Victoria Brownworth

watching the sunday morning talking heads shows is always an excercise in controlling one’s (out)rage. yesterday was no exception. there were myriad choices to freak out anyone who thinks there should be a public option for health care reform or who thinks escalation in afghanistan is a monumental mistake. in short, it was another five/six hours of  slamming progressivism hard. the fact that much of this slamming was being done by the obama administration’s own top guns made it that much worse. pundits are one thing, but when rahm emanuel and david axelrod are gutting us, it feels so much worse.

like many of the sunday squakers, i have 30 years experience as a reporter covering politics for some of the bigger and better newspapers and syndicates in the country. this makes me one more pundit among many with either more or less or more recent or less vast experience than i.  like other pundits my opinions are based concomitantly on inside sources plus personal insights that have evolved out of all those years in and around and beyond the beltway.

one such experience is my politically activist youth. i was a teenager during vietnam, but i got arrested quite a few times in demonstrations–all peaceful–against that war. i sat in a few jail cells with other protesters twice my age and more. i felt genuine outrage of the sort usually associated with adolescence, but which was clearly mirrored for me by adults i knew who were equally outraged by the war. war has a way of coalescing sides and eradicating the barriers of age, gender, race, etc.

usually.

as a catholic school girl in a parish where the priests were followers of the berrigan brothers, and living in a mixed-race working class neighborhood, the general tenor of my teenaged surroundings was solidly anti-war.  this may have been because the war had been going on for such a long time and folks who had initially supported the war were tired or it may have been because there had been so many kids coming home in body bags. it may also have been because nixon was becoming so universally reviled–it’s hard to know. i was a politically sophisticated teenager, but a teenager nonetheless and thus had no backstory on which to draw for my politics. it was all here, all now.

older brothers of high school friends of mine were drafted and some never came back. one of my former husband’s older brothers came back, but his depression (what we now call PTSD) wrecked his marriage and damaged him for many years after his service.  a high school near the one i attended held the national record for most alumni killed in vietnam.

i may have only been a teenager, entering high school after richard nixon began “vietnamization,” but it was clear to me even then–because i was well-read, politically active and my parents were socialists–that the war was wrong.   

looking back on the certainty i felt in those years, a certainty that the adults around me also seemed to feel, that vietnam was a huge mistake that could have no good end, i’m flummoxed by the current stasis in washington over afghanistan. if it’s not vietnam revisisted, then what is it?

and what is the big question, really? candidate obama seemed so clear in his anti-war stance. we heard repeatedly that he was against both wars, although he hadn’t been in political office when those wars were started, so his opinion was much like the rest of us who had a WTF? response. nevertheless, he seemed clear: the wars were a mistake.

then during the primary, obama began to lean toward a withdraw-from-iraq-and-devote-the-troops-to-afghanistan stance. and because everyone was ga-ga over obama, no one challenged this. in fact in one stunning exchange that should have made headlines,  obama said at the new hampshire debate that he would consider bombing pakistan with no warning. hillary clinton gave a solid foreign policy response that took india and pakistan as nuclear nations into account. but the exchange barely made it to the blogosphere. because obama was golden and hillary, was, in obama’s own words at the time, someone who thought foreign policy experience meant having had tea with the wives of world leaders. (of course he chose her for secretary of state, so either he changed his mind or it’s one more sign of his own inexperience that he picked her or he realized that he had no clue about foreign policy and better get her on board. clinton told ABC’s cynthia mcfadden last week that she hadn’t wanted the job, but when your president asks you to serve, you do.) 

the key reason obama fired mckiernan from the afghanistan post  and replaced him with mcchrystal was because mckiernan had called the war unwinnable and was leaning toward the perspective that the u.s. should withdraw. a narcostate with no infratstructure run by political corruption that makes pakistan, iraq and iran look pristine by comparison, afghanistan has never had a truly solid government and has been involved in one or more conflicts for decades. anyone looking at the country’s history for more than five minutes (less time, apparently, than george bush spent checking it out) could see that entering into afghanistan would become, to use the overused word of the day, a quagmire.

and quagmire it has indeed become. unlike in iran where the corrupt and rigged june election was called fair and uncorrupt by the very people who rigged it because they really know how to run a dictatorship there,  the election in afghanistan has now been deemed rigged after weeks of vote counts. there will be a run-off. our guy (and why is karzai our guy???) will win again, as secretary clinton said this sunday with an unmistakeable note of regret in her voice.

but there will be no more stability after a more carefully orchestrated run-off election. because afghanistan is corrupt to its core. to re-direct the politics of that nation requires more than mere nation-building–it would require sowing the ground with salt and starting over from scratch.

