Tom Watson

On the Cold Tarmac of History

Four years ago, I castigated the Bush Administration on this blog for what seemed a public lack of regret over the mounting war losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush visited families in private, but unlike Presidents Reagan, Clinton and his own father, he refused to attend solemn rites for actual soldiers - like standing at an Air Force base as the remains of sons and daughters fighting America's wars are brought home. Those posts stirred a bit of controversy; one compared our official disdain for national public mourning to the memorial for a slain Italian security officer. Perhaps because I'm headed for Italy tomorrow, those images came back at me. More likely: President Obama's overnight visit to Dover Air Force Base to stand at attention as the bodies of 18 Americans were carried from a transport plane, and to comfort the soldiers' families and comrades.

Without doubt, the President's timing carries real policy import; he is on the verge of a major decision on the continuing conflict in Afghanistan, a seemingly endless battle to stem what  seems unstemmable. Yet the image of President Obama standing on the tarmac at Dover is important, whatever his strategic decision. That is because he is not a figurative commander-in-chief, a mere head of state who leaves the conduct of American military action to the generals. No, he - and every president - is the literal commander, the immediate supervisor of the vast defense establishment. Ever since President Washington took the field to crush the Whiskey Rebellion, American President's have run the military directly. Nowadays, Presidents can direct the virtual battlefield from the highly-wired command center under the White House. Indeed, modern Presidents are often called upon to give the order to kill enemy combatants.

For the President to be seen publicly mourning his own comrades-in-arms - however tenuous and thinly constitutional that bond sometimes feels - is ethically vital. As their commander, he is responsible for their actions and must bear the burden for their deaths. But symbolically, he is also a direct link to the people who elected him - and who he is sworn to protect. When he stands before the bodies of fallen soldiers, he represents us. For whether or not we support or oppose this war, or other wars, the President and his soldiers act in our names.

Bush's refusal to be seen near the caskets of dead soldiers, and his Administration's ban on photographs of those returning remains, willfully broke that link. I think it attempted to remove Americans from responsibility for the war - to make it seem like a distant event. And to hush up the cost.

Whatever you think of President Obama's foreign policy, you cannot argue that he turns a blind eye to the terrible price of war. I understand that his visit was symbolic. But in the middle of the night in Dover, the President walked the walk.

Broad Street to Broadway

Jimmy Rollins is wrong. The Phillies won't beat the Yankees in five games, in what promises to be a fascinating Jersey Turnpike pileup of a baseball affair beginning tonight in the faux House That Bloomberg Built in La Belle Bronx.

Nope, it'll take six games.

I am boldly predicting a Philadelphia win in a classic World Series, featuring two terrific and interesting baseball teams - both of them, unfortunately, teams that New York Mets fans love to hate. It gives me no pleasure to pick the Phils, who have the clear makings of an NL East dynasty just 90 miles south of the GWB toll booths. But I think they'll edge the Yanks in dramatic fashion, and here's why.

First, I give the Phillies the edge at more positions than the Yankees. The quick run-down goes like this:

Catcher - Yankees, but not defensively.

1B - Almost shocking to put anyone above Texeira, but Ryan Howard's better (but not defensively). Phils.

2B - Easy choice - Utley and the Phils.

SS - Jeter, Yanks. Always.

3B - The New A-Rod, NY.

LF - I'm going with Ibanez over Damon. Philly.

CF - Not close, Victorino outclasses Melky. Phils.

RF - Again, easy - Werth's better than Swisher.

So that's 5-4 for the Phillies. Now, on to the starters. Philadelphia did a little patching this season after last year's championship run and the starters weren't nearly as good. Yet, at this stage it's pretty even. The two brilliant aces, Cliff Lee and C.C. Sabathia, may go head to head three times, while the Yanks may face a suddenly much-younger Pedro Martinez (who dominated the Dodgers) even as Andy Pettitte continues to show post-season toughness. The key to the series, starter-wise may well be the difference between eratic whipped-cream flinger A.J. Burnett versus the come-backing Cole Hamels - I'm giving the edge to Hamels in that match-up based on his work last year, and thus the very slight edge to the Phillies among starters.

