Category Archives: Barack Obama

White voters hope Trump will restore the racial hierarchy upended by Barack Obama

Jamelle Bouie writes: In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, [Barack Obama’] election was very much a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes ascended to the summit of its political landscape. And he did so with heavy support from minorities: Asian Americans and Latinos were an important part of Obama’s coalition, and black Americans turned out at their highest numbers ever in 2008.

For liberal observers, this heralded a new, rising electorate, and — in theory — a durable majority. “The future in American politics belongs to the party that can win a more racially diverse, better educated, more metropolitan electorate,” wrote Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post after the 2008 election. “It belongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats.”

For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longer matter. More than simply “change,” Obama’s election felt like an inversion. When coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused by the Great Recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn’t give material benefits.

In a 2011 paper, Robin DiAngelo — a professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University — described a phenomenon she called “white fragility.” “White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves,” she writes. “These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”

DiAngelo was describing private behavior in the context of workplace diversity training, but her diagnosis holds insight for politics. You can read the rise of Obama and the projected future of a majority nonwhite America as a racial stress that produced a reaction from a number of white Americans — and forced them into a defensive crouch. You can see the maneuvering DiAngelo describes in the persistent belief that Obama is a Muslim — as recently as last fall, 29 percent of Americans held this view, against all evidence. It is a way to mark Obama as “other” in a society where explicit anti-black prejudice is publicly unacceptable. Consistent with this racialized fear and anxiety is the degree to which white Americans now see “reverse discrimination” as a serious problem in national life. For its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks respondents whether “discrimination against whites is a significant problem.” In last year’s survey, 43 percent of Americans — including 60 percent of working-class whites — said discrimination against whites had become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

The anxieties DiAngelo describes, and the fears cataloged by the American Values Survey, have real political impact. In a 2014 study, political scientists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson tried to measure “perceived status threat” from a shift in racial demographics, surveying how people responded when informed that California is now home to more blacks, Hispanics, and Asians than non-Hispanic whites. In other words, how do white Americans react to unrelated political questions when exposed to news of a “majority-minority” future? The results were clear. “Making the majority-minority shift in California salient led politically unaffiliated white Americans to lean more toward the Republican Party,” wrote Craig and Richeson. Likewise, “making the changing national racial demographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political party affiliation) to endorse both race-related and relatively race-neutral conservative policy positions more strongly.”

The Obama era didn’t herald a post-racial America as much as it did a racialized one, where millions of whites were hyperaware of and newly anxious about their racial status. [Continue reading…]

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Obama blithely sells out his allies and millions of Syrians in legacy interview

By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

In the last months of his administration, US President Bill Clinton tried to resolve the Israel-Palestine dispute. The effort fell short, but it was the closest anyone came to resolving the conflict since the creation of the Israeli State in 1948.

In the last months of his administration, President Barack Obama is giving interviews to explain how everyone else is to blame for the five-year Syrian conflict – which has supplanted the Israeli-Palestinian issue as the region’s destabilising centre and shows no sign of receding.

Rather than evaluate what could be done to mitigate the damage, Obama has chided allies such as Britain, Germany, and France. He has implicitly lashed out at his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as she campaigns to succeed him. And he has shown little regard for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have been killed and the millions who have been displaced, and who will continue to die and flee in his final months in office.

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Obama’s disastrous handling of the Syrian conflict

Hisham Melhem writes: For more than three decades, I have tried to interpret America to the Arabs and to explain the Arabs to Americans. I have never seen such disillusionment with an American president and his policies expressed by people in the region, ordinary citizens as well as public figures. In private, I have heard Arab officials express critical views of Obama and his style of leadership bordering on utter contempt; some Israeli officials did that publicly. For his Arab allies, Obama was too deferential to Iran and too quick to dump President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt — views also held by Israeli officials. Arabs feel Obama also mishandled Syria, a view strongly held also by Turkey. It is rarely the case for an American president to find that his relationships with Arabs, Israelis, and Turks are simultaneously troubled and in some cases very bitter.

