism and utter sleaze of the Deukmejian/ Wilson era ("welcome aboard the Decline & Fall Express!").  I met Jerry and we hung out briefly in his nest of geniuses in Oakland when he was out of politics: what struck me immediately was his intellectual and ethical rigor, and his uncompromising objectivity and critical outlook toward himself, similar to the attitude of a working scientist toward his subject matter.

He was also the most capable Mayor of Oakland in the 30 years I've been here: he turned the city around, though since that time it's slid backward in a number of ways (FBI's "Robbery Capital of America").  And he's the most capable Governor we've had since the last time he was Governor.

Key questions:  Is there anyone you see as having a similar combination of intellect, ethics, principles, and practicality, who could continue on the path forward after Jerry retires from public service (presumably in his mid 90s;-)?  Did you see any indication that Jerry was training a younger generation of possible successors?  What do you think are the most critical steps to maintain forward momentum in the next generation?

Short answer: No. But this is an interesting question that I hadn't thought about, and will.

Next, from a non-American who has been living in LA:

Regardless what one thinks of him, Jerry Brown truly is an extraordinary figure. Part of what makes him so is, as you say, "that he has spent his life studying its machinery". California politics and the rules which govern them are in his DNA. He has spent an entire lifetime building upon a genetic predilection.

I wonder, though, if there isn't another factor that is just as critical to his great leadership. (I realize that you stop short of calling him a great leader but it seems that you believe it.) This other dimension, to borrow a Biblical phrase, is that Brown "is in the world but not of it".

The article refers repeatedly to Brown's deep passion for reading, especially for understanding the lessons of history. At the end of the article, though, summarizing why "California's broken government is still functioning", you refer to the unique quality of Brown's leadership, but only one aspect of it: that he "is in the (political) world" more than any other politician of his generation.

I wonder whether Brown doesn't draw his ability to lead from being the embodiment of the Biblical paradox - he is well and truly immersed in the grittiest details of the political world AND well and truly detached from them. This detachment may have its origins in an intellectual pursuit. But it has been thoroughly integrated into Brown's emotional and psychic state.

Snapshot above by me, when visiting Brown at his Oakland office just before his 75th birthday in early April.

If that strategy [abolishing the three vacant seats], which Democrats have compared to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's failed attempt to change the size of the Supreme Court, does not work, Republicans could filibuster Mr. Obama's nominees to prevent them from joining the court. Republicans currently hold 45 of the Senate's 100 seats, and 41 are needed for a filibuster.

From the front page of today's NYT, a strong and important lead story about how the Republican majority in the House and minority in the Senate are committed to nothing less than the full repeal of Obama care. But the story is presented under this headline:
So, one side "insists" on the "total repeal" of existing legislation; the other side "fears reopening debate." Hmmm, how could we possibly judge which of them was being more obstructionist? More from the story:

Republicans simply want to see the entire law go away and will not take part in adjusting it. Democrats are petrified of reopening a politically charged law that threatens to derail careers as the Republicans once again seize on it before an election year.

As a result, a landmark law that almost everyone agrees has flaws is likely to take effect unchanged.

"I don't think it can be fixed," Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in an interview. "Everything is interconnected, 2,700 pages of statute, 20,000 pages of regulations so far. The only solution is to repeal it, root and branch."

Yes, it sounds like partisans on both sides are equally responsible for this standoff. Rather than partisans on one side betting everything on an outright obstructionist approach. (Cf: Debt ceiling fight, "the sequester," etc.) And more on the consequences from Jamelle Bouie:

It's hard to overstate the extent to which this is a break with the past. The Social Security Act was followed by two decades of major changes... Likewise, as the Times notes, the Medicare Act came in for changes in 1967 and 1972, as lawmakers made corrections and adjusted for unforeseen circumstances.

Without the political leeway necessary to make adjustments to the Affordable Care Act, the ride to implementation may be bumpier than expected. This, in all likelihood, is the point behind GOP opposition to changing the law.

Or, as the Marxists used to put it, a strategy of intensifying the contradictions -- the worse, the better. These days we just call that "gridlock."

Lots of attention on a holiday weekend to the NYT's lead front-page story, by Adam Nagourney, about California's odd "problem" of having a rapidly-burgeoning state budget surplus. Less than three years after Arnold Schwarzenegger departed with a budget deficit in the tens of billions, a combination of tax increases and spending cuts is giving the state a big surplus. As the story puts it:

At first glance, the situation should be welcome news in a state overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats, who have spent much of their time slashing programs they support... Instead, the surplus has set off a debate about the durability of new revenues, and whether the money should be used to reverse some of the spending cuts or set aside to guard against the inevitable next economic downturn.

