176. Choosing a President: Prior Questions.

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Suppose we had to answer these two questions before we listened to another word, or had another thought, about this presidential election:

(1) How much can any President do about the economy?

(2) How much better off (or worse off) could I have been if somebody other than the incumbent had taken office at the moment he did?

I don't know how much a president can do about the economy but I'll bet it's a lot less than those now blaming or praising President Obama are assuming he can do.

As for having more or less money than you had four years ago, you might remember the fundamental forces like those at work right after World War II (all that pent-up demand), and if you did you might realize that in some four-year slices you would have been in clover no matter who was president.  Tarzan of the Apes could have been president from 1952 to 1956 and his economic numbers would have been good.

Downturns, incipient recessions or depressions, may be different.  A president's emergency measures can have an effect.  But what are you going to measure that effect (even if you can distinguish it) against?  Your projections (even if you can distinguish them from your hopes and dreams) of how your candidate's measures would have worked out? 

And speaking of your candidate's measures, was he ready with them?  Where was he when we were on the brink of a great recession, or maybe depression?  That's the moment you need to measure your "better off" question from.  Compare 2008 with 1956, when there wasn't a brink in sight.

A good year to think about is 1992.  George H. W. Bush is coming up for re-election after four pretty good years.  But there's been an interruption, a downcurve in the graph that, in the big picture we see now, keeps going up.  The nominal GDP, the one people pay attention to at the time, has gone from 6.6 and 6.9 in the first two quarters to 6.1 in the third — the quarter just before the election.  (It will go back up to 6.7 in the fourth quarter.)  No brink, not much of a recession (if there was one it lasted only eight months), but oh, what a big deal in the eyes of the opposition party.  George Stephanopoulos gets the press to notice James Carville's reminder on the wall behind his desk, "It's the economy, stupid," and we're off to the races.

Well, it wasn't the stupid economy, as we can see now.  Nobody looks back to '92 as a year of decision, much less a crisis.  All it gave us was a little swerve in the prosperity line.  But oh what it did to George H. W. Bush.  It knocked his approval rating down to 37%.  And you know what?  Within three months, after a little swerve in the other direction, it was back to 56%.  But the election had been taken care of.  What timing!  What a gift to Carville and Stephanopoulos! 

Well, the American public was a gift to them too, as it is to all campaign advisers.  I'm referring to its capacity, to every busy human being's capacity, to be swayed by little, twistable, sometimes falsifiable things.  In this case it was Bush's polite, unremarkable wonder at the powers of a supermarket scanner displayed at a Grocer's Association convention.  The public, following journalists' slant (starting with Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times) and publicists' drums, saw a candidate who was "out of touch with ordinary Americans."  He hadn't even shopped at supermarkets, the rich bastard.

So there's one moral of the story:  Don't get so busy you become a member of the American public.

91. What's the Difference between a Yippie and a Wall Street Occupier?

Street Movements and Moral Clarity (11)

In 1968 there were a lot of confused, outlandish people demonstrating in the streets and they were stupid; in 2011 there are a lot of confused, outlandish people demonstrating in the streets and they are not stupid. What's the difference?

The 1968 demonstrators did not see that voters who might press their representatives to end the Viet Nam War would be slower to do so if it meant associating themselves with a lot of outlandish people. Voters could change things. Change yourself, become more landish, and you could change those voters. Those who didn't see that were stupid. And history confirms that judgment. The silent landish vote swept Nixon into office and kept Democrats out for decades.

That taught a lot of us not to side with outlandish people lightly. Give them a boost and the backlash could discredit good causes for years to come. In Athens we saw evidence of that backlash just last week, in a Messenger cartoon. One well-dressed fellow, passing Zucotti Park, says to another, "I'm having a moral dilemma: Do I want to live in a country that caters to the ultra-rich … or do I want to agree with a hippie?!"

Well, 1968 hippies were stupid for alienating those who had the power to change. The 2011 Wall Street Occupiers see (I suppose) that voters no longer have the power to change. The OWS equivalent to "Peace in Viet Nam" is "Regulation on Wall Street." And how will voters bring that about? Not by making a Republican President. He's almost sure to be against regulation. By making a Democrat President? Well, we've got one who had one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate and who promised not to be influenced by lobbyists for special interests. Just the one to make the slam-bang speech against big money and lead the charge on the Hill. Just the one to get the country's biggest mistake in the pre-Great-Recession years corrected. Why isn't he doing that? Because to get re-elected he has to have big money, and to get that money he, through lobbyists called "bundlers" (NYT, 10-28-11), has to go to a lot of people who don't want regulation on Wall Street. We infer influence.

You don't have to give the Zucotti Park riff-raff credit for great powers of perception here. It's been obvious for months that Wall Street bankers, the very people responsible for the 2008 crisis, are successfully working on Senators and Congressmen, no doubt through that need to get re-elected, to hold up or weaken legislation on new rules.

