Barack Obama and personal convictions

by philg

One of the things that has confused me most about Barack Obama is how he has failed to act on his expressed personal convictions. I would have thought that one of the luxuries of being President of the U.S. is that one would be able to do whatever one wanted, mostly, at least for four years. For example, Obama has said that he is against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He could have ended both with the stroke of a pen and brought he troops home on January 21, 2009. Yet he did not.

In some ways the latest argument over gays in the military is even harder to understand. Obama has said that he is against any restrictions on gays serving in the military. A federal judge handed him exactly what he said that he wanted, i.e., an injunction preventing the military from treating gay soldiers differently from straight soldiers. You would think that he would have checked that one off his list of goals and proceeded to work on other stuff. Instead, we learn from this nytimes article that Obama is mobilizing a swarm of government lawyers to fight the judge’s ruling and preserve the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

It seems odd that Obama has put so much effort into expanding government power in areas never previously imagined, e.g., to force every American to buy health insurance, but won’t use the powers that everyone agrees that a U.S. President has had for 200+ years, e.g., to bring troops home or to let a judge’s ruling stand unchallenged.

19 thoughts on “Barack Obama and personal convictions”

  2. Right on the money – this does seem odd. Two thoughts:

    1. It’s easier to talk about personal convictions on the campaign trail than to have to implement them when in power.

    2. Both issues could be spun to the Democrat’s political disadvantage in the upcoming elections – soft on terrorism, pro-gay.

    Steve

  3. Steve: As far as Item #1 goes, I don’t see what would have been difficult about letting a judge’s decision stand. It takes more effort to act than not to act. Obama could have enjoyed a game of golf instead of mobilizing the government’s lawyers in the fight to preserve Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

    As far as Item #2 goes, it is true that a person perpetually afraid of the voters might avoid acting on his convictions, but in this case I’m not convinced. A person who votes primarily based on gay issues is not going to switch parties based on a Democrat doing something perceived as pro-gay; the Democrats have already positioned themselves as the “gay party”. As for the wars, I’m also not sure that there is a huge warmongering vote that Obama is capturing at the moment. In any case, what kind of a person would send American troops to their deaths and American taxpayers to the poor house to fight wars that he doesn’t believe in, merely to get a few extra votes?

  4. Are you saying that you are surprised that a politician used theatrics and “personal conviction” to gain office and now does not adhere to the perceived beliefs voters believed he held?

    I am watching my teenagers grapple with this for the first time and I am glad they are getting the lesson early.

  5. Colin: I don’t believe everything that politicians say in order to get elected, but in these particular cases I’m not sure why Obama would have had a reason to lie about his personal convictions. There aren’t enough gay voters to make a difference in most elections and, in any case, as with Massachusetts voters, Democrats need not work too hard to collect gay votes. Why pretend to be a champion for gays in the military to begin with? Surely that is not a position that tempted away a lot of conservative voters.

  6. I work at a local school where the university president has banned the ROTC from campus, instead the students have to schlep to a local technical school’s campus to participate in ROTC activities.

    I was always curious why the school didn’t instead ban the Commander-in-Chief and/or members of Congress, either of whom could actually repeal the anti-gay policy in the military. After all, Truman ended segregation in the military by executive order, not waiting for legislative action, as the current Commander-in-Chief is claiming as the motivation for his actively anti-gay rights position.

  7. Maybe Obama changed his mind (and convictions) after 2 years in office? It is one thing to campaign on the trail and state a need to change the military, it is another to be in daily war/security meetings.

    You say Obama has simply “not to act”, which is easy — but the military, I assume, would have to change a lot of internal documents to comply. I read the article, and the stated reasons seem pragmatic; when you were CEO, how would you like if suddenly a new rule were imposed, and you had to make it effective immediately, disrupting your business?

  8. Murali: Obama could certainly say “I’ve changed my mind on this,” but he has not done so. And I think he is saying how much he would like to welcome gays in the military even while simultaneously unleashing dozens of lawyers (all paid for with our tax dollars, I might add) to fight against the judge’s rule.

    How would I have liked it if a federal judge told me to do something that I already wanted to do? Something that would require me to “change a lot of internal documents” as you say? I would personally sit down in Google Docs and start editing rather than hiring 50 lawyers.

    What kind of documents exactly would the military have to edit? Something that says it is now okay to use a Macintosh while watching Bravo and wearing Levis?

  9. Even though I think DADT is stupid, I would argue that what Obama is doing is the less expedient and more long-term principled route:

    I disagree with Phil — a truly responsible US President cannot mostly do whatever he wants to do. A President should in fact be highly circumscribed in what he must and must not do. Regardless of his personal opinion about DADT, Barack Obama in his capacity as President of the United States has an obligation to order the Justice Department to defend all duly enacted federal laws against all court challenges. I personally think this is preferable to a President choosing to defend only those laws he happens to agree with.

    2. Not appealing could set a terrible precedent beyond the DADT issue at hand. Judge Virginia Phillips, who wrote this opinion, is one of 35 district judges on the US District Court, Central District of California. This court is one of 89 US District Courts in the 50 states. Yet Judge Phillips is enjoining the Secretary of Defense and the US Military “…from enforcing or applying the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Act and implementing regulations, against any person under their jurisdiction or command…” In other words, she is applying her injunction everywhere in the world the US Military operates, an area way beyond the jurisdiction of the Central District of California. Simply as a matter of governing principle, Obama cannot afford to let US national and international policy be determined by the opinion of one District Court judge, even if he happens to agree with that judge’s opinion.

