WASHINGTON, Sept 10 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama's re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised more than $114 million in August, filling up its coffers for an expensive fall against well-funded Republican rival Mitt Romney.
The Democratic incumbent broadened his donor base with more than 317,000 donors who had never given money before, said Obama campaign manager Jim Messina in a statement.
"The key to fighting back against the special interests writing limitless checks to support Mitt Romney is growing our donor base, and we did substantially in the month of August," Messina said. "That is a critical downpayment on the organization we are building across the country -- the largest grassroots campaign in history."
Monday, 10 September 2012
Obama's Fundraising Edges Out Romney In August
Friday, 7 September 2012
John Feffer: Dumb and Dumber: Obama's 'Smart Power' Foreign Policy Not Smart at All
Obama’s “Smart Power” Foreign Policy Not Smart at All
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” -- a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all things global -- has been a smart move politically at home. It has largely prevented the Republicans from playing the national security card in this election year. But “smart power” has been a disaster for the world at large and, ultimately, for the United States itself.
Power was not always Obama’s strong suit. When he ran for president in 2008, he appeared to friend and foe alike as Mr. Softy. He wanted out of the war in Iraq. He was no fan of nuclear weapons. He favored carrots over sticks when approaching America’s adversaries.
His opponent in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn this hesitation to use hard power into a sign of a man too inexperienced to be entrusted with the presidency. In 2007, when Obama offered to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran, Clinton fired back that such a policy was “irresponsible and frankly naïve.” In February 2008, she went further with a TV ad that asked voters who should answer the White House phone at 3 a.m. Obama, she implied, lacked the requisite body parts -- muscle, backbone, cojones-- to make the hard presidential decisions in a crisis.
Obama didn’t take the bait. “When that call gets answered, shouldn’t the president be the one -- the only one -- who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq war from the start,” his response ad intoned. “Who understood the real threat to America was al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Who led the effort to secure loose nuclear weapons around the globe.”
Like most successful politicians, Barack Obama could be all things to all people. His opposition to the Iraq War made him the darling of the peace movement. But he was no peace candidate, for he always promised, as in his response to that phone call ad, to shift U.S. military power toward the “right war” in Afghanistan. As president, he quickly and effectively drove a stake through the heart of Mr. Softy with his pro-military, pro-war speech at, of all places, the ceremony awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Obama’s protean abilities have come to the fore in his approach to what once was called “soft power,” a term Harvard professor Joseph Nye coined in his 1990 book Bound to Lead. For more than 20 years, Nye has been urging U.S. policymakers to find different ways of leading the world, exercising what he termed “power with others as much as power over others.”
After 9/11, when “soft” became an increasingly suspect word, Washington policymakers began to use “smart power” to denote a menu of expanded options that were to combine the capabilities of both the State Department and the Pentagon. "We must use what has been called 'smart power,' the full range of tools at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural -- picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation," Hillary Clinton said at her confirmation hearing for her new role as secretary of state. "With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy."
But diplomacy has not been at the vanguard of Obama’s foreign policy. From drone attacks in Pakistan and cyber-warfare against Iran to the vaunted “Pacific pivot” and the expansion of U.S. military intervention in Africa, the Obama administration has let the Pentagon and the CIA call the shots. The president’s foreign policy has certainly been “smart” from a domestic political point of view. With the ordering of the Seal Team Six raid into Pakistan that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden and “leading from behind” in the Libya intervention, the president has effectively removed foreign policy as a Republican talking point. He has left the hawks of the other party with very little room to maneuver.
But in its actual effects overseas, his version of “smart power” has been anything but smart. It has maintained imperial overstretch at self-destructive expense, infuriated strategic competitors like China, hardened the position of adversaries like Iran and North Korea, and tried the patience of even long-time allies in Europe and Asia.
Only one thing makes Obama’s policy look geopolitically smart -- and that’s Mitt Romney’s prospective foreign policy. On global issues, then, the November elections will offer voters a particularly unpalatable choice: between a Democratic militarist and an even more over-the-top militaristic Republican, between Bush Lite all over again and Bush heavy, between dumb and dumber.
Mr. Softy Goes to Washington
Mr. Softy went to Washington in 2008 and discovered a backbone. That, at least, is how many foreign policy analysts described the “maturation” process of the new president. “Barack Obama is a soft power president,” wrote the Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman in 2009. “But the world keeps asking him hard power questions.”