So it looks like the difference is that in 1968 you were stupid if you didn't work through the system and in 2011 you were stupid if you did. The system wasn't working.

What's the smart play? It looks to me like a run at the campaign finance rules. Reduce the need for big money and you reduce the power of Wall Street. Is anybody smart enough to bring that off? Inside the presently jammed system? We won't find any such person in Zucotti Park. But that's not what we look to those occupiers for. It's enough that they keep before us, among all the goofy causes, this most important one.

85. Suspense in the Sixties, Suspense Now

Street Movements and Moral Clarity (10)

I see that Hendrik Hertzberg in the latest New Yorker (10-17-11) is in the same state of suspense over the Wall Street occupiers that I was in over the Viet Nam war protesters. Will they focus on a worthy goal or will they blow their chance?

From my experience I can give him this exciting answer: some will and some won't. And the good that's done will depend on who the television cameras focus on. In 1968 it was Jerry Rubin and the Yippies — in Hertzberg's terms, "the flaky fringe." Now, who knows, but whoever it is a repetition will mean irrelevance, diffusion of force, disillusion. Hertzberg clearly fears that but, he says, it's "not too late to hope."

I want to tell him, and anybody else now in his state, that there are grounds for hope. You could see them right there in the sixties scene. If in today's university population we have any significant number of young people like those I saw going to work for Eugene McCarthy Hertzberg has nothing to worry about. Some American young people are going to be there ready to focus and, hopefully, make the others focus.

Remember that turnaround in 1968? The war was going on and on, Johnson was going to get re-elected, it would all continue, and then McCarthy stood up, declared against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, New England's universities emptied their best students into the state to work for him, the votes poured in, and Johnson, shocked, dropped from the race. Power. Exerted by young people. Inside the system.

Humphrey steps in, takes over the Johnson machinery. McCarthy will run against him in the Indiana primary. Indiana, right next to Ohio. In our streets, as in most streets, we're hearing "Power to the People," black power, flower power, student power. Some students, though, are hearing, "power in the ballot box," and don't care if it's coming from what other students are calling "party hacks." They check in with McCarthy headquarters in Indiana and get organized.

In haste. Oh my God the haste. Who saw this coming? Who has any money? Small contributions come in. Veterans for Peace contributes fifty dollars. Not nearly enough for a bus but some students have cars. A prof has a station wagon. Here we go, OU for McCarthy.

Headquarters assigned our contingent two towns, Shelbyville and Franklin, historically tough for Democrats and poison for liberals. Canvassing would take place on separate weekends. Canvassers would be put up in private homes and church basements. They would feed themselves.

It may be hard now to appreciate what these establishment-joiners were giving up: status with the rebels, the hip, the icebreakers who were setting student style; the badges that showed their allegiance, the dress, the smoke, the long hair; even, here and there, the beard. "Lose it," said the boss in Indianapolis. Lose anything that might lose a vote for peace on the porches of Indiana.

The boss in Indianapolis, the one who set up the McCarthy operation throughout the state, was a nineteen-year-old sophomore. She had dropped out of Macalester College in Minnesota in the middle of the quarter. The fellow who was waiting for us in the one lit storefront in Shelbyville (it was one a.m., our people had late classes) had dropped out of Yale Law School. His briefing of arriving groups would take him well into the morning.

OK, so there's sacrifice, there's adulthood, there's the contrast with the juveniles around them, there's emersion from that juvenility. And there's the ground for hope that the young Americans in the Occupy Wall Street movement will focus on something worthy (Hertzberg lists seven possibilities) and not blow their big opportunity.

I hope they understand how big that opportunity is. At this moment the two-party system really is at a stand — worse, in its way, than in 1968. The Republicans won't squeeze the wealthy and the Democrats can't, not really. They need the big money as badly as the Republicans do. Why do you think Obama is so slow to crack down on them? To get re-elected he's got to pay for all that expensive television time. Same with the Democrats in Congress. So, without a campaign-finance law, the country's got nobody. Except, now, you. You've got a lot of eyes on you, OWS.

74. What "Class Warfare" Conjures.

First "conjure": to call up a spirit or devil. "Class warfare" calls up communism. That devil, Congressional Republicans want us to remember, would have had the citizens of every nation, divided into classes, at each other's throats. That's what you, President Obama, would have Americans do when you agitate for higher taxes on the rich.

What you need, Mr. President, is a counter-expression, conjuring up a good spirit, one you'll be acting in the name of. But not acting gently. We've had enough of that. Acting forcefully, like a Crusader. Get the word "war" into your expression.

I know. A lot of people hate war, or at least blood. So you've got to avoid conjuring that. Nothing that can be pictured as a target, nothing that will bleed. But people don't mind wars against abstractions (poverty, terror), and may in fact love them. So, let's find an abstraction that fits what you're doing and sock the Republicans with it.

