Pity the pay czar. When Ken Feinberg announced last month that he would slash pay at seven firms that received federal bailout funds and convert large chunks of compensation to stock units that can’t be sold for years, he was met with almost universal opprobrium. Critics of Wall Street protested that simply paying out salaries in stock rather than cash would have little effect on executives at the bailed-out firms, to say nothing of the banking culture at large. “This is a ploy to appease a public enraged by Wall Street bonuses, particularly Goldman’s which is notably unaffected by the move,” finance blogger Yves Smith wrote in The New York Times. Meanwhile, bankers complained that the scheme would hamper the ability of those firms to compete for the best talent in the business. “It looks like meatball surgery with a sledgehammer,” one independent compensation expert told the paper. “There are going to be some people who just pick up their sticks and go.” Even the administration seemed lukewarm about Feinberg’s compromise. The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House deliberately made him unaccountable to Treasury so that it wouldn’t have to deal with the predictable fallout.

Fortunately, we get to start replaying the whole tortured drama in a few short weeks. Because Feinberg’s agreements only apply to 2009 salaries, he still has to negotiate next year’s compensation packages for all seven major bank-bailout recipients--AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, GM, GMAC, Chrysler, and Chrysler Financial--set to take effect in January. Which is why, as we approach the next round--sure to launch its own separate uproar--it’s worth keeping in mind that the pay czar is largely beside the point.

That’s not to say bankers are underpaid. Far from it. Financial-industry bonuses are expected to rise 40 percent this year. Goldman Sachs, just months after paying back taxpayer dollars, is expected to give out bonuses that exceed what the company paid out in 2007, at the height of the bubble. Even after Feinberg’s pay cuts, 66 executives at the seven companies under his jurisdiction will receive at least $1 million in long-term compensation.

The point, rather, is that there’s very little that a czar--even one as apparently well-intentioned and tough-minded as Feinberg--can accomplish in this realm. Compensation reflects a number of factors: a firm’s profitability, size, business model, competitors, etc. When a firm is making billions in profits and has all sorts of unregulated competitors (like hedge funds or foreign banks) who are equally profitable and can afford to pay multimillion-dollar salaries, it’s very difficult to force its executives to take an 80 or 90 percent pay cut. More likely, such a decree will be counterproductive, causing the targeted executives to leave for unregulated competitors, and therefore undermining the government’s efforts to recoup its investments in these firms.

Really changing executive pay at big commercial banks would require reforming the structure of the banking industry. That would start with the kind of proposal former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker has put forth, which would separate traditional commercial banking (and some investment-banking functions) from proprietary trading--in other words, separating the banking parts of the business from the hedge-fund parts of the business. The current problem is that the hedge-fund parts of the business create huge profits, in turn driving huge salaries, while the banking parts of the business give the firm access to cheap borrowing from the Fed in a crisis, federal deposit insurance, and fdic backing for its debt issuance. The fact that the two parts are combined also makes the government more likely to bail out a large institution if it verges on collapse.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Hedge funds and outlandish financial-sector salaries are probably here to stay. But there’s no reason that they should benefit from government support. Spinning off the hedge-fund activities of a company like Citigroup from the more traditional bank activities would drive down salaries in the parts of the business that benefit from enormous government largesse. And if the government did have to step in and save a bank, at least taxpayers wouldn’t have to pay salaries that were quite as titanic.

Unfortunately, that’s not something a pay czar can accomplish with limited powers over a few bailed-out firms. It would require tough legislation, which means a massive fight in Congress and an investment of presidential capital. The administration opposes Volcker-esque proposals for breaking up the banks, suggesting that truly reforming executive compensation is not a top priority. That’s disappointing but understandable--there’s a lot on Wall Street that needs reforming. But, as long as that’s the case, don’t blame Ken Feinberg for failing to lower executive pay. There isn’t much he can do.

WASHINGTON--Normal human beings--let's call them real Americans--cannot understand why, 10 months after President Obama's inauguration, Congress is still tied down in a procedural torture chamber trying to pass the health care bill Obama promised in his campaign.

Last year, the voters gave him the largest popular vote margin won by a presidential candidate in 20 years. They gave Democrats their largest Senate majority since 1976 and their largest House majority since 1992.

Obama didn't just offer bromides about hope and change. He made quite specific pledges. You'd think that the newly empowered Democrats would want to deliver quickly.

But what do real Americans see? On health care, they read about this or that Democratic senator prepared to bring action to a screeching halt out of displeasure with some aspect of the proposal. They first hear that a bill will pass by Thanksgiving, and then learn it might not get a final vote until after the New Year.

