Dice are rolling, the knives are out
Would be presidents are all around
I don’t say they mean harm, but they’d each give an arm
To see us six feet under ground.
- from “Evita” lyric by Tim Rice
So it must seem to President Obama this week. The nightly television talk, especially that carried by cable, is filled with carping. The editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are given over to Karl Rove, John Bolton, and the neocons in exile, tell us daily how badly the new President is screwing up on foreign policy, on the financial rescue programs, and on just about everything on his plate. And the man has been in office barely a month! It doesn’t seem fair.
All right, some criticism is justified, especially on errant cabinet appointments. But that’s not the loudest beef. What really ticks off the hard right is his promise to talk with Iran, his determination to close Gitmo, and his obvious preference for diplomacy over confrontation. Real men choose confrontation, the hawks seem to be saying. Pie-in-the-sky Obama just doesn’t get it.
The most dangerous situation facing us is what’s brewing in Pakistan. As someone said, Afghanistan is irrelevant; the real game is in Pakistan, a big country, a poor country, and a country filled with weapons, including the nuclear kind. As is so often the case these days, we get along (barely) with the leaders but the people don’t like us. What should the President do about Pakistan? The neocons would say “get tough.” The doves would say, “pull out.” Neither approach makes sense. It’s not that simple. The problem calls for patient, thoughtful diplomacy. Above all, it calls for working the global room, schmoozing with China, Russia, and other Asian neighbors. Obama seems to recognize this, and the critics should at least give him credit for his recent overtures to Russia, whose help would be invaluable in Asia. But they won’t, because some of them are still fighting the cold war.
The polls suggest that the natterers are having little effect on public opinion, as Obama’s honeymoon continues. Of course, the kind of decisions he will have to make soon, especially on the financial front, are sure to cost a lot of people a lot of money, and that will take points off his approval rating. Will the public blame the President, or will it blame the forces that created the problem? Reason says the latter, but I am not so sure. A wild card in all this is Congress, which seems intent on pulling Obama to the left, a chancy move in a country that is still somewhat to the right of center politically.
This week the President took the gloves off, so to speak, in addressing the Republican opposition to his financial bailout, reminding them pointedly that it was the Democrats, after all, who won the election. Fine; there is nothing wrong with showing a little spine in politics. But one hopes he will be equally tough on the Congressional Democrats who try to yank him off the reservation, because it seems to me that they will turn out to be his real problem in Washington. The Republicans, for all their bluster, are, like Afghanistan, irrelevant. If you want to know where the dice are rolling and the knives are out, look in the direction of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