According to this scenario, Obama made quiet overtures to North Korea, and Pyongyang responded by testing a nuclear weapon. The president went to Cairo and made an impressive speech in which he said, among other things, “we also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But individuals and movements in the Muslim world -- al-Qaeda, the Taliban -- continued to challenge American power. The president made a bold move to throw his support behind nuclear abolition, but the nuclear lobby in the United States forced him to commit huge sums to modernizing the very nuclear complex he promised to negotiate out of existence.
According to this scenario, Obama came to Washington with a fistful of carrots to coax the world, nonviolently, in the direction of peace and justice. The world was not cooperative, and so, in practice, those carrots began to function more like orange-colored sticks.
This view of Obama is fundamentally mistaken. Mr. Softy was a straw man created from the dreams of his dovish supporters and the nightmares of his hawkish opponents. That Obama avatar was useful during the primary and the general election campaign to appeal to a nation weary of eight years of cowboy globalism. Like a campaign advisor ill-suited to the bruising policy world of Washington, Mr. Softy didn’t survive the transition.
Consider, for example, Obama’s speech in Cairo in June 2009. This inspiring speech should have signaled a profound shift in U.S. policy toward the Muslim world. But what Obama didn’t mention in his speech was his earlier conversation with outgoing president George W. Bush in which he’d secretly agreed to continue two major Bush initiatives: the CIA’s unmanned drone air war in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands and the covert program to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program with computer viruses.
Obama didn’t just continue these programs; he amplified them. The result has been an unprecedented expansion of U.S. military power through unmanned drones in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan as well as Somalia and Yemen. The use of drones, and the civilian casualties they’ve caused, has in turn enflamed public opinion around the world, with the favorability rating of the United States under Obama in majority Muslim countries falling to a new low of 15% in 2012, lower, that is, than the rock-bottom standard set by the Bush administration.
The drone campaign has undermined other smart power approaches, including that old standby diplomacy, not only by antagonizing potential interlocutors but also by killing a good number of them. Along with the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, often cited as one of Obama’s signal accomplishments, the drone war has by now provoked a slow-motion rupture in relations between Washington and Islamabad.
The covert cyber-war initiative against Iran’s nuclear program, conducted with Israeli cooperation, produced both the Stuxnet worm, which wreaked havoc on Iranian centrifuges, and the Flame virus, which monitored its computer network. Instead of vigorously pursuing diplomatic solutions -- such as the nuclear compromise that Brazil and Turkey cobbled together in 2010 that might have defused the situation and guaranteed a world without an Iranian bomb -- the Obama administration acted secretly and aggressively. If the United States had been the target of such a cyber attack, Washington would have considered it an act of war. Meanwhile, the United States has set a dangerous precedent for future attacks in this newest theater of operations and unleashed a weapon that could even be reverse-engineered and sent back in our direction.
Nor was diplomacy ever actually on the table with North Korea. The Obama team came in with a less than half-hearted commitment to the Six Party process -- the negotiations to address North Korea’s nuclear program among the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas, which had stalled in the final months of George W. Bush’s second term. In the National Security Council, Asia point man Jeffrey Bader axed a State Department cable that would have reassured the North Koreans that a U.S. policy of engagement would continue. “Strategic patience” became the euphemism for doing nothing and letting hawkish leaders in Tokyo and Seoul unravel the previous years of engagement. After some predictably belligerent rhetoric from Pyongyang, followed by a failed missile launch and a second nuclear test, Obama largely dispensed with diplomacy altogether.
Hillary Clinton did indeed move quickly to increase the size of the State Department budget to hire more people and implement more programs to beef up diplomacy. That budget grew by more than 7% in 2009-2010. But that didn’t bring the department of diplomacy up to even $50 billion. In fact, it is still plagued by a serious shortage of diplomats and, as State Department whistleblower Peter van Buren has written, “The whole of the Foreign Service is smaller than the complement aboard one aircraft carrier.” Meanwhile, despite a persistent recession, the Pentagon budget continued to rise during the Obama years -- a roughly 3% increase in 2010 to about $700 billion. (And Mitt Romney promises to hike it even more drastically.)
Like most Democratic politicians, Obama has been acutely aware that hard power is a way of establishing political invulnerability in the face of Republican attacks. But the use of hard power to gain political points at home is a risky affair. It is the nature of this "dumb power" to make the United States into a bigger target, alienate allies, and jeopardize authentic efforts at multilateralism.
