Oct
20
Written by:
Brian
10/20/2009 6:14 AM
October 20, 2009
MILITARY MEMO
As the Commander in Chief Deliberates, Frustration Builds Within the Ranks
WASHINGTON — Only nine months ago, the Pentagon pronounced itself reassured by the early steps of a new commander in chief. President Obama was moving slowly on an American withdrawal from Iraq, had retained former President George W. Bush’s defense secretary and, in a gesture much noticed, had executed his first military salute with crisp precision.
But now, after nearly a month of deliberations by Mr. Obama over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military.
A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room.
“The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”
Last week the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., gave voice to the concerns of those in the military when he issued a terse statement criticizing Mr. Obama’s review of Afghan war strategy.
“The extremists are sensing weakness and indecision within the U.S. government, which plays into their hands,” said Mr. Tradewell’s statement on behalf of his group, which represents 1.5 million former soldiers.
Last August, in a speech to the V.F.W., Mr. Obama defended his strategy, saying, “This is not only a war worth fighting; this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
A retired general who served in Iraq said that the military had listened, “perhaps naïvely,” to Mr. Obama’s campaign promises that the Afghan war was critical. “What’s changed, and are we having the rug pulled out from under us?” he asked. Like many of those interviewed for this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals from the military’s civilian leadership and the White House.
Mr. Obama’s civilian advisers on national security say the president is appropriately reviewing his policy options from all sides. They said it would be reckless to rush a decision on whether to send as many as 40,000 more American men and women to war, particularly when the unresolved Afghan election had left the United States without a clear partner in Kabul.
Although the tensions do not break entirely on classic civilian-military lines — some senior military officers have doubts about sending more troops to Afghanistan and some of Mr. Obama’s top civilian advisers do not — the strains reflect the military’s awareness in recent months that life has changed under the new White House.
After years of rising military budgets under the Bush administration, the new administration has tried to rein in Pentagon spending, and has signaled other changes as well, including reopening debate on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy governing military service by gay men and lesbians.
The administration has made clear that Mr. Obama will not necessarily follow the advice of his generals in the same way Mr. Bush did, notably in the former president’s deference to Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the head of the Central Command, and that it does not want military leaders publicly pressing the commander in chief as they give their advice.
Two weeks ago, after Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, rejected calls for the Afghan war to be scaled back during a question-and-answer session in a speech in London, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned not only General McChrystal, but also the military as a whole, to keep quiet in public as the debate progressed.
“It is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations — civilian and military alike — provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately,” Mr. Gates told the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army, a private support group, in Washington.
Andrew M. Exum, a former Army officer in Afghanistan, an adviser to General McChrystal and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said that the change in style from one administration to the next had led to some of the military’s discontent. “The Bush administration would settle on a strategy and stick to it, and you could argue often to ill effect,” he said, referring to the president’s decision not to send more troops to Iraq until 2007, after years of rising violence.
The Obama administration, he said, is not afraid to go back and question assumptions. “There’s a value in that,” Mr. Exum said, “but that can be incredibly frustrating for those trying to operationalize the strategy.”
Part of the strain comes from lessons learned from the generals who acquiesced to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s demands for a small invasion force in Iraq, then faced criticism that they had not spoken up for more troops to secure the country during the occupation.
The retired general who served in Iraq said that today’s senior officers had decided, “I won’t be so quiet, I won’t be a lap dog.”
Another source of tension within the military is the view that a delay is endangering the 68,000 American troops now in Afghanistan. “McChrystal has troops out there who are risking their lives more than they need to, partly because we have not filled in the gaps and we have not created a safe zone in southern and eastern Afghanistan,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution.
A military policy analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing senior Pentagon leaders, said that “the military lives in a very rarefied environment,” and that “they are not out there every day having to meet citizens who say, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ ”
Senior military officers, the analyst said, “are smart guys, but they do not have the daily pulse of the American public in their face. They tend to interpret politicians who give voice to it as being weak, but none of this works if the public gives up on it.”
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Rift between Obama and Chamber of Commerce widening
Health-care reform and economy are points of contention
By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The White House is moving aggressively to remove the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from its traditional Washington role as the chief representative for big business, the latest sign of a public feud ignited by disagreement over the administration's effort to overhaul the health-care system.