Nor is Obama popular with the region’s ordinary citizens. A Pew Research Center poll in June 2015 shows that Obama’s image in the Middle East is mostly negative, with more than eight in ten Palestinians and Jordanians saying that they have no confidence in Obama to do the right thing in world affairs. In Lebanon 64 percent have no confidence in Obama’s leadership, with only 50 percent of Israelis saying they have confidence in the American president. In Turkey Obama’s fortune is better, but not by much where 46 percent of Turks have a negative assessment of his leadership. There is much anecdotal evidence showing that Arab youth in general have soured on Obama, accusing him of reneging on his early pledges to oppose Arab despotism and to stand by those who sought peaceful change in Egypt and Bahrain, and of abandoning Libya after the fall of the Gadhafi regime. However, what angers many Arabs is Obama’s disastrous handling of the Syrian conflict; they blame his indecisiveness on challenging the Bashar Al-Assad regime’s predations, and halfhearted measures toward helping the Syrian opposition, for the worst human tragedy in the twenty-first century. [Continue reading…]

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How Iraq warped Obama’s worldview

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Shadi Hamid writes: On October 2, 2002, Barack Obama gave a speech opposing war in Iraq—perhaps, in retrospect, the most important speech he ever gave. He was right, of course, and the foreign-policy establishment was largely wrong. The problem is that politicians who were right about Iraq tend to overestimate what that says about their foreign-policy judgment. For Obama, the effects of being right are magnified. He became president, in part, because of Iraq and the considerable damage the conflict had done to the country. Obama offered the promise of a decisive correction and, for true believers, a kind of spiritual atonement.

It is unclear what being right on Iraq would mean for your likelihood of being right on Syria, since the contexts in question are, in a way, opposites: Civil war in Iraq began after the United States intervened. Civil war in Syria happened in the absence of intervention. History will have to judge, but it may actually be the case that being right on Iraq made you more likely to be wrong about subsequent interventions. The tragedy of Iraq, if you weren’t careful, was likely to distort your perception of everything that followed, for wholly understandable reasons.

Iraq’s dark shadow seems to be everywhere in Jeffrey Goldberg’s fascinating yet unsettling exchanges with Obama. “Multilateralism regulates hubris,” Obama says. And he is right: It does. What is left unsaid is why, exactly, regulating hubris should, seven years after the conclusion of the Bush era, remain a primary preoccupation. It is hard to imagine any world leader citing the hubris of overextension as the problem that the United States, today, must take extra care to correct for or guard against. Obama has already corrected for it, many times over. [Continue reading…]

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How Obama has increased the risk of nuclear war

In January, the New York Times reported: As North Korea dug tunnels at its nuclear test site last fall, watched by American spy satellites, the Obama administration was preparing a test of its own in the Nevada desert.

A fighter jet took off with a mock version of the nation’s first precision-guided atom bomb. Adapted from an older weapon, it was designed with problems like North Korea in mind: Its computer brain and four maneuverable fins let it zero in on deeply buried targets like testing tunnels and weapon sites. And its yield, the bomb’s explosive force, can be dialed up or down depending on the target, to minimize collateral damage.

In short, while the North Koreans have been thinking big — claiming to have built a hydrogen bomb, a boast that experts dismiss as wildly exaggerated — the Energy Department and the Pentagon have been readying a line of weapons that head in the opposite direction.

The build-it-smaller approach has set off a philosophical clash among those in Washington who think about the unthinkable.

Mr. Obama has long advocated a “nuclear-free world.” His lieutenants argue that modernizing existing weapons can produce a smaller and more reliable arsenal while making their use less likely because of the threat they can pose. The changes, they say, are improvements rather than wholesale redesigns, fulfilling the president’s pledge to make no new nuclear arms.

But critics, including a number of former Obama administration officials, look at the same set of facts and see a very different future. The explosive innards of the revitalized weapons may not be entirely new, they argue, but the smaller yields and better targeting can make the arms more tempting to use — even to use first, rather than in retaliation. [Continue reading…]

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The Obama doctrine: The Middle East doesn’t matter but even if it did, there’s nothing the U.S. can do to fix it

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Inside the West Wing, officials say that Obama, as a president who inherited a financial crisis and two active wars from his predecessor, is keen to leave “a clean barn” to whoever succeeds him. This is why the fight against isis, a group he considers to be a direct, though not existential, threat to the U.S., is his most urgent priority for the remainder of his presidency; killing the so-called caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is one of the top goals of the American national-security apparatus in Obama’s last year.

