"Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?"

The New Republic promotes its "redesign" in email that says I "signed up to get an early look at." (I did?) I'm sent to this interview with Obama, which takes so absurdly long to load that I go off and write other posts before rediscovering the open tab. I see Obama's smiling eyes peeking out over the top of the headline "Barack Obama is Not Pleased." I pause and contemplate 2 things: 1. Do the redesigners not understand the rules of capitalization? and, 2. Did they intend to allude to the famous Queen Victoria quote "We are not amused" — that is, did they intend to imply that Obama uses the royal "we"?

The subtitle is "The president on his enemies, the media, and the future of football," so I guess that's what he's "not pleased" about. I can see not being pleased by one's enemies, but how can he not be pleased by the media? The media fawn over him. What more can he want? And the future of football... I guess TNR threw that in to signal that there's going to be some fun somewhere on this page that took so long to load.

I scroll down past 6 paragraphs of introductory text to get to the actual interview, and that's the first question: "Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?" See what I mean about fawning? My first bite of the "redesign" is thoroughly cloying. It seems to be cloying even to Obama. He says:

I'm not sure it's an intellectual exercise as much as it is reminding myself of why I ran for president and tapping into what I consider to be the innate common sense of the American people.

I wish I could read what went through his head when he heard that question, before he said, in so many words, that's a stupid question. I think it was something like: These elite media guys are so in love with their idea of me as an intellectual. 

That first question was asked by Chris Hughes. It took 2 fawning elite media guys to interview Obama. The other one is Franklin Foer, and his first question is: "How do you speak to gun owners in a way that doesn't make them feel as if you're impinging upon their liberty?" Later, FF comes up with:

Sticking with the culture of violence, but on a much less dramatic scale: I'm wondering if you, as a fan, take less pleasure in watching football, knowing the impact that the game takes on its players.

Wait. We were talking about the "culture of violence" when we talked about gun rights and we're continuing to talk about "the culture of violence" when we talk about football?! Noted.

By the way, credit to FF for extracting from Obama that he shoots guns "all the time," "up at Camp David," where "we do skeet shooting." I never hear about Obama going to Camp David. Where are the photos of Obama skeet shooting at Camp David?

There's some mystery within that pronoun "we."

On "Meet the Press" today, Obama mostly came across as the moderate, pragmatic politician I like.

Now, I'm not a sucker for mere posing, and in fact, I get suspicious when I hear what are simply assertions of pragmatism:

But generally if you look at how I've tried to govern over the last four years and how I'll continue to try to govern, I'm not driven by some ideological agenda. I am a pretty practical guy. And I just want to make sure that things work. And one of the nice things about never having another election again, I will never campaign again, is I think you can rest assured that all I care about is making sure that I leave behind an America that is stronger, more prosperous, more stable, more secure than it was when I came into office.

Well, no, I'm not going to rest assured. Much as I would love these statements to be true, they make me nervous. And that assurance came right after the most partisan thing he said in the whole interview. The moderator, David Gregory, had asked Obama how "frustrated" he was about the difficulty of getting things done with Congress. Gregory asserted that people were constantly coming up to him saying "Don't they realize, all of them, the president, Republicans and Democrats, how frustrated we all are?" And President Obama showed a little irritation:

Well, I think we're all frustrated. The only thing I would caution against, David, is I think this notion of, "Well, both sides are just kind of unwilling to cooperate." And that's just not true. I mean if you look at the facts, what you have is a situation here where the Democratic party, warts and all, and certainly me, warts and all, have consistently done our best to try to put country first.

Country first. Where'd he come up with that slogan?



Then Obama started inching away from this assertion that the Democrats are better. He shifts to more neutral boilerplate about trying "to work with everybody involved to make sure that we've got an economy grows" and "Make sure that it works for everybody. Make sure that we're keeping the country safe." Then he retreats again, making abstract concessions (in question form):

And does the Democratic party still have some knee jerk ideological positions and are there some folks in the Democratic party who sometimes aren't reasonable? Of course. That's true of every political party.