The new surplus figures are bigger than were known when I last spoke with Jerry Brown, in California in early April, for my story in the new issue. But he was all on top of this issue and the upcoming "what do we do with this money?" debate. Here are relevant parts from the story:

The third and most publicized part of the California budget [after economic recovery, and spending cuts] turnaround was Brown's success last fall in winning passage of Proposition 30, which (among other things) raised high-end tax rates for several years, with a commitment to use the money to avoid cuts in school funding and to pay down the state debt. ... The higher rates will last for seven years, and Brown in his speeches told the biblical story of Joseph, Pharaoh, and the seven fat years and seven lean years. "The people have given us seven years of extra taxes," he said in his State of the State speech. "Let us follow the wisdom of Joseph, pay down our debts, and store up reserves against the leaner times that will surely come."

And, about the shift in power between himself and the legislature about what to do in these new circumstances:

"For me to get the budget cuts these past two years, I had to go to the legislature and say 'Please, please, please!' " he told me. "The Democrats"--who control the legislature--"didn't like it, but they agreed as part of getting the tax increase." In California, the governor has line-item-veto authority--one more indication of the legislature's feebleness--and Brown says he will use his veto power to resist spending increases. "The budget is more or less balanced," he told me. "To un­balance things now, they have to come through me. That is a real shift in power." Meanwhile, Brown's reduced and balanced budget includes more spending for what he considers the big challenges of the future: clean-energy initiatives, an expensive (and controversial) north-to-south high-speed-rail project, new canals and aqueducts, even California-based medical-research projects beyond those sponsored by the National Institutes of Health....

Brown has tried to cut spending so much that the main complaints about him are from the left, and budget-related--­especially about his resistance to federal court orders to spend more on California's enormous and overcrowded prison system. "Fiscal discipline is not the enemy of our good intentions but the basis for realizing them," he said in this year's State of the State speech, justifying a hard line against letting spending increases sop up new revenues. "It is cruel to lead people on by expanding good programs, only to cut them back when the funding disappears."

Now, here is a little more from that early-April on-the-record interview, beyond what we could fit in the magazine. My article was brim-full of quotes from Jerry Brown, but they amounted to about 5 percent of what he said in our talks. Here's the fuller-context version of how he set up the coming budget fights:

We are governable. We balanced our budget. Arnold just borrowed money, but we're paying down our debts. Our job creation -- we're 50% faster than the national average. We lost 1.3 million jobs. But we are coming back. Our tax revenues are very volatile, but this increase will be over in seven years. We've got to learn to pay down our debts. We are paying them off at $1.5 billion every year. Then that will be $1.5 billion we don't have to spend.

The [proposed new spending] bills are stacking up! It's like water on a causeway, it's going to come rolling down. But I'm here, and I'm going to make sure we're going to live within our means. They [meaning other politicians] haven't heard that yet. But they will hear it, as I continue to repeat it.

I think the real test is whether we get through this year in a balanced way. For me to get the budget cuts these past two years, I had to go to the legislature and say 'Please, please, please!' The Democrats didn't like it, but they agreed as part of getting the tax increase. The budget is more or less balanced. To un­balance things now, they have to come through me. That is a real shift in power.

All I have to do is hold that line. All I have got to do is play defense.

I don't know enough about the details of the coming budget battles to judge the full merits of Brown's hold-the-line pledge versus the state's unaddressed needs. My point is that he was anticipating stories like today's.

While I'm at it, here was another Jerry Brown riff that couldn't fit in the article. We were talking about the oddities of California's governing structure, especially the unique (among U.S. states) weakness of its legislature and unique power of the public through direct-democracy initiatives. I asked him what he thought about a related structural problem at the national level: the modern abuse of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. For those joining us late, I am talking about the radical increase in filibuster threats in the past 6 years, which in effect means that it takes 60 votes (rather than the normal simple majority of 51) to get anything done. Brown was not a fan:

We can't have a country based on the 60-vote standard. This is serious.

We've never had to have 60 votes for appointments or day-to day-decisions. Really, you can't govern that way. That's a radical change.

How can you govern? Does England have 60? [JF note: Obviously a rhetorical question. His point is that the U.S. has the drawbacks of parliamentary democracy, including political polarization -- without the benefits, namely the ability to get things done.] I think that 60 votes could end America's ability to govern itself. We have to get rid of it.

That 60 votes is bad.

Image of Joseph and Pharoah from here.

There's a connection between two themes I've been hitting hard recently: the surprising extension of "stop and frisk" inspections into the general-aviation world, and Barack Obama's announcement that the time had come formally to end the "war on terror."

The connection is that events in the first category -- overreach of the security state, at home and abroad -- are reflections of the second development: the 11-plus years of "permanent emergency" in America's rhetoric and laws about terrorist threats. In this war like many previous ones, "normal" Constitutional constraints and checks-and-balances were suspended. But all previous wars ended. Until this week, no president or serious presidential contender had argued that, for the health of America's democracy, it was time to end this one too. 