Instead of working through the Chamber, President Obama has reached out to business executives, meeting repeatedly with small groups of CEOs in his private White House dining room. He also has dispatched top aides Valerie Jarrett and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to corporate boardrooms. Since the summer, the three have met with some of the biggest names in the business community, including the heads of IBM, Wal-Mart Stores, Time Warner, Eastman Kodak, Starbucks, Amazon.com and Coca-Cola.
In the process, Obama is attempting to rewrite the rules of the game in Washington, where the Chamber and other business lobbying groups have long held a highly visible, and powerful, place at the intersection of policy and politics.
"The question we have is: Does the Chamber really represent the business community the way they used to?" said Jarrett, the president's chief business liaison. "It seems as though their members are disengaging."
Meanwhile, the Chamber is fighting back with its own public relations agenda, launching multimillion-dollar ad campaigns to resist several of Obama's top priorities. Passage of the president's plan could depend in part on how this battle plays out.
R. Bruce Josten, the Chamber's longtime lobbyist, said he has less real access to Obama's chief aides than he had during any previous administration. He said the business events Obama holds at the White House are just for show.
"Going to the Reagan center with 150 people, where the president gives prepared remarks -- I'm sorry, I don't consider that a consultative outreach," Josten said. "That's an event, designed by the White House, for the White House."
Quitting in protest
The quarrel obscures that the White House and the Chamber had a relatively warm relationship when Obama took office. Disagreements about a broad swath of the president's economic agenda soured relations, though.
The Chamber of Commerce was already embroiled in controversy over its opposition to climate change legislation. In recent weeks, high-profile businesses have quit the Chamber in protest of that position, most notably Apple Inc.
Chamber officials hint that they think the White House has been encouraging the defections. Jarrett denied that vehemently, saying, "They have to be responsible for their own membership, not us."
On Monday, climate change activists orchestrated a hoax in which Chamber officials appeared to reverse their opposition to energy legislation in Congress.
The event, complete with fake handouts on Chamber letterhead, at least a couple of phony reporters and a podium adorned with the Chamber logo, broke up when a spokesman from the real Chamber burst in.
The pretend Chamber of Commerce official was a member of the activist-prankster group called the Yes Men, which has staged several hoaxes to draw attention to what it believes is slow progress in fighting climate change.
"These irresponsible tactics are a foolish distraction" from the real work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, said Thomas J. Collamore, the Chamber's senior vice president for communications and strategy. He added that his group will ask authorities to investigate.
Obama and CEOs
Since taking office, Obama has held three private lunches with chief executives. On Oct. 8, he met with Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. Lewis Hay III of Florida Power & Light, Antonio M. Perez of Eastman Kodak and Irene B. Rosenfeld of Kraft. The next day, before reporters in the East Room, Obama upbraided the Chamber of Commerce for its effort to defeat or water down new consumer protections.
"They're very good at this, because that's how business has been done in Washington for a very long time," he said. "In fact, over the last 10 years, the Chamber alone spent nearly half a billion dollars on lobbying -- half a billion dollars."
Josten said previous presidents sought to work with groups such as the Chamber, even when they disagreed on policy matters, in an attempt to improve legislation or neutralize potential concerns. But he said Obama's dislike of lobbyists has robbed the White House of the chance to craft legislative compromises that businesses can live with.
"Does he get some probably good input from CEOs? I'm sure he does," Josten said. "Are they going to actively go up to the Hill and lobby? I'm sure they're not."
Josten and other Chamber officials participated in more than two dozen "issue meetings" during Obama's transition, and the group backed the president's early efforts to fix the economy. They supported his economic stimulus plan and some of his first nominees for economic positions in the administration.
That goodwill ended abruptly this past summer, when the Chamber announced its opposition to a public insurance option as part of a broad health-care reform effort. The group ran ads in 20 states warning of higher taxes, inflated deficits and "government control over your health."
The Chamber followed up with public statements against the president's climate control legislation and his push for new regulation of the financial sector in the wake of the economic collapse. (Politico first reported Monday on the dispute.)
Chamber officials describe their change in attitude as a result of the president's ambitious agenda, which they said contrasts sharply with their long-standing belief in smaller government, lower taxes and less regulation. Jarrett and others in the White House say the Chamber became an all-out adversary less interested in working to find solutions.
White House officials say they remain open to meeting with the Chamber and its officials, but Jarrett said that discussions so far have been contentious.