Of course, isis was midwifed into existence, in part, by the Assad regime. Yet by Obama’s stringent standards, Assad’s continued rule for the moment still doesn’t rise to the level of direct challenge to America’s national security.

This is what is so controversial about the president’s approach, and what will be controversial for years to come—the standard he has used to define what, exactly, constitutes a direct threat.

Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America’s role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place. The third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power. The fourth is that the world cannot afford to see the diminishment of U.S. power. Just as the leaders of several American allies have found Obama’s leadership inadequate to the tasks before him, he himself has found world leadership wanting: global partners who often lack the vision and the will to spend political capital in pursuit of broad, progressive goals, and adversaries who are not, in his mind, as rational as he is. Obama believes that history has sides, and that America’s adversaries — and some of its putative allies — have situated themselves on the wrong one, a place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism still flourish. What they don’t understand is that history is bending in his direction.

“The central argument is that by keeping America from immersing itself in the crises of the Middle East, the foreign-policy establishment believes that the president is precipitating our decline,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But the president himself takes the opposite view, which is that overextension in the Middle East will ultimately harm our economy, harm our ability to look for other opportunities and to deal with other challenges, and, most important, endanger the lives of American service members for reasons that are not in the direct American national-security interest.”

If you are a supporter of the president, his strategy makes eminent sense: Double down in those parts of the world where success is plausible, and limit America’s exposure to the rest. His critics believe, however, that problems like those presented by the Middle East don’t solve themselves — that, without American intervention, they metastasize.

At the moment, Syria, where history appears to be bending toward greater chaos, poses the most direct challenge to the president’s worldview. [Continue reading…]

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Limit the next president’s power to wage drone warfare

Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman write: When Barack Obama took office as the reluctant heir to George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” he renounced some of his predecessor’s most extreme policies. There is one Bush-era policy, though, that President Obama made emphatically his own: the summary killing of suspected militants and terrorists, usually by drone.

In less than a year, the president will bequeath this policy, and the sweeping legal claims that underlie it, to someone who may see the world very differently from him. Before that happens, he should bring the drone campaign out of the shadows and do what he can to constrain the power he unleashed.

President Bush started the drone wars, but Mr. Obama vastly expanded them. Almost entirely on his watch, United States strikes have killed as many as 5,000 people, possibly 1,000 of them civilians. The president approved strikes in places far from combat zones. He authorized the C.I.A. to carry out “signature strikes” aimed at people whose identities the agency did not know but whose activities supposedly suggested militancy. He approved the deliberate killing of an American, Anwar al-Awlaki.

The president also oversaw an aggressive effort to control the public narrative about drone strikes. Even as senior officials selectively disclosed information to the news media, his administration resisted Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, arguing that national security would be harmed if the government confirmed drone strikes were taking place. [Continue reading…]

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Barack Obama’s broken nuclear promise

Jared Keller writes: In the early days of his presidency, during a visit to Prague’s Hradčany Square, Barack Obama launched what observers saw as a centerpiece of his foreign policy: a doctrine for a nuclear free world. “The Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not,” President Obama announced, pointing out the paradoxical twist of the modern nuclear dilemma — as the threat of global nuclear war has subsided, the risk of a singular nuclear attack has only intensified.

“More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build, or steal one,” Obama continued. “Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.”

Taken in the context of his other campaign promises — the closure of Guantanamo, (which has only truly blossomed in the twilight hours of his presidency) and the end of the two costly wars he inherited — Obama’s nuclear promise seemed both heroic and unimpeachable, especially given its tacit support by past foreign policy luminaries. Mere months after his Prague address, Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize — a symbolic endorsement of his nascent doctrine — with the Nobel Committee specifically citing the “special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” Obama used the moment to make the case for “just war” in the modern geopolitical stage: “We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” [Continue reading…]

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‘We know what the U.S. can do with bombs,’ a Libyan student said. ‘What else can you do?’

In a 12,000-word two-part report for the New York Times on the U.S. intervention in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s role in it, Jo Becker and Scott Shane write: President Obama has called failing to do more in Libya his biggest foreign policy lesson. And Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the United Nations during the revolution, is deeply troubled by the aftermath of the 2011 intervention: the Islamic State only “300 miles from Europe,” a refugee crisis that “is a human tragedy as well as a political one” and the destabilization of much of West Africa.