So are the Democrats better or not? He's melted into squishy blandness. And it's exactly here that he does the not-an-ideologue/practical-guy riff that appears at the beginning of this post.

Gun control and the "common sense" meme.

I got 19,300 results from a Google news search for "common sense" and "Sandy Hook."

To be fair, not all of the "common sense" is a characterization of gun regulation proposals. Here's "Parenting common sense and solace," for example. And here's one referring to "the common-sense procedures" that schools can put in place — and that in fact were in place at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But most of them seem to be about "common sense" gun control.

Why is "common sense" the meme of choice?

1. The massacre itself feels senseless, and we want things to make sense. Our fervent desire for sense about what happened in the past makes us amenable to related ideas for making sense. Politicians and policymakers step forward to fulfill/manipulate this need for meaning.

2. To say that this "sense" is "common" is to say: a. It's easy, relax, and see what is right in front of your eyes, and b. This conversation is over, and only weird/bad people are cluttering it with other ideas. "Common sense," by offering closure and comfort, seems well-meaning and helpful, but it is also manipulative and power-enhancing.

3. "Common sense" says: I'm moderate. I'm not about banning and confiscating guns, but doing a few modest things that will constrain the bad people of this world without burdening the good people (like you). In that, it's similar to "balanced approach," which is getting a workout in connection with the "fiscal cliff" negotiations. Those who want more taxes — only for the bad guys, not for you! — want to look sensible and moderate. It's those other people who are unbalanced.

4. "Common sense" is a quintessentially American frame of mind. It was the title of the pamphlet Thomas Paine wrote in 1775, stirring up revolutionary fervor. It was completely incendiary and treasonous. And it led to quite a bit of gun violence.

There were those in high places who, while in agreement with Paine's sentiments, voiced criticism of his method. John Adams, ... in his Thoughts on Government wrote that Paine's ideal sketched in Common Sense was "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work."

Ah! So balanced approach has deep roots too. We are a pragmatic people, and we like practical proposals. We're amenable to arguments framed as balanced and common sense. But if we are indeed practical, we know these are propaganda words, and we look on them with suspicion.

President Obama, may I give you some campaign advice?

I'm independent, moderate, and pragmatic, and I voted for you in 2008 because I thought I saw those qualities in you. I still see those qualities in you, but the you that has those qualities is one of two Obamas, and the other Obama — Radical Lefty Obama — is a person I will not vote for.

I think you alternate between these 2 personas, and I sense that you've done it for so long that it feels normal and comfortable to you, but I want to urge you to pack up Radical Lefty Obama and stow him away with the rest of your Harvard Law School memorabilia. I know you — the Moderate Obama — have impressed some very useful people over the years by parading about as Radical Lefty Obama.

Like yesterday, you gave that Republicans-are-extremists speech, and the New York Times loved it:

Mr. Obama provided a powerful signal on Tuesday that he intends to make this election about the Republican Party’s failure to confront, what he called, “the defining issue of our time”: restoring a sense of economic security while giving everyone a fair shot, rather than enabling only a shrinking number of people to do exceedingly well. His remarks promise a tough-minded campaign that will call extremism and dishonesty by name.

Notice how, in expressing its love, the NYT portrayed Radical Lefty Obama as Moderate Obama. It's Moderate Obama that American voters find so appealing. You don't need all that left-wing economics and race-and-gender demagoguery. I think what people like about you — you, who are famously, sublimely likeable — is the normal person who seems to be in harmony with everyone. We — many of us — voted for you because you seemed to offer to bring us together, to end the rancor.

Be that Obama.

Note to Mitt Romney: If Obama doesn't want to be that Obama, you can be that guy.

"What the academy is doing, as far as I can tell... is largely of no use or interest to people who actually practice law."