In his speech this week, Obama quoted James Madison to the same effect: "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." Seven years ago, in the issue shown below, I tried to imagine what a future speech like Obama's would sound like. This was its [imagined] peroration:

"My fellow Americans, we have achieved something almost no one thought possible five years ago. The nation did not suffer the quick follow-up attacks so many people feared and expected. Our troops found the people who were responsible for the worst attack ever on our soil. We killed many, we captured more, and we placed their leaders in a position where they could not direct the next despicable attack on our people--and where the conscience of the world's people, of whatever faith, has turned against them for their barbarism. They have been a shame to their own great faith, and to all other historic standards of decency.

"Achieving this victory does not mean the end of threats. Life is never free of dangers. I wish I could tell you that no American will ever again be killed or wounded by a terrorist--and that no other person on this earth will be either. But I cannot say that, and you could not believe me if I did. Life brings risk--especially life in an open society, like the one that people of this land have sacrificed for centuries to create.

"We have achieved a great victory, and for that we can give thanks--above all to our troops. We will be at our best if we do not let fear paralyze or obsess us. We will be at our best if we instead optimistically and enthusiastically begin the next chapter in our nation's growth. We will deal with the struggles of our time. These include coping with terrorism, but also recognizing the huge shifts in power and resulting possibilities in Asia, in Latin America, in many other parts of the world. We will recognize the challenges of including the people left behind in the process of global development--people in the Middle East, in Africa, even in developed countries like our own. The world's scientists have never before had so much to offer, so fast--and humanity has never needed their discoveries more than we do now, to preserve the world's environment, to develop new sources of energy, to improve the quality of people's lives in every corner of the globe, to contain the threats that modern weaponry can put into the hands of individuals or small groups.

"The great organizing challenge of our time includes coping with the threat of bombings and with the political extremism that lies behind it. That is one part of this era's duty. But it is not the entirety. History will judge us on our ability to deal with the full range of this era's challenges--and opportunities. With quiet pride, we recognize the victory we have won. And with the determination that has marked us through our nation's history, we continue the pursuit of our American mission, undeterred by the perils that we will face." [End of imagined speech. Note: no 'God Bless America' ending.]

Different leaders will choose different words. But the message--of realism, of courage, and of optimism despite life's difficulties--is one we need to hear.

The different leader of 2013 did indeed choose different words. But the essence of his message was one I have been waiting for a long time to hear.
__
In-house note: That September 2006 issue, with its cover story rashly announcing "We Win," was the first one fully under James Bennet's control after he arrived as editor. By the time he got here I had already begun work on this "declare victory" article.

It was a very gutsy choice for him to stick with that story, and that claim, as the cover of one of his early issues. What if some big bomb went off somewhere just before or after the issue appeared? By the strict logic of the story, that "shouldn't" matter. In the story I took great pains to explain, quoting many historians and experts in the long arc of terrorism, that attacks probably would continue, as other disasters and misfortunes do. Nonetheless (I said) we shouldn't let that blind us to the damage done by an open-ended state of war. That's fine as far as logic goes -- but in the real, trans-logical world of emotion and buzz, we unavoidably would have looked bad, "Dewey Beats Truman"-style. The risk was all the greater with a new editor's first issue, and even more so when the writer (me) had moved to China as soon as the article was done but before it had appeared. I have always been grateful for the guts of James Bennet's choice to go ahead. 

This speech was very long -- nearly 7000 words, even longer than my profile of Jerry Brown! And I didn't expect anyone to listen to me read my article aloud. Also, I am not going to deal with the part of the speech that has been most thoroughly discussed: changes, or not, in the administration's drone policy.

Instead I'll focus on a part of the speech that I think matters even more: his argument that the time has come to end the "war on terror." And, even more important, to bring an end to the "Authorization for Use of Military Force," which the Congress passed while the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was still smoking and which has been the basis for the wars, detention, killings, and torture carried out in the 11+ years since then.

I am long on record in arguing that, even though America will continue to face threats and endure attacks including from Islamic-motivated extremists, it needs to move off the open-ended, permanent-war footing that was used to justify invasions and constraints on civil liberties. Yes, there will still be attacks, perhaps (I hope not) even as horrific as the recent one in London. But we do not let the tens of thousands of annual highways deaths justify banning cars; nor the toll of alcohol justify a new Prohibition; nor take an absolutist approach to a range of other risks, starting with guns. So too with "terror" risks. We cannot end them, but we don't have to be driven mad by them.

I thought that was a case Obama was building toward today. Parts of the speech I noted, with occasional commentary in brackets [like this]:

1) How we got here, and at what cost:

And so [after 9/11] our nation went to war. We have now been at war for well over a decade....