  10. Obama’s biggest problem with critics the right and the left is that everybody projects their hopes and their disapprovals on him.

    In his campaigns, he clearly said that Afghanistan was the war that was needed and the war that should have additional resources put to it.

    He clearly carried through with that and yet, he is continually slammed for not following through with what he didn’t campaign on.

  11. Markl: You raise some good points that I hadn’t thought of. Thanks. Maybe this is why I’d be a bad president! You’d find me copiloting all of the fancy military aircraft to make “official” visits to beautiful countries around the world, playing with the presidential dog on the White House lawn, etc.

  12. What makes you think he actually has personal convictions? I realize he’s been canonized as a sort of secular saint and all, but he is a politician. It would be more surprising if he did have personal convictions.

  13. Scott: Maybe “convictions” was too strong a word, in the sense that it implies something that a person would make sacrifices for. But even a politician will have personal preferences and if it doesn’t cost anything in terms of votes, power, or advancement, I would expect a politician to indulge some of his or her personal preferences.

  15. “The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.” -George Stephanopoulos, on Clinton’s Presidency.

  16. Instead of convictions, I’d analyze them as campaign promises and part of his platform. He said, elect me and I will do these things. And now he has not. Was he mugged by reality? I don’t think so. Maybe the people who elected him believed everything he said but I doubt he was so naive as to think he could really do all the things he promised.

  17. I suspect Markl has the correct explanation in terms of the ongoing relationship between the executive and judicial branches. But to bring it back to the terms in which Phil posed the question: it isn’t true that Obama’s path of least resistance is to let the judge’s ruling stand. That would involve Obama getting directly involved in the machinery of the Justice Department to *stop* a reflex action that is deeply entrenched in the culture of that organization. So Obama *is* in fact taking the easy road here: let the Justice Department go ahead and do its thing while Obama continues putting his personal energies into issues he considers more important.

    Likewise with the wars: the Department of Defense is pursuing its chosen policies. Obama has to lobby them like crazy to get them to deflect a few inches from their favored path. They have all the institutional momentum on their side. Obama only has the ability to fire individual officers, slow walk promotions, hold up budget approval on this or that, etc. Any power he tries to exercise has a range of risks to consider, mostly taking the form of bad publicity fostered by Republican (or even some Democratic) politicians with stealth assistance/prompting from disgruntled military brass.

    The sad fact is that the “Leader of the Free World” has mostly a “Bully Pulpit” to work with. And a very noisy gallery full of hecklers ready to sabotage anything he attempts.

  18. Seth: Obama is Commander in Chief. Exactly what “lobbying” would he have to do to withdraw U.S. soldiers from both Afghanistan and Iraq? Aside from the risk of “bad publicity” that you cite, what would stop Obama from ordering the troops home?

  19. philg:

    I’ll let Harry Truman explain:

    In the early summer of 1952, before the heat of the campaign, President Truman used to contemplate the problems of the general-become-President should Eisenhower win the forthcoming election. “He’ll sit here,” Truman would remark (tapping his desk for emphasis), “and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!” And nothing will happen. Poor Ike — it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.” … Long before he came to talk of Eisenhower he had put his own experience in other words: “I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them … That’s all the powers of the President amount to.”

    (From Richard E. Neustadt’s “Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: the Politics of Leadership” available here. The whole book is worth a read.)

    Neustadt provides a lot of perspective on the practical realities of Presidential leadership. Note that Truman did some remarkably decisive things, so his complaint about the Bully Pulpit can’t just be written off as some kind of ‘sniveling’. If Obama were a better leader, he might come closer to the “do it because I said so” ideal you seem to have in mind. But you dramatically underestimate the personal and political *cost* to him of doing so. He could have his way about this, if nothing else mattered to him … AT … ALL. Including his own reelection. But of course he has half a dozen comparably enormous problems to juggle, and probably would like to be reelected. And he just isn’t (yet) inclined to be all that confrontational.

    Also, George W. Bush was subject to the same fundamental constraint. Bush’s team had to “lobby” the DoD to invade Iraq (via repeated insistence, overriding of contrary opinion, rearranging the org chart, etc. etc.). Big parts of the post-Vietnam, “Powell Doctrine” military really, really didn’t like the neocon kool-aide they were made to drink. But thermodynamics is at work here: it’s easier to break the egg than to put it back together again. Now that we’re “in it”, there is huge institutional inertia insisting upon “winning it”. Most of those Powell Doctrine officers who swore to themselves at various scary moments during combat tours in Vietnam that they would stand up against stupid military adventures once they wore the stars have either retired (think Andrew Bacevich — retired as a colonel, NOT a general) or made their peace with the new holy writ of “Counterinsurgency”.

    What else besides “bad publicity”? It starts with completely ignoring his intent, simply writing up plans that don’t do what he asks for, continues with endless iterations of “but, sir, what about this that and the other?”, playing dumb, leaking gossip to reporters, presenting him with faits accompli and challenging him to “whatayagonna do? fire me?” games of chicken in the press, or McChrystal-style insubordination. Don’t you read your Bob Woodward? 🙂

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