Said Chief Justice John Roberts, in a quote that sprang to mind when I read this from Gordon Smith (via Instapundit):

[Some old lawprof once said:] "To become a great law professor, one must write a casebook, a treatise, and a Restatement ... Seavey never wrote a treatise."

... It is impossible to imagine anyone giving Scott's advice to a young professor today. The sort of doctrinal synthesis that lies at the heart of casebooks, treatises, and Restatements is not highly valued among today's law professors, even though it has real-world value.

What is the measure of a great law professor today? The highest achievement of a law professor today is creating a new concept or theory that is used widely by other academics in the field....

Lawprofs injecting other lawprofs with theories. It sounds unsanitary, but it's a closed system, so what could go wrong? It's not as if a law professor is going to break out and grasp massive power in the actual real world. Imagine a lawprof as President! It's absurd!

Aw, come on. Seriously. Barack Obama wasn't a law professor law professor. Did he ever try to create a new concept or theory for other lawprofs to use in the sickly circulatory system of academia? Absolutely not. He was always organizing and operating in the political world.

Bill Maher about Barack Obama: "I think he's a centrist the way he's a Christian... not really."

Via Instapundit:



And Cornel West says "being a Christian is not a political orientation for the President." Oh, thanks for putting it that way. An apt turn of words, Cornel. Because that's exactly what I think Obama's Christianity is: a political orientation.

My source? I said it before:

My source is "Dreams from My Father," chapter 14. While working as a community organizer, Obama was told that it would "help [his] mission if [he] had a church home" and that Jeremiah Wright "might be worth talking to" because "his message seemed to appeal to young people like [him]." Obama wrote that "not all of what these people [who went to Trinity] sought was strictly religious... it wasn't just Jesus they were coming home to." He was told that "if you joined the church you could help us start a community program," and he didn't want to "confess that [he] could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." He was, he writes, "a reluctant skeptic." Thereafter, he attends a church service and hears Wright give a sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope" (which would, of course, be the title of Obama's second book). He describes how moved he was by the service, but what moves him is the others around him as they respond to a sermon about black culture and history. He never says he felt the presence of God or accepted Jesus as his savior or anything that suggests he let go of his skepticism. Obama's own book makes him look like an agnostic (or an atheist). He respects religion because he responds to the people who believe, and he seems oriented toward leveraging the religious beliefs of the people for worldly, political ends.

Why won't the Obama say that polar bears are endangered and thus make it possible to use the Endangered Species Act to deal with global warming?

"U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan sent the [Bush administration's] controversial listing decision back to the Obama administration in October, asking officials to clarify the language the agency used when it determined that polar bears aren’t 'endangered' under federal law. Environmentalists ... had hoped that Obama administration officials would ... protections to the species."

I'm guessing that wasn't changed because polar bears aren't endangered and because using the Endangered Species Act to fight global warming is a bad idea.

Why is Obama's plan to close Guantanamo "in shambles"?

David Remes, lawyer for 14 detainees, says:

“From the outside it appears to be in shambles because he was never sufficiently committed to the success of his own plan and, as a result, Republicans were able to mobilize to turn the issue against him and he provided the Congressional Democrats no leadership.”

I'm guessing it's in shambles because Obama faced the reality that closing Guantanamo is a bad idea.

"Defying President Obama, House Democrats vote not to bring up tax deal he negotiated with GOP in its current form."

CNN Breaking News.

Meade, immediately: "Oh, man! That's going to make bleeding-heart moderates like you like him even more."

Immediate Althouse: "Obama is being thrust into the arms of the onrushing GOP!"

Meade: "In the same way that H.W. befriended Bill Clinton, W is going to befriend Obama. You'll see them playing golf together. Maybe even mountain biking."

It's the Obama I voted for: Obama the Pragmatist.

Now, Rush Limbaugh was talking about how "the media is just beside itself over how pathetic [Obama's] performance was yesterday" in the news conference about the tax compromise. And Rush is saying that Obama "knows full well that he had a meltdown yesterday."