Is it any wonder that Congress has miserable approval ratings? Is it surprising that independents, who want their government to solve a few problems, are becoming impatient with the current majority?

Democrats in the Senate--the House is not the problem--need to have a long chat with themselves and decide whether they want to engage in an act of collective suicide.

But it's also time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machiavellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit.

We know what happens when drivers just sit there when they're supposed to be moving. They get grumpy, irascible and start turning on each other, which is exactly what Democrats are doing now.

Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there's so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin?

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Yet there was a small break in the Curtain of Obstruction this week when Republican senators unashamedly ate every word they had spoken when George W. Bush was in power about the horrors of filibustering nominees for federal judgeships. On Tuesday, a majority of Republicans tried to block a vote on the appointment of David F. Hamilton, a rather moderate jurist, to a federal appeals court.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama explained the GOP's about-face by saying: "I think the rules have changed."

That was actually a helpful comment, because the Republicans have changed the rules on Senate action up and down the line. Hamilton's case is just the one instance that finally got a little play.

Thankfully, this filibuster failed because some Republicans were embarrassed by it. But Republican delaying tactics have made Obama far too wary about judicial nominations for fear of controversy. He is well behind his predecessor in filling vacancies, a shameful capitulation to obstruction. There's also the fact that the nomination of Christopher Schroeder as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, which helps to vet judges, is snarled--guess where?--in the Senate.

Republicans are using the filibuster to stall action even on bills that most of them support. Remember: The rule is to keep Democrats from ever reaching the exit.

As of last Monday, the Senate majority had filed 58 cloture motions requiring 32 recorded votes. One of the more outrageous cases involved an extension in unemployment benefits, a no-brainer in light of the dismal economy. The bill ultimately cleared the Senate earlier this month by 98-0--yes, that is a zero.

The vote came only after the Republicans launched three filibusters against the bill and also tried to lard it with unrelated amendments, delaying passage by nearly a month. And you wonder why it's so hard to pass health care?

Defenders of the Senate always say the Founders envisioned it as a deliberative body that would cool the passions of the House. But Sessions unintentionally blew the whistle on how what's happening now has nothing to do with the Founders' design.

The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent. By using Republican obstructionism as a vehicle for forcing through their own narrow agendas, supposedly moderate Democratic senators will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.

E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

Sarah Palin’s autobiography Going Rogue doesn’t have an index. Why? Well, I’m not exactly sure. But it sure makes finding gems in the text--such as the defense of that $150,000 clothing bill, the petty attacks on Katie Couric, and Palin-isms like “maverick” and “dang!”—a pretty tough slog. So, here’s an index. A really, really long and thorough one. Want to know where Palin celebrated one of her baby showers with her gal pals? It’s in here. Want to know how she feels about the ACLU, or Ashley Judd, or Steve Schmidt? In here, too. Want to know how many times she mentions God, or Ronald Reagan, or Tito the Builder? Yep, here. It’s worth reading the whole thing. Enjoy.

A

Abortion and right-to-life issues  2, 5-6, 115, 168-169, 172, 215-216, 277-278, 349

ACLU, as activists who insist on telling people to be offended by religious expression 28

ACORN  360

Alaska

Independent spirit of 6, 12, 13, 65-66, 136, 284

State GOP

State machine of  3

Being outside of  5, 85 110

Starting off on wrong foot with 5

Party bosses of  5, 96

Butting heads with 197

Anti-hunting groups, cluelessness of 19, 134

ANWR 196, 198, 206, 273, 274, 288

Ayers, Bill 306-307, 312

B

Baby shower at a shooting range 76

Baldwin, Alec 314-315

Baldwin, Stephen 314-315

Bartiromo, Maria  206

Bash, Dana 318

Beck, Glenn 206

Beer, first chug of  38

Biden, Joe                                    

On liking to hear himself talk 288

Sarah Palin accidentally calling him "O'Biden" 289

Should Palin call him "Joe" in the debate? 289

Showing up late to debate 296

Weirdly stretching before debate 296

Hair plugs of 297

Big Business 84

Birkenstock 48, 76

Blogs/blogging/bloggers 116, 203, 236, 237, 347, 348, 371, 378

Book banning 76-77, 237

Bono 301

Bridge to Nowhere 237

Buck, Pearl S., on freedom 180

Buckley, William F. 219 

Bush, Laura 135 189

C

Cap and trade, as "environmentalist Ponzi scheme" 391

"Captive," of McCain campaign 261

"Caribou Barbie" 314

Caribou lasagna 218

Carter, Jimmy

Humiliation of America 45-46

CBS, exclusion of in post-resignation interviews 380

"Change," on originating campaign slogan before Obama 114, 225

"Cleavage Czar" 354

Clinton, Bill 286-287

Clinton, Hillary, Palin's non-accusations about whining of  287

Clothes

Disinterest in fancy types of 37, 205, 229

Liking of Ann Taylor suits 221

McCain campaign's giving of to Palin, without her request 226, 245, 314

Unnecessary New York stylists hired to handle 230, 231, 314, 315

Assumption of Palin that items were paid for by McCain campaign 230, 231

Stylists of, as distraction from Palin's opportunities to study foreign policy 232