A Kinder, Gentler Empire
Despite its rhetorical flexibility, “smart power” has several inherent flaws. First, it focuses on the means of exercising power without questioning the ends toward which power is deployed. The State Department and the Pentagon will tussle over which agency can more effectively win the hearts and minds of Afghans. But neither agency is willing to rethink the U.S. presence in the country or acknowledge how few hearts and minds have been won.
As with Afghanistan, so with the rest of the world. For all his talk of power “with” rather than “over,” Joseph Nye has largely been concerned with different methods by which the United States can maintain dominion. “Smart power” is not about the inherent value of diplomacy, the virtues of collective decision-making, or the imperatives of peace, justice, or environmental sustainability. Rather it is a way of calculating how best to get others to do what America wants them to do, with the threat of a drone strike or a Special Forces incursion always present in the background.
The Pentagon, at least, has been clear about this point. In 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued for “strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power.” The Pentagon has long realized that a toolbox with only a single hammer in it handicaps the handyman, but it still persists in seeing a world full of nails.
At a more practical level, “smart power” encounters problems because in this “integration,” the Pentagon always turns out to be the primary partner. As a result, the work of diplomats, dispensers of humanitarian aid, and all the other “do-gooders” who attempt to distinguish their work from soldiers is compromised. After decades of trying to persuade their overseas partners that they are not simply civilian adjuncts to the Pentagon, the staff of the State Department has now jumped into bed with the military. They might as well put big bull’s eyes on their backs, and there’s nothing smart about that.
“Smart power” also provides a lifeline for a military that might face significant cuts if Congress’s sequestration plan goes through. NATO has already shown the way. Its embrace of “smart defense” is a direct response to military cutbacks by European governments. The Pentagon is deeply worried that budget-cutters will follow the European example, so it is doing what corporations everywhere attempt during a crisis. It is trying to rebrand its services.
Always in search of a mission, the Pentagon now has its fingers in just about every pie in the bakery. The Marines are doing drug interdiction in Guatemala. Special Operations forces are constructing cyclone shelters in Bangladesh. The U.S. Navy provided post-disaster relief in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, while the U.S. Army did the same in Haiti. In 2011, the Africa Command budgeted $150 million for development and health care.
The Pentagon, in other words, has turned itself into an all-purpose agency, even attempting “reconstruction” along with State and various crony corporations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is preparing for the impact of climate change, pouring R & D dollars into alternative energy, and running operations in cyberspace. The Pentagon has been smart about its power by spreading it everywhere.
Dumb vs. Dumber
As president, Obama has shown no hesitation to use force. But his use of military power has not proven any “smarter” than that of his predecessor. Iran and North Korea pushed ahead with their nuclear programs when diplomatic alternatives were not forthcoming. Nuclear power Pakistan is closer to outright anarchy than four years ago. Afghanistan is a mess, and an arms race is heating up in East Asia, fueled in part by the efforts of the United States and its allies to box in China with more air and sea power.
In one way, however, Obama has been Mr. Softy. He has shown no backbone whatsoever in confronting the bullies already in America’s corner. He has done little to push back against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his occupation policies. He hasn’t confronted Saudi Arabia, the most autocratic of U.S. allies. In fact, he has leveraged the power of both countries -- toward Iran, Syria, Bahrain. A key component of “smart power” is outsourcing the messy stuff to others.
Make no mistake: Mitt Romney is worse. A Romney-Ryan administration would be a step backward to the policies of the early Bush years. President Romney would increase military spending, restart a cold war with Russia, possibly undertake a hot war against Iran, deep-six as many multilateral agreements as he could, and generally resurrect the Ugly American policies of the recent past.
But President Romney wouldn’t fundamentally alter U.S. foreign policy. After all, President Obama has largely preserved the post-9/11 fundamentals laid down by George W. Bush, which in turn drew heavily on a unilateralist and militarist recipe that top chefs from Bill Clinton on back merely tweaked.
Obama has mentioned, sotto voce, that Mr. Softy might resurface if the incumbent is reelected. Off mic, as he mentioned in an aside to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a meeting in Seoul last spring, he has promised to show more “flexibility” in his second term. This might translate into more arms agreements with Russia, more diplomatic overtures like the effort with Burma, and more spending of political capital to address global warming, non-proliferation, global poverty, and health pandemics.