Here's the video:



Rush says he can tell that Obama...

... has been festering, this has been effervescing inside him, that he's unappreciated, that he did something nobody else has done, and they wanted it for a hundred years, and by golly he got it.  He didn't get everything he wanted, he got 99%, and they don't appreciate me,...

So he's essentially telling them, look, I gotta back off on some of this stuff if we're to get anything done.  And that infuriated 'em even more because the question was, "Where you gonna go to the mat, what are your core values?" And he withered.  He caved.  And that made them even angrier.  I know it's hard to comprehend.  But these people on the left, they are truly enraged.  It is a lifestyle.  They are never happy.  I looked at the comments on the Daily Kos website, they are hilarious.  But they're real.  And it went on for ten pages.  I mean they are just fit to be tied because Obama is not what they thought he was....

I must say... I watched that video clip earlier today, and I liked the Obama I saw there. You could say he's beaten down, but there's fire there. It's the fire of pragmatism. I see a sensible and strong man. I never believed in Obama the Messiah, and I fretted about the signs that he was a left-wing ideologue. But when it came down to a decision between Obama and McCain, in the midst of a terrible economic crisis, I put my trust in Obama. I said:

I worry about what awful innovations the new President will concoct in league with the Democratic Congress, but at this point, I'm more worried about McCain than Obama. 

I thought that Obama would have some independence from the Democrats in Congress and that he'd use his common sense and pragmatism to work out some solutions. The more he departs from left-wing ideology and struggles to get to good solutions, the more I like him.

When I watch that video, I don't see a melt-down at all. I see Obama coming into his own at last. I see the Obama I voted for.

“Neither Steve Breyer nor Ruth Ginsburg has much of a purchase on Tony Kennedy’s mind.”

That's actually the most embarrassing sentence in Larry Tribe's letter to Obama about who to nominate to the Supreme Court.

I love the use of the noun "purchase," meaning, not something you buy, but "A means of increasing power or influence" or "An advantage that is used in exerting one's power." That's the 5th definition of the noun in the 3d edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. Here are some other, related definitions:

2. A grip applied manually or mechanically to move something or prevent it from slipping.

3. A device, such as a tackle or lever, used to obtain mechanical advantage.

4. A position, as of a lever or one's feet, affording a means to move or secure a weight.

You get the idea of the image Tribe had of Kennedy's brain? If you read the whole letter — PDF — you'll see that Tribe thought Justice Souter had "purchase," and he was worried that without Souter, Kennedy would roll toward the "Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomos wing of the Court." He thought Elena Kagan — and not Sonia Sotomayor — would operate — as a tackle or lever? — to move "Tony Kennedy's mind."

Kagan, Tribe said, had a way of "gently but firmly persuading a bunch of prima donnas to see things her way in case after case." Of course, he was referring to the prima donna professors at Harvard Law School, and mainly talking about new faculty appointments, which is quite different from persuading Supreme Court Justices about interpretations of law. It's one thing to build a law school community where professors can spout diverse ideologies and still feel like it's a happy, functioning institution. It's quite another to amass votes for a legal proposition that produces an outcome in a case and binds all the courts in the United States.

And if the target of a light touch knows that the most powerful man in the world has selected that approach to prying his brain into a particular political direction, that target ought to become highly vigilant and not get played.

... I think it's clear that a Justice Kagan would be a much more formidable match for Justice Scalia than Justice Breyer has been... in the kinds of public settings in which it has been all to easy for Scalia to make his rigid and unrealistic formalism seem synonymous with the rule of law and to make Breyer's pragmatism seem mushy and unconstrained by comparison.

Tribe says Kagan will be "simultaneously progressive yet principled, pragmatic and yet constrained." That sounds like pragmatism. How does it not "seem mushy" like Breyer's pragmatism? Because it's asserted to be "constrained," while Breyer's pragmatism "seem[s]... unconstrained"? Because it's progressive — steadily aimed in one direction and not more subtly varied?

