He Kept Us Safe, Redux

In these crisis filled waning days of the Bush 43 administration, among the manifold efforts to assess his legacy are a dwindling number of brave little recruits in his willful ignorance army sifting the debris of his multiple catastrophes for a few scraps of anything that could even remotely be considered positive.

One of the shiny nuggets they have turned up and repeatedly pointed out is that “he kept us safe.” It’s trivial to point out, as many have done, that this claim is a grossly misleading interpretation of his record. In fact it is a baldfaced lie: one of the considerations that the responses to the “he kept us safe” chorus fail to point out strongly enough is that as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, a title he and his disciples seem to have fetishized without absorbing its implications, he is responsible for placing U.S. troops in harms way and for the casualties suffered by those troops (in Iraq alone, over 4200 dead and over 43,000 wounded, with no official tally for civilian contractors).

It has been vigorously argued, of course, that those casualties prevented much worse consequences, an argument slipping ever deeper into solipsism and fantasy as the harsh reality and colossal scale of the Iraq debacle solidifies. Nevertheless, as Commander in Chief, he is responsible for the safety of those he leads - that is the nature of the military chain of command, its ultimate meaning, its special hell (for those with a conscience), the reason for those salutes as he struts down the tarmac.

Bush elected to place those troops in harms way, many of them young and idealistic, and with limited background to judge the virtues and shortcomings of the orders they followed, and they died or were wounded under his command. He (presumably) considered the costs and benefits and chose to risk their lives.

They were boys and girls and husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and most of them would have fit right in on the 90th floor of the World Trade Center. They were Americans. They were us. I am sickened at the apparent willingness to consider the issue of their safety as somehow deeply discounted because they had 18 weeks of training, or deposited a signing bonus, or knew the ins and outs of an armored Humvee, or were gung-ho. Their military commitment especially obligated their military chain of command: “I will trust you with my safety so that, in turn, those that I protect will be safe”. They were Americans and their commander knowingly put them in harms way and whatever else you say about him and his motivations, whatever history eventually says about him and the quality of his decisions, they were us and he did NOT keep them safe.

Is PEOTUS Obama THAT Smart?

What I see as one of the brilliant and remarkable accomplishments of Republicans, picking up momentum with Ronald Reagan and extending at least through the election of George W. Bush and a Republican dominated legislature in 2004 and the continued reddening of a swath of the deep south in the 2008 election, is persuading an enormous sector of the electorate to, demonstrably, vote against their own interests.

Republicans did this in many ways including standard outright misrepresentation of their policies (lying), but I would suggest also primarily by methodically establishing a misleading (a charitable assessment) kneejerk association between a series of social icons and symbols and their party and candidates. In essence, many Republican candidates were campaigning with an invisible twin (e.g., the white baby Jesus driving a 4WD pickup truck loaded with stacks of tax-free cash, swaddled in the American flag, cradling a handgun in His lap, and reciting the pledge of allegiance – you get the idea). In the voting booth, it was the twin for whom the lever was pulled (now that’s an anachronistic metaphor, eh?).

How does one change this situation in which much of the electorate has become comfortable with and habituated to voting against their own interests, in which this type of voting has become structural? The evidence of the past 30 years unfortunately and perversely strongly suggests that it cannot be addressed effectively by simply developing, articulating, and running on a platform that is in the interest of the majority of the electorate. I think it is an enormous understatement to say that PEOTUS Obama is very smart, but in the face of the unprecedented array of converging long-term crises and disasters that the Bush administration is bequeathing him, a big part of his job has to be to convince a majority of the electorate to vote in their own interests over the short term while these crises and disasters play out. As obvious as this sounds, those structural iconic and symbolic associations by much of the electorate will make it extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

Enter the current brouhaha over PEOTUS Obama’s selection of Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. Now as a lifelong devout agnostic I admit I have a visceral negative reaction to Pastor Warren and his noxious brand of evangelism. And many others also have very good reason to find Pastor Warren an appalling choice for this role. I suspect that you’ll now see where I am going with this: what I wonder is whether that very smart PEOTUS Obama is cleverly and strategically working to coopt some of that iconic and symbolic association, to put it into the service of having the electorate vote in their own interests again. Is he THAT smart?