Where the Yankees totally outclass the Phillies is quite obviously the bullpen - Rivera's the best of all-time and Philly closers were awful. The Yankees have a better supporting cast as well. Big edge to New York from the seventh inning on.

That said, some of the Yankees' bullpen effectiveness is blunted by the strange managing of the ever-hyper Joe Girardi, who loses the managerial match-up to Philly's Charlie Manuel, who is perfectly matched to his team and drives that squad like AJ Foyt used to run Chevy's.

On that basis - and because the Phillies have quite simply "been there before" as a unit while most of this Yankee team hasn't - I'm giving the edge to Philadelphia. They're a tough bunch that doesn't quit, and the extra game in New York won't bother 'em.

Now back to looking forward to Omar Minaya's next move, and the latest on the Wilpon-Madoff saga. Oh, baseball joy.

Crazy Like A Fox

There are fans of President Obama who insist that every move made by the Administration has eight-thousand levels of three-dimensional chess choreographed by the grand master of karmic jujitsu. I'm far too cynical to buy into that particular fable. But I do want to take note of a pretty obvious strategic campaign on the part of the White House that hasn't generated much comment.

Here's the executive summary for you bullet point types:

1. Health care reform is quickly gaining strength after a horrendous summer of political malaise on the left.

2. The right is increasingly outraged by the Administration's box-out of Fox News, and its reframing of mainstream political argument in general.

3. These  two trends are not unrelated.

Strip away a lot of the noise and heat surrounding the public diss Obama is laying on Fox News, and what you're left with is a classic misdirection. It's Patton's phantom army massing to invade the Pas de Calais. It's Peyton Manning's audibles and play fakes before pounding it into the endzone. It's Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.

Over the summer, the President and his party was in full, disastrous backpedal. This was decidedly not jujitsu - this was poor planning, a drift in framing the storyline. A tiny minority of Tea Party types, sporting all manner of racist and divisive signage and spewing the infectious sputum of know-nothingitis, grabbed the momentum away from a Democratic Party that seemed increasingly splintered. The President's popularity dropped. The public option, centerpiece to the most important initiative of Obama's domestic agenda, lacked even a faint pulse. What to do?

Feint and jab for the fleshy and painful midsection. Who could have known the punch would hurt so much - and be such effective strategy? You see, the people at Fox News actually believe that "fair and balanced" malarkey. Enervated and slowed to slurred and drunken speech by eight years of Bush-favored ascendancy, Roger Ailes and Company actually began to believe their own press clippings; they thought they were part of the mainstream establishment, a "real" news organization respected by their peers and feared by the very government they covered.

So the freeze-out on Pennsylvania Avenue actually hurt, inducing tears of pain and rage beyond even the salty ducts of Glenn Beck's hateful nativist tribe. It hurts not to be invited to the party.

Neutralizing the largest media outlet of the opposition - by inducing a great sob of self-pity - is simply good strategy. Meanwhile, there's a whole lotta policy shakin' going on. The Fox Hunt, the Great Rush Limbaugh NFL Blitz, and the White House's new willingness - nay, eagerness - to throw the penalty flag on crazy right-wing stuff in the media - it's all good strategy.

It also has others in the so-called mainstream press - your ABC News, your Joe Kleins - tut-tutting about the rights of their "sister" news organization, or providing false advice on how the President's taking his eyes off the ball.

But the opposite is true. The Administration, after a tough summer, has its eyes on the ball and it's moving down the field with some momentum. Meanwhile Fox News is tangled in a pile of slow-moving linemen about 20 yards behind the play.

Si Mi Sangre Piden, Mi Sangre les Doy

Here's a great Los Lobos cover from the early 80s of the traditional Mexican revolutionary ballad Carabina .30-.30:

Let the Wild Rumpus Start

There is nothing like a preemie Nobel Peace Prize to set the polity ablaze. I'm sure Barack Obama smelled the political smoke when awakened with the news this morning that the Nobel committee had essentially named him "Worldwide Statesman Most Likely to Succeed" - and White House sources tell me his initial reaction went pretty much like this: "whaaaaa?!"