I'm sure Justice Kennedy doesn't need to be tipped off to this political scheme to clamber over the crusty crags of the convolutions of his brain. But Tribe's letter is amusing reading nonetheless.

The NYT trumpets that an academic has read all Obama's writings and "unearthed" a "philosophy"...

... but the philosophy is pragmatism.

To [Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg] the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism...

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said.

It's one thing for a philosopher to explain and promote pragmatism as a philosophy, but it's quite another to perceive that a given political character behaves and speaks in a pragmatic matter. Nearly all politics is pragmatic, but these politicians are not philosophers, unless you define "philosopher" down to a meaningless level. Touting Obama as a philosopher on this thin ground is the sort of inane idolatry of the President that I thought went out of style over a year ago.

Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”

All right, now I'm genuinely annoyed. Scalia's "good, old dead Constitution" sets up a system of government that allows us to go on, indefinitely, engaged in a conversation about what we want to do as a polity. Does the author of this NYT article, Patricia Cohen, not know the difference between legislation and the work of courts using the Constitution to limit what legislators can do? The notion of a living Constitution is about the scope of the courts' role restricting what democratic majorities can enact. Justice Scalia doesn't oppose the results of that democratic "conversation" that plays out in legislatures!

If you bother to read to the end of this article, you'll see that Cohen eventually gets around to my first point. But check out the weird introductory clause she uses:

As for liberal critics, Mr. Kloppenberg took pains to differentiate the president’s philosophical pragmatism, which assumes that change emerges over decades, from the kind of “vulgar pragmatism” practiced by politicians looking only for expedient compromise. (He gave former President Bill Clinton’s strategy of “triangulation” as an example.)

There's no detail about these "pains," so I have no idea what Kloppenberg did other than to acknowledge the weakness of his assertion that Obama's pragmatism deserves to be called a "philosophy." But why does this sentence begin "As for liberal critics"? It seems to have to do with the fact that Kloppenberg was giving a lecture in NYC and he had some critics in the audience. I can only guess that "liberals" is an appropriate way to refer to the human beings that show up for a lecture in New York City.

Not all of the disappointed liberals who attended the lecture....

Were there no disappointed conservatives?

...in New York were convinced that that distinction can be made so easily. T. J. Jackson Lears, a historian at Rutgers University, wrote in an e-mail that by “showing that Obama comes out of a tradition of philosophical pragmatism, he actually provided a basis for criticizing Obama’s slide into vulgar pragmatism.”

Ah! The liberals are sad that Obama lacks a crisper ideology.

And despite Mr. Kloppenberg’s focus on the president’s intellectual evolution, most listeners wanted to talk about his political record.

Sounds like Kloppenberg's lecture was not well-received. It all comes down to politics. Does that make the audience members pragmatists? Does that make them philosophers?

"Critics say Obama's message becoming 'incoherent.'"

Yes, of course. It was built into Obama's style of communication that it would become incoherent when it moved from campaign oratory — which he seemed so good at — to the real work of governing — which requires you to make specific decisions about the details. At a high plane of principle and abstraction, there is a beautiful harmony. For example, most Americans believe in freedom of religion and reject discriminating against a particular religion. That's not what the dispute over the mosque near Ground Zero is about. Yet Obama thought he could participate in the dispute by doing nothing more than celebrating those principles.

What happened was, most people thought he was taking a position on the wisdom of building the mosque. That is, they didn't see that he was remaining aloof on the high plane of abstraction, beckoning them to join him up there and bask once again in the beautiful harmony that radiated from his glorious presidential campaign. But they'd moved on to trying to solve particular problems, and — like a law student handing in a D exam — Obama hadn't done the hard work of applying the doctrine to the fact pattern.

Obama's response, when he saw that people had misunderstood what he'd said, was to chide them for misreading. He didn't take advantage of the opportunity to do a rewrite and apply the uncontroversial principles to the controversial real-world problem. He stood firm on his lofty pillar of abstraction.