“You have to make a moral choice: a blood bath in Benghazi and keeping Qaddafi in power, or what is happening now,” Mr. Araud said. “It is a tough question, because now Western national interests are very much impacted by what is happening in Libya.”

It was late afternoon on March 15, 2011, and Mr. Araud had just left the office when his phone rang. It was his American counterpart, Susan E. Rice, with a pointed message.

France and Britain were pushing hard for a Security Council vote on a resolution supporting a no-fly zone in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from slaughtering his opponents. Ms. Rice was calling to push back, in characteristically salty language. Continue reading →

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How the White House disregarded mounting evidence of an imminent Russian intervention in Syria

Reuters reports: Last July, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seemed to be losing his battle against rebel forces. Speaking to supporters in Damascus, he acknowledged his army’s heavy losses.

Western officials said the Syrian leader’s days were numbered and predicted he would soon be forced to the negotiating table.

It did not turn out that way. Secret preparations were already underway for a major deployment of Russian and Iranian forces in support of Assad.

The military intervention, taking many in the West by surprise, would roll back rebel gains. It would also accelerate two shifts in U.S. diplomacy: Washington would welcome Iran to the negotiating table over Syria, and it would no longer insist that Assad step down immediately.

“That involved swallowing some pride, to be honest, in acknowledging that this process would go nowhere unless you got Russia and Iran at the table,” a U.S. official said.

At the heart of the diplomacy shift – which essentially brought Washington closer to Moscow’s position – was a slow-footed realization of the Russian military build-up in Syria and, ultimately, a refusal to intervene militarily.

Russia, Iran and Syria struck their agreement to deploy military forces in June, several weeks before Assad’s July 26 speech, according to a senior official in the Middle East who was familiar with the details.

And Russian sources say large amounts of equipment, and hundreds of troops, were being dispatched over a series of weeks, making it hard to hide the pending operation.

Yet a senior U.S. administration official said it took until mid-September for Western powers to fully recognise Russia’s intentions. One of the final pieces of the puzzle was when Moscow deployed aircraft flown only by the Russian military, eliminating the possibility they were intended for Assad, the official said. [Continue reading…]

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Syria and Barack Obama’s surplus powerlessness

Fred Hof writes: In his excellent Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, Joby Warrick quotes White House wordsmith Benjamin Rhodes as saying, “I think, candidly, that a lot of people have used this debate to position themselves for posterity as being for doing something in Syria when in fact it wouldn’t have made much difference.” Leave aside that the use of the word “candidly” is an indicator that the thought articulated is anything but candid. Leave aside the broad brush nature of the accusation. What is important is not the view of a staffer, but that of his boss. If President Obama thinks that his critics are poseurs and their ideas are all useless, what does it imply about his willingness to correct a disastrous course during the time left to him in the presidency?

Mr. Kerry too is perfectly free to claim that nary a “realistic alternative” has been offered by critics. This critic takes special exception to the claim. What is important, however, is whether or not the President of the United States recognizes that a significant policy shift is required. What is critical is whether or not he is energizing his national security apparatus to produce alternatives for his consideration. If he is satisfied with the present course, if he is at peace with the political implications for allies of Syria emptying itself, and if he is satisfied that mass murder in Syria can go unanswered on the grounds that it is not genocide, then it will likely be up to his successor to stop digging and eventually climb out of the hole. [Continue reading…]

The phrase, surplus powerlessness, comes from Michael Lerner, who in his 1991 book of the same name, defined it this way:

the set of feelings and beliefs that make people think of themselves as even more powerless than the actual power situation requires, and then leads them to act in ways that actually confirm them in their powerlessness.

