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Counter-balancing baleful influences

Thursday, May 21, 2009

BARACK OBAMA’S MEDIA honeymoon may not actually be over yet, but the sky’s definitely looking dark and cloudy in places.

 

 

There's been applause for his early legislative success – achieved with several tactical compromises – from the startling breadth of his $3.44 trillion federal budget to the tighter focus of this week’s credit industry reform bill. But now much of the US media, and foreign press commentators too, are pouncing on his flip-flops that look like defeats.

 

These have stretched from a sudden kowtowing to the gun lobby (a disappointment to me, just after I hoped for exactly the opposite in the last edition of THE MEDIA BEAT that highlighted handgun murders) through to dramatic reversals on the release of photographs showing prisoner abuse and the revival of George W Bush's military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees, albeit somewhat retooled.

 

On the terrorism-related issues, he’s split the East Coast media elite. While the persistently lapdog-like Washington Post says “the president offered compelling arguments”, the increasingly jaundiced New York Times talks of “a jumbled set of explanations” … says outright that “Mr. Obama was wrong” … and fears that he “risks turning Mr. Bush’s mistakes into his own”. (He’s likely to feel beleaguered further now that even a Democrat-run Congress won’t support - financially, at least - his Guantanamo closure plan.)

 

At its simplest, the concerns of the Pentagon’s senior generals seem to have won the day with this generally unmilitary-minded president.

 

It’s hard not to suspect - however distasteful the thought - that the President may also have been intimidated, or at least swayed, by the remarkable “zombie strikes back” campaign that former Vice-President Dick Cheney has been mounting, helped by the familiar crowd of media allies, led as ever by Fox News (above right).

 

(Oh, and with a lot of extra promotional push from his own daughter, Liz Cheney. She’s been all over cable TV complaining that the media embrace ex-Vice President Al Gore but not her dad. At home she’s been urging her father to write his memoirs and is already indexing whole tracts of source material for him. She was also was the first to tell the media that Cheney senior was asking - unsuccessfully in the end - for the CIA to declassify documents that would “prove” the efficacy of torture.)

 

Today the most recent ex-Veep, whom I doubt even a well-placed wooden stake would ever truly silence, looms into view yet again at Washington’s American Enterprise Institute, to speechify on the topic of “Keeping America Safe” - and according to his conservative think-tank hosts, to present a “Blueprint” for doing just that.

 

The invitation-only event takes place in the Institute’s meeting room named after Albert Wohlstetter, the foreign policy theorist famous in the Cold War “Mutually Assured Destruction” years for his seminally influential essays like “The Balance of Terror”. In a set-piece that offers the media some immediate theatricality, the ex-White House occupant speaks in that Wohlstetter Room just after the current one addresses a National Archives audience on security matters. Just 45 minutes will separate them, and not much more than a mile ... and an entire world-view. It will be interesting to see how (or even if) Fox News splits its screen.

 

Cheney’s impact on Obama is of course impossible to judge, and I can’t pretend – unlike many an analyst in print, airwaves and cyberspace – to see into the President’s decision-making process. But some insight does emerges anyway from Obama's own past writing, notably the books Dreams of my Father and The Audacity of Hope. They make it clear, as the now-blocked nominee for the National Intelligence Council Charles Freeman tells journalists so enthusiastically, that an overseas upbringing and some very varied life experiences place Obama “already light years ahead of the average elected American politician”.

 

And it’s certainly emerging from leaks out of White House meetings between Obama and his visitors - domestic or foreign, friend or potential foe - that his horizons are impressively broad and his intellectual and political self-confidence dauntingly strong, whatever may get thrown at him.

 

But there’s just one area where I suspect this is not true.

 

I may be wrong … but it’s significant, I believe, that the President's multifaceted resume still lacks any real exposure to the field of battle. This could mean that, in contrast with his often Solomonic capacity on many contentious issues, he’s less able to judge authoritatively the arguments of forceful, experienced military men like General James Jones and Admiral Mike Mullen (above left, at the President's back) - and to summon strong counterweights.

 

He and his supporters wouldn’t like the comparison, but Barack Obama is beginning to take on some aspects of Lyndon Johnson.

 

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** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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