"The danger here is an incoherent presidency," said David Morey, vice chairman of the Core Strategy Group, who provided communications advice to Obama's 2008 campaign. "Simpler is better, and rising above these issues and leading by controlling the dialogue is what the presidency is all about. So I think that's the job they have to do more effectively as they have in the past [in the campaign]."

No! Simpler is only better if people accept the invitation to ascend to that high plane of abstraction where no particular decisions are made. Even if they do, it's only a temporary harmony, because when a particular decision needs to be made, disagreement will reemerge. That's what Morey is perceiving as "incoherence." To say, Obama should use abstraction to achieve coherence is to say Obama should hide our disagreements by avoiding the hard work of governing.

"There is no question they are having messaging problems at the White House," Morey said. "They've lost control of the dialogue, and they've gotten pulled down by the extremes on the left and right. They've just not had a coherent set of themes."

But Obama should descend on his own from that level of abstraction — that "coherent set of themes." If he doesn't do it himself, he will be "pulled down" by whoever fills the gap and takes specific positions about the details he likes to rise above.

"Communicating as a law professor does not work as president. It's not worked," [Morey] said. "You're drawing fine distinctions and speaking in long enough paragraphs that they can be misconstrued and taken out of context and frankly, handed to your opposition to exploit. And that's clearly what's going on here [with the Islamic center/mosque comments]."

Only a bad law professor operates that way. A good law professor speaks as clearly as possible and draws attention to anything the courts have glossed over or left ambiguous. We lawprofs try to extract the doctrinal rules and point up any place where courts have left the rule mushy. Then we apply those rules to particular factual settings. We hypothesize the most difficult applications of law to fact and help the students work through these hard problems. Obama's lolling at high levels of abstract principle and avoiding the specifics of applying principle to real problems is not the way of the law professor.

"The epistemic closure on the right is how other conservatives still manage to blind themselves to the pragmatic virtues of this president's remarkable 15 month record at home and abroad."

What?

Thomas Friedman is puzzled: Obama "speaks so well" yet he "can’t come up with a clear, simple, repeatable narrative to explain his politics."

Look out. Here it is again: the "he speaks well" compliment that white people bestow on black people. It was embarrassing and hackneyed 40 years ago. But still it lives.

Saying "hope" and "change" in a campaign speech isn't much like selling specific policies. Friedman blurs the difference with the notion of "explain[ing]...  politics" with "a clear, simple, repeatable narrative." (By the way, I loathe that word "narrative." It's a synonym for "story" that sounds fancier and has the advantage of not also being a synonym for "lie.")

Friedman muses over the puzzle he's constructed for himself — why Obama hasn't found the right words to grease our gullets so we'll accept what he'd like to ram down:

[I]nstead of making nation-building in America...

That's one of Friedman's phrases: nation-building in America. It implies that we haven't yet built a nation. Think of the depth of the disrespect to the Framers of the Constitution and all who have worked on their construction.

[I]nstead of making nation-building in America his overarching narrative and then fitting health care, energy, educational reform, infrastructure, competitiveness and deficit reduction under that rubric, the president has pursued each separately. This made each initiative appear to be just some stand-alone liberal obsession to pay off a Democratic constituency — not an essential ingredient of a nation-building strategy — and, therefore, they have proved to be easily obstructed, picked off or delegitimized by opponents and lobbyists.

So “Obamism” feels at worst like a hodgepodge, at best like a to-do list... and not the least like a big, aspirational project that can bring out America’s still vast potential for greatness.

Now, why would we let him do that? We would be imbeciles to accept some big abstraction and not pay attention to the details.  Friedman is talking about what Obama should have done to retain the support of voters like me who don't automatically vote for Democrats, but who thought Obama was more likely than McCain to deal with the various problems we faced in the next 4 years.