Meanwhile, we strengthened our defenses - hardening targets, tightening transportation security, and giving law enforcement new tools to prevent terror. Most of these changes were sound. Some caused inconvenience. [TSA} But some, like expanded surveillance, raised difficult questions about the balance we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy [good to have a president noting this tension]. And in some cases, I believe we compromised our basic values - by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law. [Even better to have this noted.]

2) It's not just about "keeping America safe":

From our use of drones to the detention of terrorist suspects, the decisions we are making will define the type of nation - and world - that we leave to our children.

So America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us [the post-9/11 era crystallized] mindful of James Madison's warning that "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." [Wish I had remembered this quote in some of my previous articles.]

3) Thank you: talking to us as if we were grown-ups.

Neither I, nor any president, can promise the total defeat of terror.

4) Putting today's threats in perspective:

While we are vigilant for signs that these groups may pose a transnational threat, most are focused on operating in the countries and regions where they are based. That means we will face more localized threats like those we saw in Benghazi.

5) A very important sentence, helpfully highlighted by me:

Lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism. We must take these threats seriously, and do all that we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.

This is part of the long sweep of American history.

6) Again, let's match the problems of the moment to the tradition of the centuries:

Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless 'global war on terror' - but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America

7) There is more to what is going on than the effectiveness of drone strikes:

To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance.

8) I cannot overemphasize how important this passage  is:

All these issues remind us that the choices we make about war can impact - in sometimes unintended ways - the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends. And that is why I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing...

So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF's mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. [See also this.]

I won't go into Gitmo, nor Obama's (correct) argument that this facility must be closed down.  But I will mention (9) his peroration:

America, we have faced down dangers far greater than al Qaeda. By staying true to the values of our founding, and by using our constitutional compass, we have overcome slavery and Civil War; fascism and communism.... But because of the resilience of the American people, these events could not come close to breaking us.

What I hate, hated, about the "post-9/11" era was the idea that this threat eclipsed all others America had faced, and justified the abrogation of liberties and principles we had defended through the centuries. These are complex trade-offs. Think of having a president who recognizes their complexity -- and comes down on the side of liberties.

Thank you. God Bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

Sigh. But again, this was a speech for grown-ups.

I half-heard the president's commencement address at Morehouse when coming back to D.C. this weekend. I saw a clip of it again late last night and thought: this is another sample and reminder of Barack Obama's reserves of rhetorical strength. Like his other big, punctuating speeches (as I have discussed previously here, here, here, and elsewhere), this one appealed to both the mind and the heart; it built an argument over a span of paragraphs rather than in isolated phrases; and it grew from Obama's position as a man part of, but also apart from, America's normal racial classifications.

Before I had a chance to write anything about the speech, I read two other reactions. One was from my former colleague Andrew Sullivan, who was defending the speech against idiotic accusations that it was "race-baiting" and too black. The other was from my current Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, who criticized the speech for being too hectoring of Obama's Morehouse audience in a way he wouldn't have been at Dartmouth or Stanford:

Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of "all America," but he also is singularly the scold of "black America."

As I told Ta-Nehisi by phone this evening, I naturally cut Obama more slack on this point than he does. (And of course I hear the speech differently too.) We all take a different tone in setting expectations for "our own." I can hold Americans overseas to a different standard than I would Russians or Japanese; I can harangue (and have!) my colleagues in the press about why we should do better; I expect something from myself and my kids I wouldn't expect from you and your kids, and so on. The challenge for Obama, exactly as Ta-Nehisi pointed out, is that he is simultaneously addressing all Americans as his own (apart from those who consider him alien) while also in this speech addressing as his own the most historically distinct subset of our population.

So, I was glad to see Andrew Sullivan's defense; and I understood the logic of Ta-Nehisi Coates's frustrated criticism. Which led me to the main conclusion: about the near-impossibility of the tightrope act Barack Obama is attempting as America's first non-white president, and the unusual combination of virtuosity (as with this speech) and unflappability (as with criticism of the speech) with which he has mainly carried it off.

I increasingly think of Obama as walking a tiny, little rope suspended across a Grand Canyon. Through four and a half years he has mainly kept his footing, in a way that becomes cumulatively surprising -- and I say that even while disagreeing with many of his policies, notably including the recent security-state extensions.  Every now and then, as with this speech, we see how hard what he is doing is.

The three Obama "scandals" have varying characteristics and varying levels of legitimacy, but all three share a meta-story. And I think I know whereof I speak as a former GOP staffer.

 

Beginning with the dethronement of Jim Wright and the House banking scandal, and achieving escape velocity in the mid-1990s with Matt Drudge becoming the virtual assignment editor of the mainstream press during the Clinton impeachment, the Washington press corps has become increasingly "wired" to accept the Republican view of what constitutes a scandal. The public has been ignoring Benghazi for 8 months; as for the Washington press, we saw how Jonathan Karl got played by Republican staffers' misrepresentations of the administration's e-mails.