Not so easy, is it. The best I can come up with is "War on Inequity." I know that "inequity" is a little on the egghead side, which I know you want to get off of, but it is abstract and it does identify your target. It certainly won't bleed. The only hazard I can see is in the typing. If you come out with "War on Iniquity" you're on the religious right's ground and the gotcha humorists will make you bleed.

72. How Barack Obama and George W Bush Are Alike.

They both took advantage of a crisis to do what they wanted to do. Bush wanted to invade Iraq, Obama wanted laws expanding Headstart, Pell Grants and a host of liberal projects he had been working for. Both men were going to have a hard time getting what they wanted. Then along came, for Bush, the 9-11 attacks and, for Obama, the Great Recession. Have to have military operations. Include Iraq. Have to have a stimulus to the economy. Work in the liberal agenda.

It's hard to see how, without a crisis, either one would have gotten much public and Congressional support. Imagine, out of the blue: "Let us invade Iraq in order to bring freedom and democracy to its people." Imagine: "Let us now finish the New Deal."

Of course I don't know their actual motives. I'm making inferences from their behavior and known views. In Bush's case these are pretty well documented and I don't need a columnist to point them out. I did need one in Obama's case and on Monday Ross Douthat stepped in and supplied the need:

The hope was that the [stimulus] legislation would do more than just kickstart a recovery: It would lay a new foundation for the economy, with an electric car in every garage and a Solyndra solar panel on every roof. The result, predictably, was a bill that looked less like a temporary exercise in crisis management and more like the Democratic Party's permanent wish list. (NYT, 9-12-11)

Obama joined Bush when he went along with that bill.

The difference between the two is seen in their words after the defects in their policies became clear. Obama is now making speeches that, according to Douthat, suggest

that he intends to campaign for re-election on what should have been the blueprint for his first four years in office: a short-term stimulus highlighted by a payroll tax cut, a medium-term push to overhaul the tax code and a plan for long-term entitlement reform.

In this, which Douthat sees as "a request for a presidential do-over," a "second chance to get things right," we see a man who learns by experience and admits a mistake.

That's the opposite of what we see in George Bush, who in his recently published autobiography, Decision Points,, rests in the belief that the invasion of Iraq was thoroughly justified. And, going by what we are now hearing from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, that belief is not likely to change. Those whose views were closest to his (and even, some say, responsible for his) are suggesting that the Arab Spring confirms that justification.

Sometimes the nation benefits when a perceptive leader takes advantage of a crisis. President Roosevelt, with an eye on the long term, added Federal Deposit Insurance, the Security and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority to his immediate recovery measures, slipping them in when the opposition was most frightened.

In the end the benefit depends on the perceptiveness of the leader, and the trust of that perceptiveness in the voters who elect him and keep him going. In 2004 voters trusted Bush enough to keep him going. In 2012 they'll have to gauge their trust in Obama. If we judge by reaction to mistakes the men are more significantly different than they are alike.

67. English Composition vs. Sarah Palin

 

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I think "Vague" was probably the word most often found in the margins of English Composition themes. You had to be on top of freshmen all the time to get them to be specific.

In yesterday's Athens Messenger Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg News revealed that he must have been an English teacher. He was all over Republican candidates for being so vague about President Obama's decision-making. "What, specifically, has he done wrong on policy? What, specifically, would you have done to create jobs?"

He went on to scold them, and a few politicians on the left, for their dim charges on the stimulus, and bailouts, and jobs, and health care, and the debt limit. If it had been in red his final imperative could have come right from the schoolmarm pencil I used: "Be specific and rational, not vague and visceral."

I can't help thinking about that pencil when I listen to Sarah Palin's speeches. She's a great example. Real Americans, real Americans, real Americans. My wife counted at least four "real Americans" in one short clip.

I think she needs a good scolding. I see it coming from my seventh-grade, Middle-West, middle-class English teacher. "Now Sarah, you know that's a lazy way to write. You've got to think about what you say. God gave you a mind. Use it."

And you know who else you could put in that class, right next to Palin?  Ulrike Meinhof of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, those radicals of the German student protest movement of the sixties, the ones with so much Gramsci and Marcuse in their mouths —claims for "authenticity" and "anti-"fascistization," cries against "repressive tolerance" and "cultural hegemonism," enunciation of one Marxist abstraction after another, further and further removed from "the specific and rational."

Isn't that a happy picture, Sarah Palin and Ulrike Meinhof, squirming in their seats, forced to take a scolding from Mrs. Davison or the visiting Bloomberg journalist?

57. Obama to voters: “You deserve better.”

No they don’t, Barack. They deserve exactly what they’re getting. They voted for these people. They instructed them to do what they're doing. Nobody from Heaven came down and made them sign a pledge never, never to raise taxes. Nobody from Mars said, "Give no ground on Social Security." These are citizens in a democracy, brother. Citizens in a democracy always get the government they deserve.

