We DUers Who Criticize our President Want him to Succeed Just as Much as Anyone [View All]

[Time for change]

Criticizing a U.S. President can be a very sensitive issue. There will always be those who claim that such criticism is indicative of a lack of “patriotism”. From within one’s own party, such as here on DU, there are those who feel that such criticism is indicative of lack of party loyalty or lack of loyalty to the principles of our party. I don’t see it like that.

I assume that the vast majority of DUers – both those who criticize President Obama and those who criticize those of us who criticize him – have good intentions. We all want our nation to recover from its myriad problems and move forward. To the extent that that happens, then almost by definition that means that President Obama will have succeeded.

As a matter of fact, I won’t even say that conservative Republicans who criticize President Obama from the right want our nation to fail. I might believe that they do, but I won’t claim it. As far as I’m concerned, they have every right to criticize our president if they believe that he’s making wrong decisions – just like we had every right to criticize George W. Bush when he was president.

I’ll go further than that. When George Bush was president I wanted him to fail in certain ways. I wanted him to fail because I believed that his goals were very bad for our country and bad for the American people. For example, I believed (and still do) that the main purpose of his invasion of Iraq was to set up opportunities for his war profiteering friends to make billions of dollars – through access to Iraqi resources and to no-bid U.S. government contracts (which were never fulfilled) for reconstruction of the country we had destroyed. I hoped that he would fail in those efforts – so that he would be forced to withdraw our troops from Iraq, thereby putting an end to the violence and killing, the destruction of Iraq, and the drain on our national treasury.

Partly for those reasons I would never criticize anyone merely for criticizing a U.S. President, or any other elected U.S. official. I wouldn’t hesitate to criticize the content of their criticism, if I disagreed with it. But I would never criticize anyone just because of the mere fact that they criticized a U.S. president.

Another, equally important reason why I would never criticize someone for the mere fact that they criticized a U.S. president, is that criticism of our government is a crucially important American right and responsibility. It is such an important function of the U.S. citizenry that our Founding Fathers incorporated our right to do that in their very first amendment to our Constitution. Without that right our democracy could not long survive. Therefore, I will never criticize anyone for using that right.


REASONS FOR CRITICIZING A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT FROM THE LEFT

When a Democratic organization, or discussion board such as DU criticizes an elected Democratic leader, especially a president, there is a natural tendency for some people to believe that by doing so we are doing damage to our party, our party’s principles, or our party’s candidate. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that such an assessment could never be accurate. But I do see a two important ways in which such criticism could be worth while – for our party, our party’s principles, our candidates, and our country.

I’m not going to criticize President Obama in this post. I’ve done so in other posts. But in this post I just want to explain the general principle of why criticizing a Democratic president from the left, when justified, can be a very worth while thing to do.


Putting things in perspective and bringing a sense of reality to bear on the situation

One of the common criticisms of President Obama that we hear from the right is that he’s a socialist, or some similar poppycock, such as that he’s the most liberal person ever to run for the U.S. presidency. Charges like those have been repeated so frequently that many misinformed Americans believe them. Those charges are so ridiculous that I won’t even bother to refute them in this post. Barack Obama is a pragmatist, and on the political spectrum is in the center or somewhat to the left of center. I won’t argue here exactly how far to the left of center he is, but it certainly isn’t as far as some of the other Democrats whom he ran against in the Democratic primaries.

I am a liberal, and I believe so are most DUers who criticize President Obama on the DU. (I’m sure that some of his most prominent defenders are also liberals, but that’s besides the point that I’m trying to make here). When we liberals criticize him for taking positions that we believe are not liberal enough, that doesn’t hurt him politically. To the contrary, it helps to point out that the conservative Republican charges that he’s a socialist or whatever are absurd. If there was any truth to those charges it would seem highly improbable that most of the criticisms against him from Democratic voters would come from the left. In other words, our criticisms of President Obama help to paint him as the centrist that he is, which will generally tend to help him when it comes time for him to run for President again against Republican Party opposition.


Balancing out pressure from the right

President Obama is getting a great deal of pressure from the right to move to the right in his policy decisions. We liberals, and probably the good majority of DUers believe that it would be very bad for our country for him to do that.

To the extent that we on the left withhold our criticism when we see our president moving to the right in a manner that we believe will be bad for our country, the pressure from the right remains unchallenged and therefore more potent. This has nothing to do with how long he’s been in office. When we neglect to counter pressure from the right with pressure from the left, the pressure from the right is thereby made more effective, and our elected officials are all the more likely to move right. That is not good for our country. We’ve had many years of those failed policies, and our country can barely afford any more. Remaining silent comes at a very steep price to our country.