Lerner describes the shift from idealism to cynicism that has shaped the thinking of so many of our generation — including a president who once in office, traded hope for realism:

The cynical chic that dominates social and political discourse in the 1990s — and which finds its highest expression in the elitist put-downs of all forms of idealism that weekly emanate from The New Republic, national columnists, and television news commentators and analysts — is a defensive compensation for the pain that many people experienced when they found that their unrealistic hopes for total transformation could not immediately be gratified. The tendency of the mass media to foster a desire for immediate gratification of all our desires made many people expect that the minute they could formulate the notion of a very different kind of world, the moment they could see its importance and desirability, they should be able to achieve it without too much struggle. A year or two, perhaps. But if nothing happened that quickly, then perhaps nothing would ever happen, and the very possibility of things changing must be an illusion. How quickly the demand for instant gratification turns revolutionaries into cynics. Suddenly the Saddam Husseins and Mu’ammar Qaddafis, the virulent nationalists of Eastern Europe, the totalitarian oppressors in China, the multinational firms that seem to have little compassion for the communities they uproot or destroy or the ecology they pollute in pursuit of their profits — all seem to be inevitable, as though built into the structure of necessity. All we can do as individuals, we begin to believe, is to become “realistic,” which is to say, to act in the same selfish and self-centered way as everyone else, expecting that anyone who can will hurt us if we don’t get the advantage first.

The power of an American president can be overstated and yet the description — most powerful man on Earth — remains true, even at this time of dwindling American power.

The president might view Syria as though he is no different from the millions of other onlookers who feel powerless to influence events and yet his posture has always involved the exercise of choice.

Some might argue that Obama now serves as a much needed role model in a rare, unappreciated virtue: American humility.

I suspect, however, that the lesson more commonly drawn from his example will be that presidents can’t actually accomplish much. Having fueled hope, he ended up breeding apathy.

Whether that turns out to be the case will likely become evident as the Bernie Sanders campaign advances.

Some of the early signs are not too promising as strong youth support fails to be matched in voter turnout.

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In Libya, Obama chose to lead from behind; in Syria it’s now feed from behind

The New York Times reports: Most of the Russian and American aircraft traversing Syria have been warplanes firing missiles and dropping bombs. But under an international agreement to aid Syrians trapped in the fighting, Russian planes will soon be dropping food in an operation partly financed by the United States.

The United Nations World Food Program will start its first airdrops in Syria in coming days, relief officials said Thursday. The main focus is Deir al-Zour, an eastern Syrian city where more than 200,000 inhabitants are ringed by forces of the Islamic State, which has made land access impossible.

Under the emergency aid agreement, truck convoys began supplying food and medicine to five besieged towns in other parts of Syria on Wednesday. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy for the Syrian conflict who helped to negotiate the final arrangements, had hinted that airdrops were an option for areas that are unreachable by land.

The World Food Program will use aircraft provided by a Russian contractor for the drops, which are conducted by parachute from high altitudes, said Bettina Luescher, a spokeswoman for the agency. [Continue reading…]

If the U.S. administration wanted to salvage a few crumbs of credibility among the Syrians who it has otherwise deserted, it could have seized this opportunity in public diplomacy — just as the Russians have.

It’s all very well to say that getting aid to those in need is more important than taking credit, but somehow, I doubt very much that U.S. decision-making at this juncture has been guided by humility. Moreover, Russia’s interest in taking the lead is surely guided by its own desire to do exactly what the Assad regime has in its long-running manipulation of UN aid distribution: support it’s military strategy by steering aid towards its own supporters.

Obama might persist in his passive approach to Syria because he sees himself as the choreographer of America’s departure from the Middle East, but walking away is much easier said than done.

Syria has become a global crisis precisely because so many governments and populations outside the conflict thought it could be ignored or viewed calmly from a comfortable distance.

Meanwhile, many of those who in the past argued most vehemently against Western intervention have since become cheerleaders of Russia’s intervention — erstwhile anti-militarists who turn out to be secret admirers of Vladamir Putin’s muscularity.

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A Syria policy that dare not speak its name

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Michael Ignatieff writes: Once President Barack Obama had let Bashar al-Assad cross his “red line” and use chemical weapons in 2013, America was left with a policy in Syria that dare not speak its name.

The policy is not what the US wants but, in light of the ceasefire plan agreed last week in Munich between Moscow and Washington, it appears to have become what it reluctantly accepts: to allow Mr Assad and Russian president Vladimir Putin to win by focusing attacks on anti-regime rebels in strongholds such as Aleppo — and then, after a decent interval, to join with them to crush the militants of Isis.

The consequences of this policy are becoming clearer by the day: free Aleppo is dying under continuing Russian bombardment and a civilian uprising that began in 2011 is collapsing for want of help. Mr Assad is re-establishing his tyranny and is certain to take vengeance on surviving insurgents.