I hear spite in your voice. I hear, "Me, me. I didn't vote for those clunks. I'm not a dimwit Johnny-one-note. Why do I have to suffer?" Now I'm sure you know the answer to that. In a democracy the minority always has to suffer what the majority imposes. You know that if it doesn't, if it rebels, it can end democracy. In my opinion it's your desire not to end democracy that keeps you suffering.

Yes, I won't start blowing up things, but am I not allowed a few howls? May not a man of self-control "give a loose to his soul" as Robert Frost's woodchopper did? I howl — at night, to you, to my friends — but in my howling am I doing anything more than whacking a few blocks of oak, releasing a little soul-pressure?

I think you are doing more. Frost was alone, feeling

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

That's a wonderful release, but it's private. You are in a room, with others, and they hear your howling. You encourage them to howl too. You could make a chorus, howling to each other. And you know what that makes you?

I'm afraid to guess.

It makes you a lot like the dimwits you're howling about. Don't we say that the reason they're so dim, or maybe just the reason they stay dim, is that they talk almost entirely to each other — you know, on blogs and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube — and listen to the same voices on radio and television? It's the whole world to them. We say the dim "live in an echo-chamber." Well, I think you bright fellows, howling in your little room, are living in the same kind of place. And you're doing what they're doing. You're dimming yourselves.

And what would we be doing if we stayed bright?

You'd be waiting patiently for each chance to change those speakers. To break into their conversations or draw them into yours. To bring in what light you can.

55. Reading the Bible: A Sermon

Preached to a recognizable American political/religious group, 13 Aug 2011:

 

Brothers and sisters, I heard last night that you are angry. The television man said that you hollered at your Congressman for letting the debt ceiling be raised. Is that right? Are you as angry as the New York Times reporter — the one the television man gets his news from (8-12-11) — says you are? Are you? Are you? [great roar, "Yes!"]

In that case, watch out, brothers and sisters. Take a minute to read your Bible. Do you know what it says about anger? Do you? Do you? [silence] It says (James 1:19), "be slow to get angry." It says (Proverbs, 14: 29), "Those with a hasty temper will make mistakes." It says — listen carefully, brothers and sisters —it says that "your anger can never make things right in God's sight" (James again).

Do you want to do right in God's sight? I wonder. Who are you angry at? Your Congressman, of course, because he didn't fight hard enough to hold down spending. Maybe at those senators who won't hold down spending your Congressman's way. But most likely you're angry at President Obama, who's behind all those Democrat spenders. Is that right? Is that right? [great roar, "Yes!"]

What does it mean, "to do right in God's sight"? Have you asked yourself that? Have you looked into your Bible? Really looked into it? Paid attention? Close attention? Have you? Have you? [silence]

Sure you have. You've just forgotten. Doing right in God's sight is doing what Joseph did in Egypt. He got the message from God that seven lean years were coming, preceded by seven fat years. And what was he supposed to do during those fat years? Lay up! Lay up! Food of the field, food in the cities, corn like the sand of the sea, into the granaries "against the seven years of famine, that the land perish not."

That's what you do in fat years, lay up. Our fat years were the 80s and 90s. What were you doing then? About the deficit. About Social Security. About all the entitlements that are killing us now. Did you think twice about a trillion-dollar war? It would have been easy then for a President to reduce spending. Plenty of money, jobs easy, no recession. Did you read your Bible thinking fat years in Egypt had no connection with fat years in the United States? Did you think God's message had nothing to do with you? Did you expect him to communicate in some other way? Great Heavens, brothers and sisters, you stand in front of the world holding up the Bible. When in God's name are you going to look into it? Are you going to rely on me, just me, or some preacher on television, to tell you what's in it?

Well, since that's the way it is, I'm going to tell you. I'm no Jeremiah or Isaiah, I'm a frail reed, but I've got their message, and they give me strength to deliver it. It's this: you have sinned in the eyes of the Lord, sinned to high heaven. You sinned then in your profligacy and you sin now in trying to blame somebody else.

Now you might have missed the first sin but I don't see how in the world, if you had read your Bible, you could have missed the second. The Bible is full of scorn for those who try to shift the blame. There's Adam, a worm squirming under God's gaze: "This woman whom thou gavest to be with me, SHE gave me of the tree, and I did eat." There's Aaron, claiming that the "mischievous" people made him make a graven image. "They gave me the gold and out came this calf." What do you know, out came that calf. There's Saul, trying to blame "the people" for denying God "the best of the sheep and of the oxen" on his sacrificial altar. And finally there's Pontius Pilate washing his hands to show that the blame for Christ's death falls on "the multitude."

You (help me, Jeremiah) are Adam and Aaron and Saul and Pontius Pilate. Why? Because you are trying to avoid the personal responsibility you're always out there making so much of.