Let's think about the modern history of "the scandal," and how such episodes emerge. 

The modern saga all starts with Nixon. Obviously there have been scandals throughout political history, and in the immediate pre-Nixon era you had Bobby Baker, Billy Sol Estes and Walter Jenkins with LBJ; Sherman Adams under Eisenhower; and such different political dramas as the Army-McCarthy hearings in the early Eisenhower era and the Bay of Pigs aftermath under JFK. But Nixon marked the beginning of the modern scandal era. That is because the phenomena of the televised high-stakes public inquiries (as with the Watergate hearings and impeachment preparations) really dates to then, as does modern press-consciousness of how coverage of a big, exciting scandal looks and feels.

I. The main stops along the way:

  Nixon: Watergate -> hearings -> dramatic revelations -> Supreme Court hearing -> impeachment -> resignation.

  Also under Nixon: Spiro Agnew taking a brown paper bag full of bribery money, in his Vice Presidential office, and having to resign, something barely remembered now.

  Nixon era: Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick.

  Ford: None really.

  Carter: No long-running ones, despite flaps about his budget director and his chief of staff. But his era marks a major change, since round-the-clock news coverage was just getting going then, and Ted Koppel's Nightline, originally known as America Held Hostage, pioneered what we now think of as scandal-style coverage, of the American captives in Teheran.

 Reagan: The Iran-contra mess, complete with Fawn Hall and Oliver North.

 GHW Bush: None, really, though the Clarence Thomas nomination got scandal-style coverage because of the charges against him and the dramatic hearings.

Clinton: First the phony scandals of Whitewater and Vince Foster. Then the real problems via Monica Lewinsky. Clinton era notable for the creation/revelation of something like a permanent-scandal mentality in politics and the press.

GW Bush: Few scandals in the technical sense. But the election, recount, and judicial overreach known as Bush v. Gore got scandal-style coverage. Then Abu Ghraib, waterboarding and torture, and the war as a whole.

Obama: In his first term, the phony scandals of birtherism and Shirley Sherrod. Now the three-"scandal" combo made of elements that have nothing whatsoever to do with one another and don't necessarily have anything to do with Obama himself but that nonetheless satisfy that phantom-limb craving for a good exciting scandal.

II. What a Scandal Takes, to Take Off

  1. An underlying offense people can understand. Clinton and Monica meet this test. Also Nixon ordering wiretaps, or Agnew taking a bag of money. Iran-Contra was always sort of a struggle on this front -- for people to grasp what exactly the offense was. Today's IRS/Tea Party accusation meets the test (despite complexity of the underlying reality); Benghazi, less so.

  2. Evidence of president's personal involvement. The Watergate tapes again lead the way here -- Nixon's own voice, cursing and swearing. Monica and Clinton -- whew. Obama "scandals" lacking here.

 3. A formal hearing/ investigative structure that guarantees an ongoing daily drip-drip-drip coverage. When there is a schedule of witnesses for a hearing, an upcoming set of votes, or a sequence of new revelations, then the story can keep going for weeks, months, even years. Darrel Issa, listen up!

 4. A press culture and DC culture that is now wired to swing into "scandal mode," and start writing stories and giving commentary reflecting that "narrative." 

5. A structure of news coverage that keeps the scandal narrative going. This was probably at its strongest in the era of the weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, etc.) Then you would have: daily coverage in the papers; nightly coverage on TV news; weekly advancing of the narrative by news mags (and Sunday talk shows); analysis of "Administration in crisis" and "President under pressure"; and it would all keep going. Now, in a sense, the hourly / minute-by-minute cycle can make scandals "burn out" too fast. 

After this item late last night.3) Many, many readers are unhappy with my assertion last night that the AP leak investigation is the one of these episodes that should be held against the president. Samples:

Is it your position that any government official should be able to leak any classified information to a journalist with impunity even when that leak endangers lives and compromises national security? Where are your boundaries?

And:

I don't think you're really grappling with President Obama's argument in favor of the leak investigation. His argument is straightforward: revealing national security secrets is a matter of life and death for Americans overseas. Anyone who reveals those secrets should be arrested and prosecuted as a matter of justice and deterrence. That's a solid argument, and for you to rebut Obama by talking about the lessons of history is an exercise in evasion. When Aldrich Ames exposed the names of CIA agents and sources to the Soviet Union, those agents and sources were promptly arrested and executed. It seems very likely that the wikileaks data dumps had the same result, especially since Julian Assange refused to redact any of the information. The Bradley Manning court case has been an embarrassment, but it's hard to argue that the federal government should not have moved heaven and earth to find the culprit and prosecute him.
 