This is where risk avoidance has led a conscientious, prudent American president — to a diabolical transaction in which he and his allies regretfully sacrifice the lives of innocent civilians in the name of the mistaken belief that the west’s only overriding strategic interest in Syria is the defeat of Isis.

If this is the actual policy of the US the consequences should be spelt out. Russia and Iran will consolidate control of a rump state in the Middle East but the millions of Syrians who have fled the fighting will never return home and the region will never know peace. [Continue reading…]

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How Scalia’s death might help our planet

Eric Holthaus writes: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death at a remote Texas ranch has triggered a political earthquake and instantly changes the outlook for a host of high-profile issues the court is currently considering. But perhaps none of these are as consequential as the fate of the planet itself. As Climate Central’s John Upton wrote, “in dying, Scalia may have done more to support global climate action than most people will do in their lifetimes.”

Scalia’s death comes just days after the Supreme Court issued an unprecedented stay that temporarily blocked the implementation of the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s centerpiece climate legislation. The Clean Power Plan isn’t perfect, but it was on pace to double the already accelerating rate of coal-fired power plant retirements by 2040. Last week’s surprising action by the Supreme Court — dubbed a “nightmare scenario” by the Hill — raised substantial fears among environmentalists that the court’s conservatives might eventually block the Clean Power Plan completely. At the very least, the stay buys some time for Republican hopefuls in this year’s presidential election; if one were to win, he could just cancel the executive order that launched the plan in the first place.

The stay is still in place, but the climate law experts I talked to say Scalia’s death greatly boosts the eventual survival chances of the Clean Power Plan. A 4-4 court would guarantee that the lower court ruling would stand—and the D.C. Circuit Court is expected to approve the plan. [Continue reading…]

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Obama called Putin and Putin agreed to carry on taking calls from Obama

Following a phone conversation between President Obama and President Putin “to discuss the decisions and agreements made at the February 11 meeting of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG),” the White House said: “The leaders agreed that the United States and Russia will remain in communication on the important work of the ISSG.”

That’s it: they’ll remain in communication.

Obama can stress the importance, emphasize the importance, reiterate the importance, and do as much urging as he wants. To Putin, this is just yada yada yada.

The Washington Post reports: President Obama and Russian President Vladi­mir Putin have agreed to intensify diplomatic and military cooperation to implement a cease-fire and the delivery of aid in Syria, the Kremlin said early Sunday.

A statement from Putin’s office said that Obama initiated a telephone conversation between the two. The White House, which said the call took place Saturday, did not mention increased U.S.-Russia cooperation but said that Obama stressed the importance “of rapidly implementing humanitarian access to besieged areas.” Obama also urged Putin to cease Russia’s air campaign against “moderate opposition forces” in Syria, according to a White House statement released Sunday.

The call came amid reports that at least one siege had been broken with the first delivery of humanitarian aid to the rebel-held Douma area, east of the Syrian capital of Damascus. Douma had been cut off by government troops since 2013. A United Nations spokesperson said from Geneva, where a task force is organizing aid under an agreement reached Friday in Munich, that the Douma delivery was a previously scheduled shipment by the Syrian Red Crescent. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s lofty plans on gun violence amount to little action

The New York Times reports: The centerpiece of a plan for stemming gun violence that President Obama announced to great fanfare last month largely amounts to this: an updated web page and 10,000 pamphlets that federal agents plan to give out at gun shows.

In a tearful display of anger and sadness in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama ordered a series of steps intended to limit gun violence and vowed to clamp down on what he called widespread evasion of a federal law requiring gun dealers to obtain licenses.

But few concrete actions have been put in motion by law enforcement agencies to aggressively carry out the gun dealer initiative, despite the lofty expectations that Mr. Obama and top aides set.

Obama administration officials said they have no specific plans to boost investigations, arrests or prosecutions of gun sellers who do not comply with the law. No task forces have been assembled. No agents or prosecutors have been specifically reassigned to such cases. And no funding has been reallocated to accelerate gun sale- investigations in Washington or at the offices of the 93 United States attorneys. [Continue reading…]

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President Obama’s remarks at the Islamic Society of Baltimore on February 3

President Obama said: This is a moment when, as Americans, we have to truly listen to each other and learn from each other. And I believe it has to begin with a common understanding of some basic facts. And I express these facts, although they’d be obvious to many of the people in this place, because, unfortunately, it’s not facts that are communicated on a regular basis through our media.