One of our greatest presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, recognized this. This point was made in a recent post by ms liberty. Here are some excerpts from that post, in which she quoted an article by Amy Goodman :

A. Philip Randolph was a legendary labor organizer and civil rights leader. He organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the men who tended to the overnight guests on the sleeper cars that Pullman built. While the porter positions were better-paying than many jobs available to African Americans at the time, there were still injustices and indignities…. Thousands of porters sought improvements through collective bargaining…

In response to FDR’s questioning, Randolph told him “what he thought of the nation, what he thought of the plight of the Negro people” and where he thought our nation was headed. FDR then replied to him:

You know, Mr. Randolph, I've heard everything you've said tonight, and I couldn't agree with you more. I agree with everything that you've said, including my capacity to be able to right many of these wrongs and to use my power and the bully pulpit. ... But I would ask one thing of you, Mr. Randolph, and that is go out and make me do it…

Barack Obama is well aware of this principle, and he apparently agrees with it. The above noted story:

was retold by Obama at a campaign fundraiser in Montclair, N.J., more than a year ago. It was in response to a person asking Obama about finding a just solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. After recounting the Randolph story, Obama said he was just one person, that he couldn't do it alone. Obama's final answer: "Make me do it."

AN EXAMPLE BY ANALOGY FROM JOHN F. KENNEDY’S PRESIDENCY

Perhaps the most significant accomplishment of John F. Kennedy’s presidency was his repeated refusals to invade Cuba with the full force of the U.S. military, despite intense pressure from his military and CIA to do so – on at least three separate occasions that we know of. So strong were the pressures and so catastrophic would have been the likely results of caving in to his military on this issue, that I have no hesitation in rating JFK among the top four presidents in U.S. history – right up there with Lincoln, FDR, and Washington. In my opinion, the only reason he has not been so rated is the strong current of militarism that runs through our country, which rates winning wars as more important than preventing them.

JFK would not submit to the pressure from his military because of his passionate commitment to avoid a nuclear war. The situation that he faced is not fully comparable to the point I’m trying to make about the need to criticize our presidents when justified, in that Kennedy did not feel the need for the support of the American people in his resistance to war. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that he was a little less sure of himself than he was. Assume that instead of steadfastly refusing to commit his nation to war, he decided instead to leak his administration’s deliberations to the American people, with the intent of basing his decisions on their reactions. That would make the political decision that he faced then more similar to what we have today, in which the American people are free to comment and criticize President Obama regarding his decisions with respect to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Long before he became president, Kennedy revealed his thoughts on the importance of grassroots political support for peace (or war) in a letter to a former U.S. Navy buddy:

Things cannot be forced from the top… The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people – it would have to be so strong that the elected delegates would be turned out of office if they failed to do it… War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

With that in mind, let’s consider the pressures for war that JFK repeatedly faced:


The invasion at the Bay of Pigs – April 15th, 1961

When Kennedy came to the presidency in January 1961 he inherited a CIA plan for an invasion of Cuba by about 1,500 Cuban exile troops, who were then being trained by the CIA. The plan, as it was related to Kennedy by CIA Director Allen Dulles, was that the landing of the Cuban troops in Cuba would inspire a nation-wide uprising against Fidel Castro, which would quickly overthrow him. The landing of the Cuban troops was to be preceded by bombing of the Cuban Air Force on the ground by a Cuban Expeditionary Force.

Kennedy was never enthusiastic about the plan, but he approved it anyhow, while making clear that under no circumstances would he introduce U.S. troops or air support, even if the refusal to do so meant the defeat of the Cuban exile troops.

The invasion began at dawn on April 15th, 1961, with air strikes by the Cuban Expeditionary Force, which were followed on April 17th by the landing of the Cuban exile troops at the Bay of Pigs. But there was no Cuban uprising, as the CIA had promised Kennedy. The Cuban exile troops were soon surrounded by Castro’s troops, they surrendered on April 19th, and 114 men were lost and more than a thousand were taken prisoner.

Prior to the surrender, Kennedy’s military advisors put tremendous pressure on him to intervene militarily. From Thomas Reeves’ book, “A Question of Character – A Life of John F. Kennedy”:

As the situation at the Bay of Pigs grew worse, pressure mounted on the president to come to the rescue. Members of the exile government were furious with… the administration for refusing to use its full military might… American military men on the scene and in Washington were enraged over the orders prohibiting them from saving the lives of brave men on the beaches…

At the time, it was believed that the CIA officials who drew JFK into the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs were merely incompetent. But it later turned out otherwise. James W. Douglass, in his book, “JFK and the Unspeakable – Why he Died and Why it Matters”, explains what we now know about this episode:

At his death Allen Dulles left the unpublished drafts of an article that scholar Lucien S. Vandenbroucke has titled “The Confessions of Allen Dulles”… In these handwritten notes, Dulles explained how CIA advisers who knew better drew John Kennedy into a plan whose requisites for success contradicted the president’s own rules for engagement that precluded any combat action by U.S. military forces… Dulles wrote that “the realities of the situation” would force the president to carry through to the end they wished… The assumption was that President Kennedy… would be forced by public opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots.