But don’t count on it. The smart money is not with Obama’s smart power. Mr. Softy has largely been an electoral ploy. If he’s re-elected, Obama will undoubtedly continue to act as Mr. Stick. Brace yourself for four more years of dumb power -- or, if he loses, even dumber power.
John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is an Open Society Fellow for 2012-13 focusing on Eastern Europe. He is the author of Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam (City Lights Books). His writings can be found on his website johnfeffer.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which John Feffer discusses power -- hard, soft, smart, and dumb -- click here or download it to your iPod here.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.
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Adam HanftPolitical Columnist, CEO of Hanft Unlimited GET UPDATES FROM Adam Hanft Like 18 Michelle Obama's Eleanor and Oprah MomentPosted: 09/05/2012 7:52 pm React
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There were two figures who stood, invisibly but powerfully, behind Michelle Obama as she gave her speech last night. Two women, generations apart, speaking through a third.
The first was Eleanor Roosevelt, who invented the concept of the modern first lady, and who in fact operated at a level of personal involvement and passion that has still been unequalled. (Mrs. Roosevelt gave 348 press conferences of her own, at which no male reporters were allowed.)
The second was Oprah Winfrey, who became the first African-American celebrity to command vast cultural attention -- and achieve enormous influence -- by using her personal story as an inspirational vehicle that encouraged others to accept and overcome their own struggles.
Mrs. Obama's speech deftly wove together the leadership role of the first lady as created by Mrs. Roosevelt, and the culture of introspection, emotion, and confessional drama that was the daily conversation on Oprah's couch. Of course, the role of race can't be ignored in this confluence of influence; Eleanor Roosevelt was a famous fighter for the rights of African-Americans. Oprah, of course, used to be the most famous black woman in the world.
The combination of these two strands -- and the emotional self-confidence of the second would not have not possible without the pathfinding courage of the first -- is the reason the speech was rapturously received by some, and well-accepted by others. As E. J. Dionne Jr. noted in the Washington Post: "As a general matter, her speech was a big hit: good enough that even Fox News was kind to her."
Mrs. Obama began by recounting her travels across America. Eleanor Roosevelt was the first wife of a president to travel and make speeches on her own. The first lady spoke of "teachers in a near-bankrupt school district who vowed to keep teaching without pay" and "people who become heroes at a moment's notice... flying across the country to put out a fire."
That was her Rooseveltian syntax. Then she pivoted directly to the Winfreyian; she spoke, from a mother's point-of-view, about bringing up her daughters in the White House.
"While I believed deeply in my husband's vision for this country... and I was certain he would make an extraordinary president... like any mother, I was worried about what it would mean for our girls if he got that chance."
Then she goes full-on Oprah schmaltz:
"So when people ask me whether being in the White House has changed my husband, I can honestly say that when it comes to his character, and his convictions, and his heart, Barack Obama is still the same man I fell in love with all those years ago......I didn't think it was possible, but today, I love my husband even more than I did four years ago...even more than I did 23 years ago, when we first met."
Woven into this were moving vignettes of her father's physical struggles with MS, and his extraordinary work ethic. This was both a spoken and unspoken rejoinder to the Republican attack on her husband for "gutting" the work requirement for welfare recipients. How could anyone whose father valued work so much, be married to someone who values work so little, she implicitly declared.
"...every morning, I watched my father wake up with a smile, grab his walker, prop himself up against the bathroom sink, and slowly shave and button his uniform.And when he returned home after a long day's work, my brother and I would stand at the top of the stairs to our little apartment, patiently waiting to greet him... watching as he reached down to lift one leg, and then the other, to slowly climb his way into our arms."
This is a very modern kind of sharing, though it clearly be scripted and politically-motivated sharing theater. Mrs. Roosevelt never spoke about her marriage or really all that much about Franklin (for reasons which are now obvious.) She lived in an era that was free of public introspection; it was rare for her to speak as personally as she did in her radio broadcast on the day after Pearl Harbor, which actually came before her husband's famous "Day of Infamy" speech:
"I should like to say just a word to the women in the country tonight. I have a boy at sea on a destroyer, for all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific. Two of my children are in coast cities on the Pacific. Many of you all over the country have boys in the services who will now be called upon to go into action."