The President is a smart enough politician to understand he'd been slapped into a pretty neat box by those well-meaning Europeans spending down the old arms maker's endowment. Despite calls to contrary, he had to accept the Nobel - anything less would have been far less than gracious. So he handled it pretty well, with statements like this one:

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

Exactly right. Obama clearly didn't deserve the Nobel, which should be awarded not for aspiration but for real accomplishment. But it's not Barack Obama's fault that the Nobel Committee went goofy. The White House was entirely blind-sided by the announcement, understanding perfectly well the day-to-day challenge of transforming the President's inspiring electoral victory into the kind of real change he promised for nigh on two years on the stump. Even hard-core Obama supporters like Gara LaMarche spoke plainly:

I am delighted for any good thing that comes to Barack Obama, and people need to look at this in terms of the sea change it represents in international opinion about the U.S., but giving it for aspiration and effort at such an early stage is, let's admit it, a bit weird.  Attention,  Pulitzer Prize jury:  I've sketched out the opening pages of a novel I'm thinking of writing...

As Richard Kim wrote in The Nation,  whose covers last year seemed permanently devoted to an iconic notion of the candidate, the committee's sentiments on the President's small body of work "are aspirational in my view. Obama doesn't deserve the prize, yet." The shorter version from Peter Beinart: "I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce."

Yet the natural reaction of some was to try and counter the predictably screeching hellwraiths on the right - "He's basically emasculating this country and they love it!" screamed Limbaugh - and perhaps the desire to rationalize the Nobel choice overcame common sense. It certainly pushed the DNC into throwing terrorism around lightly. There was a bit of strain in the reasoning. Some voices on the left actually stooped to point out that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hadn't yet witnessed the signing of the Voting Rights Act when he won his Nobel, or that Bishop Desmond Tutu hadn't yet seen the formal end of Apartheid. But those arguments diminish Obama by easy and simple comparison; it does the President no favors to call to mind 1950s Birmingham and 1980s Johannesburg in the context of his inspiring - but hardly revolutionary - political career in Chicago.

I think the prize will stick to Obama, and not in a good way. Sure, you can observe that the Nobel committee was rewarding the passing of the neocon era and the end of a foreign policy run on arrogant think tank dreams of American "exceptionalism." But any thinking person knows it's too much, too soon. It puts an even brighter target of expectations on a President in his first year and on an Administration struggling to pass healthcare reform, sort out Afghanistan and put millions of unemployed Americans back to work. On his Philanthrocapitalism blog,  the Economist's Matthew Bishop argued that President Obama should defer his acceptance:

At first glance, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama is absurdly premature. Beyond his fine words, it is hard to demonstrate conclusively that President Obama has yet added a net ounce of peace to the world, and although hopefully he will ultimately do so, the record of past US presidents, including well-intentioned fellows like Messrs Carter and Clinton, suggests that they do more for peace once they leave office.

The world may be happier with Obama than his predecessor, but it also appears to me that the Nobel machers were a little late to the big rally. It's like they showed up a day late for the blow-out party, ringing the front door and holding out a shiny gift to a bewildered host who's more than a bit hung over and already finished sweeping up the confetti. Like the rest of us here on Planet America, the New Yorker's George Packer has long since moved past the slogans, the balloons and all the glorious hoopla:

This seems like a prize for Europeans, not Americans, and I worry that at home it will damage him politically by reinforcing the notion that he is—and will be—a world icon rather than a successful President. I don’t mind him being the former, but I most want him to be the latter.

Tongues Talk Fire and Eyes Cry Rivers

Richard and Linda Thompson, circa 1975, and the evocative (and ironic, for them) Heart Needs A Home.

Like a Waring Blender

Here's a clip from a rather famous Warren Zevon show at the old Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey back in 1982 - a double track: his classic Poor Poor Pitiful Me and a cover of Springsteen's Cadillac Ranch. Zevon was one of the great live acts, as well as true melodic poet and rare wit. I remember this show like it was yesterday.