I can tell you that I am not distracted by the feeling of having "a big, aspirational project." It wouldn't lull me. It would alarm me. I don't care about the labels and generalities. I voted for Obama the Pragmatist, not Obama the Ideologue or Obama the Lefty.

You know, what Friedman calls "a hodgepodge" or "a to-do list" would be perfectly fine with me. Just make the items on the list — or in the pot — good ones.

ADDED: In the comments  american girl in italy said:

You are kidding [about "he speaks so well"], aren't you? You think this was a racist slam? Everyone in the free world has proclaimed Obama to be the world's best speaker. How many times have we heard he is the master of oratory, the world's best speaker.

Let me call in Chris Rock for some backup. (NSFW audio)("'He speaks so well! He's so well spoken. I mean he really speaks so well!' Like that's a compliment. 'He speaks so well' is not a compliment, okay? 'He speaks so well' is some sh*t you say about ret**ded people that can talk," etc.)

Is President Obama the victim of "the stubborn complexity of his national security inheritance"?

That's Scott Shane's angle in the NYT:

For much of President Obama’s first year in office, his national security team worked to devise a secure plan to send dozens of Yemeni detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the largest single group at the prison camp — home to Yemen, perhaps to a rehabilitation program....

Since November, the administration had been preparing to move the highest-profile Guantánamo prisoners — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four accomplices accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — to Manhattan for a federal criminal trial.

It seems to me that the President is the victim of his own ideas about how to do things differently. If he had graciously accepted the inheritance left by George Bush, he wouldn't have had either of these problems. He squandered an inheritance that he failed to value!

Bush — despite his reputation for simplicity — did understand the complexity of the problem, and he had a solution. There was stability. After posturing about "change" in his political campaign, Barack Obama seemed to think that he could apply the immense power he had won to changing things in the real world. And there is no blaming Bush for failing to know the difference between what sounds good and what works well.

George Bush — the extreme contrast to Barack Obama — knew that he was doing a lot of things that didn't sound good and left him open to harsh criticism, but he made a decision early on to accept that and to do what he thought was right. He didn't get enough credit for that. Maybe he will some day. But he also avoided the torrent of justified criticism that would have fallen on him if there had been further terrorist attacks.

Fortunately, there is a limit to how far Obama will go in his dream world of "hope and change." I voted for Obama, but the Obama I voted for was Obama the Pragmatist. I'm glad to see OTP finally emerging, even if part of his pragmatism is blaming Bush. But he will throw that aside if it doesn't work, which it shouldn't. For now, I'm glad he's making some better decisions... even as those freed detainees roam around Yemen.

ADDED: Click and scroll here for all my "Obama the Pragmatist" posts. Like, remember in August 2008 when Joe Biden assured us that Obama "is a clear-eyed pragmatist who will get the job done"? And then there was the time I said:

Forced to choose between Clinton and Obama [in the Wisconsin primary], I voted for Obama — even though he stated positions that were farther from what I want than Clinton's — because I thought he had more mental flexibility and pragmatism, that he was more likely absorb and process evidence and advice and exercise sound judgment.

"The American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems."

"They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty, and care, and a dose of common sense. That, after all, is the unique genius of America. That is the challenge laid down by our Constitution. That has been the source of our strength through the ages. That is what makes the United States of America different as a nation.... I can stand here today, as President of the United States, and say without exception or equivocation that we do not torture, and that we will vigorously protect our people while forging a strong and durable framework that allows us to fight terrorism while abiding by the rule of law. Make no mistake: if we fail to turn the page on the approach that was taken over the past several years, then I will not be able to say that as President. And if we cannot stand for those core values, then we are not keeping faith with the documents that are enshrined in this hall."

Obama the moderate pragmatist. He's oh-so-different from Bush and also — let's not be rigid and ideological — really also exactly the same. He's going to do everything right and get everything done, and whatever it is he does, you can be sure that it's not torture and it's within the rule of law, because he's standing near these documents and Bush was terrible.