And you know this. You know in your heart that you are guilty, and it's a burden to you. I can see it in the way you try to lighten that burden. You'd see it too if you would just go back and look at the way the Israelites tried to lighten their burden of guilt. They put "all their iniquities" on a goat (called "the scapegoat") and sent him "into the wilderness."

That's what you are doing. Your choice of goat varies but I see that your goats do have one thing in common: they all work in Washington. That's where the sin is. Not where you live.

And you know what? I believe that you love virtue and hate sin. And you have an intense desire to show that, to others and to yourself. That's why you are so strict about frugality and austerity and discipline, today's great virtues.

The thing is, your timing is terrible. And that changes everything. You want frugality just when imposition of it will damage the budding prosperity that you also want. Twenty years ago you could have had it, and been happy with your President. Now you can't have it unless your President, that goat, commits a lot of the sins you hate.

I have searched the Bible, brothers and sisters, for comparisons to what you are now, people who have betrayed the ideals of their religion, neglected their Holy Scripture, and acted like the pleasure-loving heathens they scorn. And who in their hearts know this.

That leaves you feeling guilty, doesn't it?  You're not as good as your grandfather.  Well, you'll show him, and his demanding spirit.  You may not have practiced the old virtues for a while but by God you'll come out for them now.  Twice as loudly.  You'll give these unfrugal Democrats the beating of their lives.

Of course it's the beating you should have been giving yourselves in the 80s and 90s.  Only with what psychologists call "compensatory exaggeration." You're the watchdog who, missing the stranger until he gets to the door, barks the place down. "See, I'm just as good at watching as I ever was."

The trouble is, that's a personal-virtue problem, with both you and the dog. And sometimes personal-virtue problems fit the nation's problems and sometimes they don't. Right now the fit is terrible. I mean to the point of your committing new and greater sins. If you bring the house down to save your virtue you've injured a lot of your brothers. The Bible has a lot to say about that, my friends, injury to brothers. Look into it, brothers and sisters. Look into it closely.

53. Presidential Leadership

 

What this country needs is one President to feel our pain and another one to do something about it. There really isn't time for a man to do both, to respond promptly on television to the Standard and Poor downgrade of Treasury bonds and counter the forces that bring on such a thing.

The first President would satisfy what is apparently the current conception of presidential leadership: showing the country an exemplary way to think, feel, and live.

Oh how such a President would protect the second President from the kind of criticism Barack Obama is getting now on the Op-Ed pages of the country! He'd be johnny-on-the-spot with a response to the death of the 22 Navy Seals (not in Hawaii on vacation, speaking three days late); he'd be ready with something wise and comforting about the S & P downgrade and the crash that followed.  With Obama, says Maureen Dowd, "It's all been 'too little, too late.'"

In World War II the expression "too little, too late" was searingly used to describe what Britain sent to help the Norwegians and then the Greeks to hold off the Germans. The failure of leaders to do enough, on time, had the most dire material consequences. The failure before us now is a rhetorical failure, and it apparently will have dire political consequences. Calling it a failure of leadership will sound strange to those who remember "too little, too late" as it applied to what our leaders were doing then. It didn't matter what Roosevelt said or where he was. If he saw that we put enough troops on the shore of Africa on time that was leadership.

I don't want to deny the term "leader" to someone who bucks up the country. Roosevelt did a lot of that, beginning with "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." But that part of a President's job has, with television, grown so that it is in danger of crowding the other part, the part done out of sight, the part with material consequences, into just a corner of the American consciousness. For Maureen Dowd that corner is very small. President Obama "doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led." There's her idea of leadership. No matter what he does he can't be called a leader unless he speaks, on time and sufficiently.

In my plan we'll have one President to make sure the country feels led and another to lead it. They'll both have time to do their jobs and they'll both be properly called "leaders."

48. What if not?

 

What if there had been no bailout and no stimulus? What if China had not instituted the one-child policy? What if, each time I criticized Barack Obama or Deng Xiaoping for their part in those actions, I were required to imagine the consequences of their not being done, or to say what I would have done at the time?

Yesterday I heard, probably on CNBC, the 553rd Republican complain that the bailout or the stimulus had failed and on the same day read in the Economist (7-23-11) that the one-child policy had had oh-so-many bad effects. The politician did not say what, in his mind, would constitute success, or how he, at the time, would have put us on the road to it. The journalist said nothing about the bad effect, over-population, that the one-child policy was designed to counter, and did not consider what a multi-child China might now look like.

Reviewing world events is like reading a novel: we can do it sharply or dully. Dull readers of Billy Budd see Billy hanged and say, "Oh this is unbearable! This good man! These cruel men!" Sharp readers see Captain Vere hanging Billy and say, "This is unbearable! This good man! This world where choice is so limited and good men have to be so cruel!"

