** 13th book of 2021: Director’s Cut **
Most of us suspect that we are pawns in a larger game. For me, the only advantage of working in the State Department was unambiguous evidence of pawn-status. So from my vantage point beneath 8 layers of bureaucracy, it was never quite clear what game Obama was playing at. Even with secret briefings and Ambassadorial brunches, information wasn’t available from within. Media coverage was (and is) useless, and contemporary books such as ‘Obama’s Wars’ took scraps of meeting notes and tried to assemble a cogent narrative.
So it’s refreshing to get a view from the top on all the issues Obama cared about during the first three years of his presidency. After briefly describing his own meteoric ascent, the book settles into a comfortable set of dilemmas during Obama’s first term. Each issue had predictable components:
**a) The realist, obstructive adversary: ** The Russians, Chinese, or Republicans that cared more about the game than impact, and would do nothing at all, or begrudgingly what was in their narrow-minded best interests. On McConnell, Obama writes: * Short, owlish, with a smooth Kentucky accent, McConnell seemed like an unlikely Republican leader. He showed no aptitude for schmoozing, back-slapping or rousing oratory, as far as anyone could tell, he had no close friends, even in his own caucus. […] What McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy, he made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness, all of which he employed in a single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power. * **b) The pragmatic advisors: ** Often old guard party operatives or foreign policy experts advising that the way it has always done remained the correct course of action. From Bob Gates: * There’s only one thing you can count on Mr. President, at any moment, on any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up. * ** c) The idealistic newcomers: ** People like Samantha Powers, congressional staffers working on healthcare, or others that propose the ‘right’ path.
With these inputs, Obama stuck with pragmatists on the financial crisis and healthcare. In foreign policy he leaned more toward the idealists, opting for a robust Libya strategy, withdrawing support for Mubarik, and trying to get something, anything, passed in advance of the Paris climate change accords. Usually this ends with a compromise that hardly seemed worth the effort. At times I felt like a fisherman in Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea: sharks gnawing at my catch as I tried to pull it to shore. Sometimes, he could pull a stunning maneuver, but the end result still be a non-binding statement that could only be seen in the context of longer term progress.
Like Theodore Roosevelt, Obama is impressive, the sort of person that is intimidating to know actually exists outside of fiction. I couldn’t help but wonder if the fatal chink in his armor was the occasional slip revealing his awareness of the disparity between his knowledge and that of the average American.
At the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment. Except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation since actually educating thee public on long term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings. The one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it.
Throughout these games, the rest of us remain pawns, but it’s fun to know what the king is thinking.