October 18, 2009
THE MEDIA EQUATION
The Battle Between the White House and Fox News
The Obama administration, which would seem to have its hands full with a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan, opened up a third front last week, this time with Fox News.
Until this point, the conflict had been mostly a one-sided affair, with Fox News hosts promoting tax day “tea parties” that focused protest on the new president, and more recently bringing down the presidential adviser Van Jones through rugged coverage that caught the administration, and other news organizations, off guard. During the health care debate, Fox News has put a megaphone to opponents, some of whom have advanced far-fetched theories about the impact of reform. And even farther out on the edge, the network’s most visible star of the moment, Glenn Beck, has said the president has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.”
Administration officials seemed to have decided that they had had enough.
“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”
Ah, but pretending has traditionally been a valuable part of the presidential playbook. Smiling and wearing beige even under the most withering news media assault is not only good manners, but also has generally been good politics. While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence.
Not that they haven’t tried. In his second Inaugural Address, Ulysses S. Grant said he had “been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history.” President William McKinley labeled a gathering of the press a “congress of inventors,” and President Franklin D. Roosevelt assigned less favored press members to his “Dunce Club.” Sometimes the strategy worked — or caused no lasting damage. McKinley, like Grant, was elected to a second term. Roosevelt also won a third and fourth.
As Americans turned to TV for news, enmity from presidents soon followed. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew said “self-appointed analysts” at the Big Three networks exhibited undisguised “hostility” toward President Richard M. Nixon, subjecting his speeches to “instant analysis and querulous criticism.” Later, in the dispute with The Times over the Pentagon Papers, Mr. Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, accused the newspaper of treason.
Neither of the Bush presidents had a particularly cozy relationship with the press. George H.W. Bush finished the campaign in 1992 with a bumper sticker that suggested, “Annoy the Media. Vote Bush.” And George W. Bush, in the words of ABC’s Mark Halperin, viewed “the media as a special interest rather than as guardians of the public interest.” Bill Clinton, too, distrusted the press, as did others in his administration. When Vincent Foster, Mr. Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, committed suicide in 1993, he left behind a note accusing the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page of lying.
Even though almost all the critiques contained a kernel of truth, in each instance the folks who had the barrels of ink, and now pixels, seemed to come out ahead. So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year, and the network basked for a week in the antagonism of a sitting president
It could all be written off as a sideshow, but it may present a genuine problem for Mr. Obama, who took great pains during the campaign to depict himself as being above the fray of over-heated partisan squabbling. In his victory speech he promised, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.”
Or not. Under the direction of Ms. Dunn, the administration has begun to punch back. On Sept. 20, the president visited all the Sunday talk shows save Fox News’, with Ms. Dunn explaining that Fox was not a legitimate news organization, but a “wing of the Republican Party.”
The one weapon all administrations can wield is access, and the White House, making it clear that it will use that leverage going forward, informed Fox News not to expect to bump knees with the president until 2010. But Fox News, as many have pointed out, is not in the access business. They are in the agitation business. And the administration, by deploying official resources against a troublesome media organization, seems to have brought a knife to a gunfight.
Tactics aside, something more fundamental is at risk. Even the president’s most avid critics admit he exudes a certain cool confidence. The public impression of him is that if anyone were to, say, talk trash on the basketball court with Mr. Obama, he would not find much space for rent in Mr. Obama’s head.
Mr. Obama has also shown a consistent ability to disarm or at least engage his critics. When he eventually sat for an interview with the Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly two months before the election, it made for great television. But for the time being, détente seems very far away and the gap seems to be widening.
On the official White House Web site, a blog called Reality Check provides a running tally of transgressions by Fox News. It ends with this: “For even more Fox lies, check out the latest ‘Truth-O-Meter’ feature from Politifact that debunks a false claim about a White House staffer that continues to be repeated by Glenn Beck and others on the network.”
People who work in political communications have pointed out that it is a principle of power dynamics to “punch up “ — that is, to take on bigger foes, not smaller ones. A blog on the White House Web site that uses a “truth-o-meter” against a particular cable news network would not seem to qualify. As it is, Reality Check sounds a bit like the blog of some unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement, not an official communiqué from Pennsylvania Avenue.
The American presidency was conceived as a corrective to the royals, but trading punches with cable shouters seems a bit too common. Perhaps it’s time to restore a little imperiousness to the relationship.
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