Captain Vere hangs Billy in order to prevent a mutiny. It's a choice that can be justified only by the closest attention to Melville's world, a world in which England's victory over Napoleonic France depends on such choices, however multiple. Sharp readers ask, "What if Billy had not been hanged?" They answer, "England would be defeated." They visualize that defeat and don't want it. They sympathize with Vere. Dull readers deplore Vere's actions and go no further.

We're all potentially sharp readers of novels and observers of world events. What dulls us? Distance from the action, according to Melville. "Little ween the snug cardplayers in the cabin of the responsibilities of the sleepless man on the bridge."  Physical distance can do it, but so can imaginative distance. Abstractions dull us, as reformed Marxists well know.  Passionate adherence to one cause, one value, dulls us, as debt-limit Republicans should know.  Anything that keeps us from putting ourselves into a scene and feeling it, feeling the forces operating there, feeling all the forces, will dull us.

36. "Defense"

Words change meaning. Twenty-five years ago "defense" in the mouth of an American Secretary of Defense meant defense against attack by Soviet nuclear weapons. The NATO treaty provided it to European nations, with U. S. weapons making an "umbrella."

Yesterday Secretary of Defense Robert F. Gates warned those nations that the U. S. was getting tired of expending "increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources...to be serious and capable partners in their own defense" (NYT 6-11-11).

Same word, referring to the same treaty. Coming from the same country, through the same official source. But not the same ears hearing it, and not processed the same way by what's between them.

Let me guess that process, as it might be going on between the ears of Angela Merkel, leader of one of several nations failing, the U. S. believes, to play their NATO part. Make her also a leader in word inspection, always starting with what words actually refer to. Here she sees that being a partner in Germany's own defense means joining an attack on the Libyan army. Merkel: "Ah, Gates's 'defense' now means 'offense.'" She, a good listener, hears that the word reverses its dictionary meaning (root: "to ward off") so she adjusts her internal vocabulary to fit the situation.

If she goes the other way, and tries to find something in the situation to fit the word Gates wants her to use, she can do it. Germany can be thought of as defending itself against her partners' impulse to go to war. That's what practically all of Europe saw itself doing when George Bush called for allies going into Iraq. But what in this case? She'll have Germany defending itself, in the end, against the humane instincts of Barack Obama. That doesn't fit the reality of diplomacy and world opinion. There are just too damned many realities.

21. Dancing Around Clausewitz.

"It's war, stupid." That can well be on your wall, but if you are a leader of a NATO nation now you can't act on it. The people you are sending in to help force Qaddafi out have to be called "liaison officers" (NYT, 4-21-11), as the people Lyndon Johnson first sent into Viet Nam had to be called (as we are calling the people we will leave behind in Afghanistan) "advisers" and "trainers." Nobody wants to be "at war."

To fill in the wall message I like to go to Carl von Clausewitz, whom I hear saying, "Look, the only way you can make some leaders do things is kill their people. The people you send to do that are called 'soldiers' and the thing they will be doing is called 'war,' whose law of escalation into worse and worse killing I have explained. Don't deceive yourself into thinking your use of force leads to anything else."

Are the statesmen who send liaison officers and advisers deceiving themselves? If so Clausewitz's "realpolitik" shows up their "illusion politics." If they are not deceiving themselves, if they see the reality of war as they hide it, I think those statesmen are a rebuke to Clausewitz and to those who define "realism" so narrowly. They see a political reality that makes calling things by their right (that is, accurate) names unrealistic. They see a public that denies votes to speakers of "war." On Clausewitz's wall they'd put "It's the election, stupid."

This is the pain of U. S. Presidents: both wall statements are true. Sometimes they need to remind themselves of one, sometimes the other. The trick is in changing them to meet the times. What a problem! By now Obama's wall must look like a bad mathematician's blackboard.

The better leaders of democracies can calculate coming pain the better they'll know how to reduce it. What they need is a graph that would show them total pain, so that they could see how much a short, sharp pain, say, paid off. Go in with a big force and get the killing over with. There's the initial spike but look at the total. Maybe worth it, maybe not. Figure the area under the curve.

How would you figure this one: Obama's back-and-forth on the wall, starting with the destruction of the Qaddafi column to Benghazi (war), then "out of there in a week" (politics), then CIA on the ground (war), then the turnover to NATO (politics), and now (also NYT, 4-21-11) "sending Predator drones." The linguistic comfort in that last choice (he frankly makes war while satisfying the political need to keep our people alive) can't conceal the fact that Obama is in great pain. Now what you have to figure is the amount of pain there would have been if he had let the Qaddafi column go to Benghazi and smash the rebels right there.

I see we're going to have to factor in the ability of the American public to bear the sight of what clearly would have been a slaughter in Benghazi, but that at the moment is too much for me to go into. I welcome ideas and will take up the problem in a later post.