I could be persuaded that AG Holder was wrong ... and that President Obama was wrong in backing him. But I am skeptical that the verdict of history is self-evidently against the president, who after all does have a responsibility to protect national security. One of the temptations that presidents should avoid is worrying about looking better in history's eyes. As you know, history is greatly influenced by journalists, who have a certain conflict of interest on issues like this. I am sure the President would rather not prevent journalists from talking to sources (in contrast to President Bush, who would have been overjoyed to send a few journalists to prison), but it's not his top priority. Should it be? You still have to do the hard work of arguing that this tactic, in this instance, was misguided.

Several people also pointed out this item, by Kevin Drum, on why the government took such a hard line in this leak case (although they've been consistently hard on leakers all along). And a university math professor said, in response to my claim that "secrets always get out," "My jaw dropped reading that, given the selection bias inherent in the claim!" (If I had said "all secrets always get out," I would have to respond Touché. My point is that every president has had to cope with "shocking" and "dangerous" releases of classified information.)

In explanation of my own hard-line tone, let me be more precise. On the "Administration's side" of the case, I recognize these points:

1) Leaks can do genuine, terrible damage -- mainly by exposing vulnerable informants and sources, in the way Kevin Drum explains. One reason I was never a fan of the Wikileaks approach is that I knew how many sources in China, in particular, were likely to be harmed by this indiscriminate info-dump.

2) Organizations can and should take reasonable steps to police themselves -- that is, to encourage their own members to observe codes of confidence, and to identify and if necessary punish those who transgress. It matters tremendously to me and other staff members of this magazine that we protect the confidence of people who share information with us. That matters in corporations; it matters in government agencies; it matters for doctors and teachers and detectives and on down a long list.

So what is my complaint?

3) There is a very long history of presidents losing all perspective about leaks, and compounding the problems the original leak through a disproportionate reaction. Jonathan Bernstein explains some of that here (thanks to AS). That is the history that I said a figure as level-headed and unflappable as Barack Obama should be aware of. Also see James Traub on this pattern in Obama's time.

3a) There is also a history of leaks usually (though not always) being less damaging than initially claimed. See: the history of The Pentagon Papers.

4) An important exception to point (2) above is that these post-leak punitive hunts are most likely to lead to trouble when they spill over to the press. The CIA giving its own members lie-detector tests or intercepting their mail to see who's disloyal is one thing -- and generally a proper thing, in my view. Same for a police department, a military unit, or within reason a company.

It is something else to force reporters to testify (or go to jail if they refuse), or to seize records of their phone calls or meetings. Let's leave aside the First Amendment issues: the complications are similar to those involved in forcing clergy members to talk about their parishoners, or doctors about their patients, or attorneys about their clients, or husbands about their wives, and parents about their children. The CIA investigating its own is straightforward. Dragging in the press is different and has very rarely turned out well. That is the reality that I expected a leader with Obama's Niebuhrian awareness of tragic possibilities to be guided by.

I think this is it for me on this theme. I hope the first two faux-scandals peter out, and that the issues of secrecy and disclosure in the era of long twilight war get more serious examination.

I have been in China, offline, and in other ways removed from the US news ecosystem through the blossoming period of the three simultaneous problems for the Obama administration. Here is how they look after a day's worth of catching up:

More »

This took place while I was on the road in China, so I didn't catch up with it until just now. It is an editorial in (surprise!) the WSJ ten days ago that represents a certain kind of perfection in false-equivalence / black-is-white thinking. As a reminder:

I was around guns much of my life. Grew up in the Congo, hunting.  Marine Corps recon, professional training and use. CIA paramilitary, more training and use. Three wars: upcountry in Vietnam I had a bunker full of exotic weapons that had been collected over a ten-year period but were not on the inventory and could not be taken home by our military when they left -- we'd take them out and fire them every week; we carried guns everywhere we went, again upcountry just a few miles from the enemy's battalions; then in the Angola War I hired and organized three bands of professional mercenaries, killers by definition. 

In the consulate in the Katanga I had an impressive collection, bought out the weapons of the retiring elephant hunter. And I hunted. And at the family ranch in South Texas I hunted deer and javelinas.  

Then I lost all interest in hunting. I killed a beautiful animal and looked at the carcass thinking how much more beautiful it had been alive. I shot a bird and had the same feeling. Both dead so I could have the dubious Freudian pleasure of pulling a trigger and killing them.

The Katanga had been flush beautiful wildlife; it had been alive, the hills crawling with beautiful animals.  Then came independence and arms turned over to the new armies.  And our war in the Katanga (JFK/CIA), thousands of modern semiautomatic and automatic weapons left in the hands of our disbanded army, and the animals were broadly exterminated, the rolling plains were lifeless--we could drive all day and not see an animal.

In Burundi, where I served, President Micombero got himself a helicopter. Began flying around the shores of Lake Tanganyika machine-gunning hippopotamuses in the water.