So let’s start with this fact: For more than a thousand years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace. And the very word itself, Islam, comes from salam — peace. The standard greeting is as-salamu alaykum — peace be upon you. And like so many faiths, Islam is rooted in a commitment to compassion and mercy and justice and charity. Whoever wants to enter paradise, the Prophet Muhammad taught, “let him treat people the way he would love to be treated.” (Applause.) For Christians like myself, I’m assuming that sounds familiar. (Laughter.)

The world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are as diverse as humanity itself. They are Arabs and Africans. They’re from Latin America to Southeast Asia; Brazilians, Nigerians, Bangladeshis, Indonesians. They are white and brown and black. There’s a large African American Muslim community. That diversity is represented here today. A 14-year-old boy in Texas who’s Muslim spoke for many when he wrote to me and said, “We just want to live in peace.”

Here’s another fact: Islam has always been part of America. Starting in colonial times, many of the slaves brought here from Africa were Muslim. And even in their bondage, some kept their faith alive. A few even won their freedom and became known to many Americans. And when enshrining the freedom of religion in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, our Founders meant what they said when they said it applied to all religions.

Back then, Muslims were often called Mahometans. And Thomas Jefferson explained that the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom he wrote was designed to protect all faiths — and I’m quoting Thomas Jefferson now — “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan.” (Applause.)

Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran. Benjamin Franklin wrote that “even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” (Applause.) So this is not a new thing. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: For Mr. Obama, the remarks were also an admission of how little progress has been made since the speech in Cairo [in 2009], where he called for “a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground.” In his speech on Wednesday, he suggested that his hopes for a reconciliation had been dashed, but he called on all Americans to stick by the country’s founding ideals.

Muslims in the audience hailed the address.

“I think it was one of the best speeches he’s ever given,” said Representative André Carson, an Indiana Democrat. Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, said the speech “hit me in the heart” and was a vital antidote to growing intolerance.

“I have a 19-year-old daughter who is a Muslim and wants to contribute to her nation, and it bugs me that someone who says he wants to be president would want to exclude her,” Mr. Ellison said.

But Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, one of the country’s oldest and largest pro-Israel organizations, denounced Mr. Obama for visiting a mosque whose leaders, Mr. Klein said, have among other issues criticized Israeli military actions. “Going to such a mosque only encourages radical Muslims to harm Americans,” Mr. Klein said. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s appeal as the antithesis of Obama

David Axelrod writes: The Republican base is infuriated by Mr. Obama’s activist view of government and progressive initiatives, from health care reform to immigration, gay rights to climate change.

Beyond specific issues, however, many Republicans view dimly the very qualities that played so well for Mr. Obama in 2008. Deliberation is seen as hesitancy; patience as weakness. His call for tolerance and passionate embrace of America’s growing diversity inflame many in the Republican base, who view with suspicion and anger the rapidly changing demographics of America. The president’s emphasis on diplomacy is viewed as appeasement.

So who among the Republicans is more the antithesis of Mr. Obama than the trash-talking, authoritarian, give-no-quarter Mr. Trump?

His bombast allows no room for nuance or complexity. He proudly extols his intolerance as an assault against “political correctness,” and he vows to bring the world to heel, from Mexico to China to Syria and Iraq.

Mr. Trump has found an audience with Americans disgruntled by the rapid, disorderly change they associate with national decline and their own uncertain prospects. Policies be damned, who better to set things right than the defiant strong man who promises by sheer force of will to make America great again?

Yes, we can? Hell, no!

Just leave it to me, Mr. Trump says. Yes, I can!

The robust condemnations Mr. Trump has received from media and political elites have only intensified the enthusiasm of his supporters, many of whom feel disdained and forgotten by the very same people who regularly mock and chide their man for his boorishness. To his base, he’s a truth-teller, thumbing his nose at conventional politicians, whether they are liberal or conservative. Rebukes from fact checkers and purveyors of civil discourse? They’re just so much establishment claptrap.

Relentlessly edgy, confrontational and contemptuous of the niceties of governance and policy making, Mr. Trump is the perfect counterpoint to a president whose preternatural cool and deliberate nature drive his critics mad. [Continue reading…]

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