Obama opposes the release of more Abu Ghraib photo.

CNN reports:

"Last week, the president met with his legal team and told them that he did not feel comfortable with the release of the [Defense Department] photos because he believes their release would endanger our troops, and because he believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court," [an Administration] official said....

The ACLU said the Pentagon had agreed to release a "substantial" number of photographs by May 28. Officials at the Pentagon have said the photographs are from more than 60 criminal investigations between 2001 and 2006 and show military personnel allegedly abusing detainees....

"We know that many terrorists captured in Iraq have told American interrogators that one of the reasons they decided to join the violent jihadist war against America was what they saw on Al-Qaeda videos of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib," [Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, wrote in a March 7th letter to the President.] ""Releasing these old photographs of detainee treatment now will provide new fodder to Al-Qaeda's propaganda and recruitment operations, undercut the progress you have made in our international relations, and endanger America's military and diplomatic personnel throughout the world."

Andrew McCarthy, writing on the Web site of the National Review, issued a harsh warning Tuesday: "American soldiers, American civilians, and other innocent people are going to die because Pres. Barack Obama wants to release photographs of prisoner abuse."

Barack Obama, the pragmatic moderate. I approve.

Obama's Secretary of Education pick Arne Duncan says "he gave my sister and I the opportunity to start a great school on the South Side of Chicago."

And what do the kids learn at this great school? How to make the kind of grammatical errors that only people who are trying to speak well make?

(Via SondraK.)

ADDED: The Stump likes Duncan:

He's pushed for aggressive reforms [in the Chicago system] that have at times placed him at odds with the city's education establishment. But he's also managed to appeal to that establishment, averting teachers' strikes like those that plagued the city in previous decades....

He's been a leader in the education reform movement, which supports tough policies on teacher accountability, merit pay, high-stakes testing, and fixing failing schools. And yet, he's also been keenly diplomatic with traditional forces like teachers' unions...

Other critics say that Duncan's selection only solidifies that Obama has yet to come down on either side of the debate between reformers and the education establishment.

So he solidifies gelatinousness? Great!

"[Duncan] is seen as a blank slate in terms of ideology or vision," Elizabeth Green at the New York blog Gotham Schools wrote last night. "Indeed, he hasn't done much publicly to indicate where he stands in the Democratic Party's education wars."

Isn't that precisely what you need to be Obama-ready?

Obama [said]: "He's not beholden to any one ideology--and he doesn't hesitate for one minute to do what needs to be done."

So we're getting the moderate, pragmatist Obama I was hoping for. Again, great.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs finds Obama to be "a non-ideological pragmatist who was willing to both listen and lead."

WaPo reports on the 45-minute conversation between Adm. Michael Mullen and the President-elect:

There was little talk of exiting Iraq or beefing up the U.S. force in Afghanistan; the one-on-one, 45-minute conversation ranged from the personal to the philosophical. Mullen came away with what he wanted: a view of the next president as a non-ideological pragmatist who was willing to both listen and lead. After the meeting, the chairman "felt very good, very positive"...

As Obama prepares to announce his national security team tomorrow, he faces a military that has long mistrusted Democrats and is particularly wary of a young, intellectual leader with no experience in uniform, who once called Iraq a "dumb" war....

But so far, Obama appears to be going out of his way to reassure them that he will do nothing rash and will seek their advice, even while making clear that he may not always take it....

Obama may, in fact, satisfy the military in ways that Bush did not:

"Open and serious debate versus ideological certitude will be a great relief to the military leaders," said retired Maj. Gen. William L. Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. Senior officers are aware that few in their ranks voiced misgivings over the Iraq war, but they counter that they were not encouraged to do so by the Bush White House or the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"The joke was that when you leave a meeting, everybody is supposed to drink the Kool-Aid," Nash said. "In the Bush administration, you had to drink the Kool-Aid before you got to go to the meeting."