 Recalling as a boy in the Congo driving with my father in a truck across the plains area.  We came on a Belgian who had been hunting all day, had a camera, wanted my father to take a picture of him with his trophies. He stood with his gun and his foot on a pile of 26 heads of little gazelles he had killed. In later years we drove through the same plains, and never ever saw another antelope.

 Even here in Austin, we are retired across the street from a lovely quiet park on the river. I walk my dog. Talk to the squirrels - - they sit on limbs not far above my head. Then one morning I found my neighbor down in the park with his son and a 22, killing the squirrels to "teach his son how to hunt." I pleasantly explained to him that he could teach his son how to enjoy live animals, that the squirrels he had killed were gone, dead. (He won-- the park no longer has any squirrels.)

3. Jonathan Rowe, in his posthumous book Our Common Wealth (buy!). As I mentioned two years ago at the time of his sudden and unexpected death, Jon Rowe was a wonderful and original-minded writer who found a way to express concerns and ideas that made instant sense -- once he had pointed them out. His main contribution to The Atlantic was a 1995 cover story, with Ted Halstead and Clifford Cobb, on why GDP growth was a crude-at-best, destructive-at-worst way for a society to measure its overall progress and well-being.

At the time of his death Jonathan Rower was working on a set of ideas that now have taken form in a book edited (from his papers) by his friend Peter Barnes. Its power is, again, to give voice and form to a concept many people sense but that doesn't clearly make its way into political, journalistic, or academic discussion. That is the value of all the things to which we can't attach an immediate profit-and-loss value but that clearly matter to individuals, families, and entire societies in distinguishing satisfaction and happiness from malaise. Which is also a point Jonathan Rauch and David Runciman are addressing.

Please find the time to read these three works.

I am in Internet range for only a few minutes, so let me just type this right out:

1. Today a provision that would increase background checks for gun purchases was blocked in the Senate, even though consideration of the bill was supported by 54 senators representing states that make up (at quick estimate) at least 60 percent of the American population.
2. The bill did not fail to "pass" the Senate, which according to Constitutional provisions and accepted practice for more than two centuries requires a simple majority, 51 votes. Even 50 votes should do it, since the vice president is constitutionally empowered to cast the tie-breaking and deciding vote, and Joe Biden would have voted yes.
   
3. It failed because a 54-vote majority was not enough to break the threat of a filibuster, which (with some twists of labeling) was the real story of what happened with this bill. Breaking the filibuster would have required 60 votes.
4. Since the Democrats regained majority control of the Senate six years ago, the Republicans under Mitch McConnell have applied filibuster threats (under a variety of names) at a frequency not seen before in American history. Filibusters used to be exceptional. Now they are used as blocking tactics for nearly any significant legislation or nomination. The goal of this strategy, which maximizes minority blocking power in a way not foreseen in the Constitution, has been to make the 60-vote requirement seem routine.
5. As part of the "making it routine" strategy, the minority keeps repeating that it takes 60 votes to "pass" a bill -- and this Orwellian language-redefinition comes one step closer to fulfillment each time the press presents 60 votes as the norm for passing a law.

Yes, this is the 20 millionth time I have made this point. (Recently here, with special Orwell-homage.) But here is why it is worth noting again. Just in the past few minutes readers have sent in these illustrations of the success of step No. 5, above:

From Business Insider (source of screen grab above):

GUN CONTROL VOTE FAILS IN SENATE -- Obama Speaks Now On Failure

With Vice President Joe Biden presiding over the Senate, an amendment to expand background checks on gun purchases failed to pass through the body, falling by a mostly partisan vote of 54-46...

Sixty votes were needed to pass the legislation through the Senate.

No, 60 votes were needed to break the filibuster threat. Note that in the "mostly partisan vote of 54-46" the 54 senators were voting for the measure.

From Politico, emphasis added:

The Senate has rejected a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks on firearms and close the so-called gun show loophole, handing President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders a major defeat on one of the key pieces of the president's second-term agenda.

The vote was 54-46, with only four Republicans crossing the aisle and voting with the Democrats in favor of the bipartisan proposal by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). Sixty votes were needed.

I won't add the line-by-line explication because you can do it yourselves. Actually, I can't resist: that last passive-voice sentence calls out for "to break a filibuster threat." Look at this home-page splash from Politico (below), and imagine if it said what actually happened: "GOP filibusters gun control."

A little over 10 years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisers as Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the invasion would be largely "self-financing" via Iraq's oil, and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war's total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.

Ten years ago today the U.S. began its invasion of Iraq. I argue that it was the worst strategic mistake since the end of World War II, and probably the biggest "unforced error" in American history. 