Operation Northwoods – March 16th, 1962

On March 16th, 1962, Kennedy’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by their Chairman, General Lyman Lemnitzer, signed a plan that they code-named “Operation Northwoods”. The plan was a false flag operation, whose purpose was to draw the United States into a war against Cuba. James Bamford describes it in “Body of Secrets – Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency”:

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

The idea was shot down. Kennedy told Lemnitzer that “there was virtually no possibility that the U.S. would ever use overt military force in Cuba.”


The Cuban Missile Crisis – October 18-29, 1962

The Cuban Missile Crisis’ was a complicated affair that I won’t try to summarize here. Suffice it to say that Kennedy’s military repeatedly and strenuously urged him to invade Cuba in response to the discovery of missiles from the Soviet Union on Cuban soil, but Kennedy resolved the crisis instead through a combination of embargo and diplomacy. James Douglass describes the intense pressure that Kennedy was under:

In those days, when compromise was regarded as treason, U.S. military leaders were not pleased by the Kennedy-Khrushchev resolution of the crisis. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were outraged at Kennedy’s refusal to attack Cuba and his known concessions to Khrushchev. (Secretary of Defense Robert) McNamara recalled how strongly the Chiefs expressed their feelings to the president. “After Khrushchev had agreed to remove the missiles, President Kennedy invited the Chiefs to the White House so that he could thank them for their support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. LeMay came out saying, ‘We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock ‘em off!’”

The pressure that Kennedy was under was further elucidated in the memoirs of the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, who had engaged with Kennedy’s brother Robert in back channel diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Dobrynin quoted Robert Kennedy as saying to him:

The President is in a grave situation… and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba… We want to ask you, Mr. Dobrynin, to pass President Kennedy’s message to Chairman Khrushchev through unofficial channels… Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.

What would have happened had JFK given in to the pressure and invaded Cuba? A big clue to the answer to that question is given in Robert McNamara’s memoirs, in which he notes a 1992 article in the Russian press which revealed that by October 26, 1962, there were 162 nuclear warheads in Cuba that were ready for launching. McNamara writes:

Clearly, there was a high risk that, in the face of a US attack – which as I have said, many in the U.S. government, military and civilian alike, were prepared to recommend to President Kennedy – the Soviet forces in Cuba would have decided to use their nuclear weapons rather than lose them. We need not speculate about what would have happened in that event. We can predict the results with certainty… And where would it have ended? In utter disaster.

ON THE NEED TO SUPPORT OUR PRESIDENTS IN DOING THE RIGHT THING

As noted in this post, Presidents Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Obama have all commented upon the need of the American people to help their leaders to make the right decisions by putting pressure on them to do so. These observations rest on the knowledge that presidents can be, and have been on many occasions in our history, under tremendous pressure to do the wrong thing.

During George W. Bush’s presidency word leaked out on many occasions that he was planning to attack Iran, possibly with nuclear weapons. That information was met with a great deal of passionate negative reaction by large numbers of the American people. We don’t know to what extent that negative reaction influenced the eventual decision of the Bush administration not to attack Iran. All I can say is that I was very glad at the time, and I remain very glad today that there was so much negative reaction against the Bush administration’s plans to attack Iran.

We were very fortunate that John F. Kennedy was our President during a time at the height of the Cold War when our military and others were intent upon risking a nuclear war by invading Cuba. The American people did not know about this pressure for war at the time. But had they known about it, raising their voices against it could have made all the difference between peace and war. It would not have been appropriate for us to say, “Let’s give me a chance and see how it turns out”.

When a president’s base and allies fails to criticize him when justified, that is not good for democracy in my opinion. I’ll end this post with a quote from Bill Burton on this subject. Burton made this comment in the context of then Senator Obama’s support for George Bush’s FISA bill. But these words apply to any candidate, any time, any where:

This attitude that we should uncritically support Obama in everything he does and refrain from criticizing him is unhealthy in the extreme. No political leader merits uncritical devotion – neither when they are running for office nor when they occupy it – and there are few things more dangerous than announcing that you so deeply believe in the Core Goodness of a political leader, or that we face such extreme political crises that you trust and support whatever your Leader does, even when you don't understand it or think that it's wrong. That's precisely the warped authoritarian mindset that defined the Bush Movement and led to the insanity of the post-9/11 Era, and that uncritical reverence is no more attractive or healthy when it's shifted to a new Leader.

I don’t mean by quoting Burton on this subject that Barack Obama is in any way similar to George Bush. There is no comparison there. But I certainly do agree with the principle that Burton describes.