Mrs. Roosevelt took on major issues, many of them controversial, the most scalding of the hot-buttons, and spoke ringingly in her voice. In that way she was even more modern than Michelle Obama, whose causes are largely domestic and non-controversial, like childhood obesity and the inarguable goodness of growing your own zucchini.
So as we expected, there wasn't much political red meat in this speech -- other than a few not-so-veiled references to "playing by your own set of rules" which invoked the luxe, influence-rich world of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.
And there certainly was no policy in this speech. There was no talk of "how." That will be left to those later in the week, including her husband, who will lay out the policy prescriptions for job creation and deficit reduction and the roadmap to a vibrant economic future.
This was a speech about "why." Why Barack was the right choice then (the ancient year of 2008), and why he is the right choice now. Michelle Obama -- a historical figure in her own right -- compellingly supplied her personal, emotional justification for the "why." She did that by putting her story, and the president's, in the ultimately American context of personal, odds-defying achievement. She argued that understanding leads to action.
"Barack knows the American Dream because he's lived it... and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we're from, or what we look like, or who we love."
While the subtle gay marriage reference was pitched to the base -- those who were in the hall, and those beyond the balloons -- it was also perfectly tuned to the frequency of independents and undecideds.
The speech called back all the reasons that America voted to let her husband start the job. That moment and that national choice, those emotionally plangent chords -- far more than arguments about Medicare or "who built that" -- will determine whether he gets to finish the job. It was the right pitch to make.
If President Obama is given his chance, it will be fascinating to watch whether a second term liberates the first lady from the controversy-free confines of the vegetable patch. (Which, by the way, was Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden.)
It's doubtful. While we can expect to see Michelle Obama on the campaign, defending her husband and going after the Republicans, her advisers will be cautious about squandering her popularity with vitriol.
If the Obamas are returned, White House advisers will seek to maintain her popularity, and use it strategically. Which means we'll see less Eleanor and more Oprah. So we'll have to wait for the Obamas to leave the White House whether Mrs. Obama wants to assume a broader and more vigorous role in the national dialogue. That's something we've always known she was capable of, and which was affirmed last night.
Follow Adam Hanft on Twitter:www.twitter.com/hanft
FOLLOW POLITICS Like 159k Get Alerts #ad_bottom_article_text {margin-bottom: 15px} Inside DCElections 2012Democratic ConventionOprahThere were two figures who stood, invisibly but powerfully, behind Michelle Obama as she gave her speech last night. Two women, generations apart, speaking through a third.The first was Eleanor Roos...There were two figures who stood, invisibly but powerfully, behind Michelle Obama as she gave her speech last night. Two women, generations apart, speaking through a third.The first was Eleanor Roos... More in Politics...
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View All Recency | Popularity HUFFPOST SUPER USEROOOOOMY238 Fans 6 hours ago ( 3:35 AM)From last post regarding Obama comes from poverty....Link: Article | Came the Hero
Link: Emet m'Tsiyon: Stop the Obama Lie Machine -- Michelle Lies ...
Link: Madelyn Dunham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here is an interesting Link: FactCheck.org : Obama White House 'Full of Wall Street ...OOOOOMY: From last post regarding Obama comes from poverty.... Link: Articlehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/OOOOOMY/michelle-obamas-eleanor-an_b_1859116_184332224.htmlHistory |Permalink |Share itThis comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation.
Loading comments… HUFFPOST SUPER USEROOOOOMY238 Fans 6 hours ago ( 3:31 AM)"Barack knows the American Dream because he's lived it... and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we're from, or what we look like, or who we love"Michelle......Stop with the poverty bit...the car had rotted out parts, shoes too small and that Table..Now try this different truer version
Obama was raised by his grandparents one of which was a banker, he went to the top private school in Hawaii. It had swimming pools and tennis courts. It had photo studios! They both attended elite schools. Michelle went to Whitney Young. Whitney Young was a public magnet school for Chicago’s upper class. That’s where Michelle went to school. Barack went to Punahou, which is the private prep school for the top strata of Hawaii society.
Then they were both accepted to Ivy League schools despite having, uh, less-than-stellar credentials. You might say that they were affirmative-action admissions. But they didn’t come from poverty.OOOOOMY: "Barack knows the American Dream because he's lived it... andhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/OOOOOMY/michelle-obamas-eleanor-an_b_1859116_184331724.htmlHistory |Permalink |Share itThis comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation.
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