20. "Humanitarian crisis"

"To help avert a humanitarian crisis" is, President Obama explained, the reason our planes bombed Qaddafi forces heading for Benghazi. Now Qaddafi forces are using deadly cluster bombs against Misurata and Britain and France want him to join in on an air attack on them in order to "better fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect civilians" (NYT, 4-16-11).

When does a humanitarian crisis end? The first one must have ended when the Benghazi column was destroyed, since President Obama then turned operations over to NATO. No crisis, no reason for America to join in. Now, by the same standard of danger to civilians, we have another crisis. How long will they keep coming?

As I read yesterday's newspaper I kept hearing Carl von Clausewitz, the German war philosopher, telling Obama across 200 years that the crises will keep coming and likely get worse until one side gives in. Each side, according to Clausewitz, will think that its next inhumanity will be so unbearable that the other side will be the one to give in. Inhumanity (the right word for what's done to the enemy, soldiers or not) is the way to win, and once you start it, and trigger the spirit of revenge, it never turns itself off. Only the naive think war is anything but reciprocal inhumanity.

That's the law of war. But there's another law, applicable to observers considering intervention, which says that human beings can't bear to watch inhumanity. That law comes into play now when we (the U. S., Obama) consider what we might do to end the present inhumanity in Libya. One choice is to intervene and be so thoroughly inhumane to the Qaddafi forces that they give in. That could be quick. The other is to refrain from intervention and watch the Qaddafi forces be inhumane to the rebels. That could be quick too. Either way somebody is going to have to be seriously inhumane. That's the only way wars between determined people have ever been ended. Directed inhumanity by outside powers has ended many wars in the past. The difference this time is that we're all going to have to watch.

Watching the inhumanity could be so hard for the electorate to bear that the President will not be re-elected. How can he avoid that? By calibrating his intervention so that the visible inhumanity never becomes so hard to bear that voters hold it against him. (This is to read "humanitarian crisis" as "political crisis," and define it as "the point at which television images of inhumanity become unbearable.")

One danger to Obama in calibrating his inhumanity is that he won't ever inflict enough (it's the hardest kind of fine-tuning in the world) to keep the Qaddafi forces' infliction of inhumanity on the rebels from being successful. He'll discover that only through an unbearably visible infliction of inhumanity can he end Qaddafi's inhumanity. The closer this is to the election the more painful this will be.

The other danger is that his calibration leaves the two sides so balanced that low-grade inhumanity remains visible on the nation's screens for years. That might not endanger his election but it could well endanger his place in history, something Presidents are bound to worry about.

When you really feel for Obama in his pain, as I did after reading the paper, you have crazy dreams of what would soften it. I dreamed of an electorate that had studied Clausewitz. "There, there," they now say to him, "we know what war is. If you refuse to intervene we can stand to watch the rebels being slaughtered. We won't hold it against you. And if you intervene, as long as you do it realistically and intelligently — that is to say, with sufficient inhumanity — we won't hold that against you either."

16. "Boots on the ground."

As a way of referring to the presence of soldiers, "boots on the ground" appeared in the New York Times only 12 times between 1851 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then it took off, rising to 34 in 2007, slacking to 17 in 2010, and now, with the Libyan action, it's hit 16 in three months and is getting play at every level, journalistic and political. Its attraction, apparently, is in the way it brings the distant ("troops present") close to the concrete reality. General Bernard E. Trainor made sure nobody would miss the political bite in it when he said, in 1999, "If you want to radically change the behavior of your opponent, it takes boots on the ground to do it.'' Lose the lofty pretensions. Boots. There. "With," he could expect us to add, "flesh in them." An expression that makes a dangerous semantic situation even more dangerous is not going to be welcomed by the Obama administration but they have to deal with it. "Are there going to be boots on the ground in Libya?" Everybody knows that some of the people in those boots will be killed. The administration knows that they will not just be killed but that they will turn into what Serge Schmemann called "televisable casualties." "No," says their spokesman. What else can he say? The public grieves over televisable casualties. But it also grieves over the victory of evil-doers. Gadhafi is an evil-doer, as Saddam Hussein was an evil-doer. If only there were a way to remove the evil-doer without televisable casualties. Here's where the old semantic try comes in. You send pilots, whose boots are in the air. Or you put CIA people, who don't wear boots, on the ground. Your "no boots on the ground" stands. Linguistic analysts can find the administration's choice of words entertaining (ha, ha, those booted pilots, those CIA guys in sneakers) but they have to recognize that Obama's people are wrestling with a very old, very difficult problem: how to balance the public's attractions to both goodness and security. Love of the good moves them to action against evil, as seen in Gadhafi. Love of security holds them back, making them ask, "Will the action make us safer?" Only a yes answer justifies the casualties. I remember once when the public was very grateful to an administration for putting security ahead of goodness. In 1942 it was good to have nothing to do with fascists. Then the administration, to secure the safety of American troops landing in Africa, cozied up to Admiral Darlan, a despicable fascist, and made a deal with him. The boots made it to African ground with few casualties. We saw that if you love good purely you weaken yourself, take high casualties, give Hitler a better chance, and maybe lose out to the big evil. Thank you, thank you, President Roosevelt. On the other hand, pure love of security can, in the end, itself weaken security. It was love of its own security that, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, kept the U.S. from joining any international effort that might have stopped Germany before it was too late. I remember the isolationist argument that yes, he was an evil-doer, "but we've got three thousand miles of ocean" to give us security. No boots for the Rhineland, where Hitler could have been most easily stopped. Every president contemplating military action has to measure public desire on two scales, a good-evil scale and a safety-danger scale. When the contemplated object of the action is both evil and a danger, as Hitler was, the president has it easy. When the object is neither evil nor a danger, as China has been most of its life, he has it easy. When both register, but one is higher than the other, he has it fairly easy. He just has to make sure of his reading. It's when they're close, as I think they are with Qadhafi, that he's got the big balance problem, and can't help trying to solve it with words.