we can’t win there. we can’t. we aren’t the first country to get stuck with this tar baby and we likely won’t be the last. just as we weren’t the first in vietnam.

the best option is the withdrawal option. joe biden, who’s had almost nothing to say that wasn’t foot-in-mouth during the whole of the obama presidency, has been stridently opposed to escalation in afghanistan. so much so that arianna huffington suggested on CNN that biden should resign in protest if obama escalates in afghanistan. (like that would happen, but read it here:  www.huffingtonpost.com/_320929.html )

rahm emanuel was doing the talk show circuit with a vengeance on sunday, doing double duty in putting off the afghanistan question and slamming the public option.

according to emanuel, there can be no decision on afghanistan until the election results have been codified. really? was there a point where anyone believed this was a fair and free election? was there a point where anyone with two brain cells to rub together thought hamid karzai–our guy in kabul–wasn’t corrupt and was a strong leader capable of pulling his country together? even diane sawyer seemed stunned when she interviewed him a few weeks ago at his summary expectation of gullibility from the west. (perhaps he thinks that cool cape he always wears is magic…)

on ABC’s this week the two issues of the day–afghanistan and the public option—faired n0 better than they had on CBS’s face the nation or on CNN. it was easy to ignore anything peggy noonan had to say (perhaps if she didn’t look/sound drunk every time she appears on the show it might help her credibility, although that seems so damaged as to be irreparable). and usually it’s easy to ignore george will, with his retograde amnesia about history/politics. but since will came out so stridently against continuing the war in afghanistan (albeit seven and a half years too late), he makes occasional sense as he did yesterday. his concern: that obama will trade up with afghanistan and the public option to look tough.

if democrats are still doing the “we have to look tough” routine, then we learned nothing from the clinton health care debacle nor from the eight loooong years of the bush/cheney regime.

democrats in washington, especially those in the white house, take note: you have the floor. the house floor, the senate floor, the oval office floor. the democratic president just appointed a latina woman supreme court justice (she’s a centrist moderate, but ignore that for the moment). we can do stuff. really, we can.

we can force a public option, we can withdraw from afghanistan. we can become the change we always wanted to be or whatever new change mantra obama is selling this week. (he seems stuck on “change is hard” these days.)

 what we cannot and must not do is revert to type, by which i mean the quaking fear of losing congressional seats that has stymied the democrats in ways it has never worried the republicans.

since when is ONE REPUBLICAN SENATOR enough to create a bipartisan bill? since we gave them that much power. as long as we cede everything to the republicans, we will continue to have nothing.

rahm emanuel used to be the best knife fighter in the democratic party after hillary clinton. whither the guy who sent a dead fish to an opponent who shafted him? obama chose him to be his chief of staff because emanuel didn’t care about getting his hands dirty. which then makes us wonder: if he’s being sent on the talk show rounds to damp down the public option and scuttle the afghanistan question, then where the hell are we with both?

obama promised a health care plan that would provide for most americans as well as provide better coverage than americans had before he took office. has anyone in the white house actually looked at what max baucus came up with? or was the president too busy lauding olympia snowe as the second coming of bipartisanship?

this bill–which will be whittled down even further before passage–is devoid of everything obama and hillary clinton fought so bitterly over during the primary. most americans’ eyes glazed over when the debates turned to health care reform because it always seemed the two were deep in the weeds on the specifics. but the fact is, obama made substantial promises on health care. not as many as clinton, but then she had been holding the health care grudge for 15 years. nevertheless, obama did promise a public option, he did promise a level of mandate, he did promise no lobbying with big pharma (he forgot that one first–to the tune of $88 billion–in june), he did promise (even john mccain promised this one) that americans could get cheaper drugs from canada.

seen those things in the baucus bill? nope–because it’s been eviscerated of everything obama and clinton battled over. (it doesn’t even have provisions mccain campaigned for, not that mccain has mentioned those, but that’s republicans for you. moderate my ass.)

most of us who weren’t born yesterday or didn’t drink the kool aid have known for a long time that obama is no progressive. but we also thought that as a democrat with a democratic majority in congress he would at least make an attempt at creating some functional change.

listen to his two main honchos, emanuel and axelrod, however, and the fix appears to be in. we’re out of everythig we want/need on health care reform in a big way–we may get a bill, but it won’t be a bill most of us will want to live with (and it won’t even do what obama has insisted it would, that is, keep current coverage intact). as for afghanistan, that one is anybody’s guess. with any luck, obama will borrow a page from the nixon and bush playbooks and orchestrate the run-off in afghanistan so that abdullah abdullah wins and then we have an actual partner to negotiate with for however many more years we are stuck in that lawless state. until then, it’s more (non)change you can’t believe you voted for. and a very long road ahead.—vab