You know the syndrome. And, hey, if you've forgotten, check these two recent examples. Today several hypotheses about its origins. First, from a reader in Colorado, the idea that the false-equivalence reflex -- "extremists on both sides are blocking progress on the budget" -- comes from a kind of mirror-image mentality:

I've had a similar reaction to politicians and pundits (virtually always on the right, it seems these days) who assume that just because they are for something, the people on the other side must be against it, or vice versa.

So, if they think there should be "less government," then the rest of us all think the answer to every problem is "more government." Or because they purport to be single-mindedly focused on less spending, the rest of us are for out-of-control spending. It puts a straw man front and center and then bashes it, which the press doesn't call out enough either.

A reader in Connecticut says we are seeing a grown-up, political-world version of schoolyard bullying:

I am particularly amused by the current meme that somehow the blame lays at Obama's, and by extension, the Democrats' feet.  So they have to give in because everyone understands that the Republicans are so set in their views that they won't change, so it's up to Obama to compromise?

I think that this ties in with the new attention that Emily Bazelon has given to the problem of bullying with her book [and related Atlantic article] Sticks and Stones.  One thing that hasn't been pointed out is that bullying exists, even in adults.  Furthermore, bullying by supposed adults often works at the highest levels of politics and business.  In sum, if a group of kids acted like the Republicans in Congress, refusing ever to even even acknowledge that there are legitimate points of view that contradicted their own, and refusing to do anything unless they got their way completely, wouldn't the teacher think that they were attempting to bully the rest of the class?

Another reader, Shreeharsh Kelkar of MIT, offers a social-science explanation:

I share your frustration with the false equivalence that's practiced by the big newspapers.

But I wonder if I might offer a perspective on bipartisan think based on my discipline: the history and sociology of science.

You say in one of your posts that the thinking behind it seems to be that reality is somewhere between the positions of the two parties. And there's something to that. But I think one of the ways of explaining it is using a concept called "boundary work." 

Boundary work is a kind of rhetorical work that is performed in public argument: something is asserted to be science by stressing what it is not (pseudo-science, or faith, or religion, or what have you). Even Tim Geithner did it in his exit interview when he painted his own work as just a kind of technocratic problem-solving rather than politics, see this analysis. 

It seems to me that our political discourse also contains a similar kind of boundary work -- between "politics" and "policy." Our politicians will always say: what I'm doing is just plain old common sense or the right thing or just good policy, or just the solution to a problem; whereas what my opponent is doing is playing politics. And if one sees politics as actually a way of managing relations between conflicting groups of people, one can see why they do that. 

For instance, reforming the American health care system is almost certainly a matter of redistribution: taking money from older people and giving it to others (the uninsured, younger people, etc.). But one can't say that if one is a politician, and so there is a delicate balancing act: one's own work is constructed as problem-solving and policy-making, the opponent is portrayed as playing politics (where politics is understood to be trading off between different social groups).

I think this kind of boundary work exists in journalism too (and more on why it exists later); it's what you call false equivalence (and Yglesias calls bipartisan think). Here the newspaper is seen as above politics, which is what grubby politicians do. And therefore the contrast between the policy that the newspaper is advocating (which is not politics but merely good moral sensible stuff), and that what the politicians are doing. It is imperative, I think, in this model that both parties be painted in the same brush. Because if you don't, then you agree with one of the parties, which therefore makes you political.

Why should the newspapers practice this kind of boundary work? My sense (which comes straight from Paul Starr's history of the media) is that it's a holdover from the times when the newspaper industry changed. As we all know now (from arguing about partisanship), newspapers in the 19th century were unabashedly partisan. They also catered to niches, and made money from subscriptions. And that changed sometime in the 20th century when newspapers started to make money from advertisements -- and therefore they had to be less partisan and attract more people. Hence the objective tone of the reported stories (he says, she says) -- and also I think the false equivalence of the editorials.

Interestingly enough, we're now back in more partisan times, thanks to the Web. And it's interesting to me that you, Matt and others who call the editorials on their false equivalence operate in a completely different new media ecosystem; you have readers of a certain kind and stripe (but lots of them thanks to the reach of the Web), you don't really need to be bipartisan. But I think the example of Ezra Klein proves my point: ever since he's moved to the Washington Post, he's a lot less rough(er) on Republicans than he used to be. He won't fall into the false equivalence trap for sure but he's certainly adapted to a different audience. (I think it's great that he's reaching more people).

So - I don't think the WaPo is ever going to abandon its false equivalence model; not unless it becomes a completely new kind of WaPo (which it might very well become!).

I don't mean to suggest of course that all editors are dumb actors acting out a premediated sociological script; just that the roots of false equivalence go pretty deep into our current system.

I suspect this analysis is not particularly new to you (with some jargon added!).

Indeed this is an analysis I've thought about before -- thanks to Starr's book, and Jay Rosen's, and many others', and Breaking the News back in the 1990s. But I had not known about the "boundary work" label, which is usefully clarifying. It's a long road ahead.