15. President Obama's Speech.

Television images are so powerful that just a reminder of them can carry an audience. "I refused to wait for images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action," said President Obama and the American people were reminded of screens full of horrors in Bosnia, or Kosovo, or Rwanda, or Darfur. "Oh, thank you for saving us from more evenings like that."

Sympathy has to fill a big part of Obama's political screen. He doesn't want to hear "Why didn't you do something?" at the end of those evenings. On the other hand he doesn't want to hear, evening after evening, "Still doing something? For what?" Or, worse, "Did you have to slaughter?" He can't give the public the Clausewitz answer ("Yes, if I was going to stop slaughter.") Sympathy is the hardest force in the world to manage.

It can also be the most dangerous. Sympathy with brothers across a border has probably produced more wars than any force in history. Make a powerful tribe a minority on the territory of another tribe, introduce discrimination, oppression, maybe some killing, and bang, you've got a war. Think of all the borders badly drawn for ethnicity. Think of Europe, the Balkans. Sympathy can be lethal.

And it can provide an altruistic cover for self-interest. Want a country's gold, or wheat, or oil? Find some brothers who need protection. You're in.

So we've got tribal sympathy and cynical sympathy. That leaves just plain human sympathy. Obama, led by the American public, could (as Gwynne Dyer has argued) be "acting from very selfless and humanitarian motives." We already had the oil through Gadhafi, Dyer points out. We have absolutely no tribal connection to the rebels. We just can't stand seeing human beings treated like that.

Obama probably knows that acting on that kind of sympathy can, over time, make him responsible for more suffering than he faced at the beginning, and leave him looking very foolish. It's a gamble. And he takes that gamble, even adding to his stake, every time he uses one of those sympathy-arousing words — "slaughter," "massacre," "genocide." Whatever his deficiencies in semantic accuracy you can't say he lacks semantic courage.

13. Obama's Words: A Cost Analysis

Start with silence. What does President Obama lose if he says nothing to support the rebels in Libya? Favor with all the rebels in other Arab countries. Something for them to associate with the U.S. backing of dictators. If the rebels represent the wave of the future he falls behind it.

What did he lose with his first firm statement of support, "Muammar Qaddafi must leave" (NYT, 2-26)? His chance to remain completely free of commitment, which in the end could mean another casualty-producing engagement abroad. To avoid losing that chance now he'd have to change his view, in which case he'd be called a "flip-flopper" and lose points to the firm and decisive party.

What did he gain by later changing the wording of his statement, "It's our policy that Qadhafi needs to go" (NYT 3-21)? A chance at a point-saving wiggle. "Needs to" can be represented as wise observation on the head-of-state job. Or simple advice. "What you need to do at this point, Muammar..." Except that he stated it as "policy," which may have lost him as many points with the casualty-fearing party (not to mention the clarity party) as it gained him with the rebels (not to mention the firm-and-decisive party). But he must have seen where "must" was taking him.

The word market has this in common with the stock market: events often determine point-loss. The Libyan revolution could fail. There could be a string of failures. The wave he strained to catch could turn out to be a wavelet. Or, maybe worse, a wave not of pro-democratic forces but of pro-my-tribe forces. Going long on "policy" and "must" could lose him a bundle.

You can't end there, though, smart analysts. You have to go back to the cost of silence. Picture a world watching people suffer agonies they know President Obama, more than any leader in the world, had the power to prevent. Though with some the sympathy they feel might be tribal (my blood, my kind of people, my democracy-lovers), and therefore suspect as, historically, a leading motive for military aggression, with many it will be just human sympathy — as it was among watchers of Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, and Darfur. Whichever, Obama (or his advisers) have to factor it in. And, unlike us analysts, do it bang, in the moment of choosing a word. Only the most inhuman analyst could fail to sympathize.