"Fuss over" as "colossal waste of time" 232

Controversy over $150,000 spent on 314-317, 343-349

CNN 318, 369

Coincidences, disbelief in 44, 330

College

Studying political science and journalism in 3, 45

Taking first semester off of to "thaw out"  42

Going to Hawaii for 42

Transferring to Idaho for 42

Media's mean handling of her career in 44-45

"Commonsense Conservative" 384, 385, 400

Coulter, Ann  288

Couric, Katie

Question about reading news  207

Lack of knowledge about energy issues 207, 273

New York stylists of 230, 315

Setting up interview with 255, 256

Low self-esteem of 256

As "lowest rated news anchor in network television" 270

Friendship with Nicolle Wallace 272

Interview with 271-279

                  Palin's lack of prep for, because of McCain campaign 271

                  Unfair editing of 272-275, 279

Agenda of 273-276

"Heavy dose of condescension" during 276

12 questions about abortion from 277 278

Niceness to Joe Biden 278

Lack of national pride 279

Comments of, regarding clothing controversy 315

Creationism, belief in 217 218, 392

Crist, Charlie 326

Current events, her closely following them 25, 26, 45, 46, 47, 48, 58, 59

D

"Dang" 74, 184, 282, 296, 352, 401

Davis, Rick 284

Debate preparation

Mean people in awful early stages of 279-283

McCain campaign's demanding of "nonanswers" for 281-283

Conflict with Schmidt during 284-285

Prep in Arizona 286-292

Democrats, historical failures of 364

Destiny and miracles, belief in 47, 122, 330, 331

"Different," as first "big word" 15

Ditka, Mike 301

Diva 315, 320

Dolce & Gabbana 316

"Drill, baby, drill!" 105, 243, 273, 310

Drilling 2, 44, 105, 196, 197, 206, 243, 273, 288, 310, 362

Duvall, Robert 300

E

"East Coast", as semi-derogatory descriptor of people 229, 374

Election-night speech, which McCain campaign wouldn't let Palin give 332, 334

Elite/elitist 171, 181, 232

Emanuel, Rahm 368

Ethics complaints, frivolous 342-343, 353-356, 363-368, 373-374, 377

Evolution, as "politically correct" stance 219

F

Feminism

Early radical mantras of 29

Skewed views on liberation of 29-30

Hypocritical followers of 352

Ferraro, Geraldine 43, 295

Fey, Tina 293, 308, 309, 310, 315, 325

FOIA requests, frivolous 353, 372, 377

Fox News 255, 298, 343, 355

“From the heart” 41, 240

G

Gibson, Charles                 

Lack of interest in "substantive issues" 270

As "grumpy" 271

Gingrich, Newt 364, 367

Giuliani, Rudy 350

Glass ceiling 295

God 1,6,15,20,22,23, 51, 52, 57, 30, 33, 34, 35, 56, 83, 103, 104, 121, 123, 133, 144, 169, 170, 173, 175, 176, 177, 188, 185, 186, 187, 193, 195, 208, 217, 218, 233, 238, 243, 244, 261, 272, 286, 294, 322, 323, 331, 337

"Going rogue" 209, 298, 317, 359, 403 

Good deeds of Sarah Palin 1-403

Gossip and rumors, dislike of 74-75

Graham, Lindsey 301

Grammer, Kelsey 303

H 

Hasselbeck, Elisabeth 215, 316

"Headquarters,” as mysterious place in McCain campaign that caused Palin problems 261, 285, 299, 309, 324, 331, 335

Hockey 29, 58, 83, 121, 130, 163 ,166, 167, 169, 243

Hockey mom 243, 262

Hollywood liberals 134, 300

Holtz, Lou

On God 1

On team-building 79

"Holy geez!" 171

I

Ifill, Gwen 281, 294, 297-298

International experience

Trips overseas 165-166

Palin's as greater than Barack Obama's 228, 229

Iraq war

Palin's informed perspective on 214

Media's skewing of Palin's informed perspective on 238

J

Joe the Plumber 304-307, 401

Joe Six-Pack 299, 315

Johnston, Levi N/A

Judd, Ashley, as “pretty, perky celeb” who unfairly opposed hunting of wolves 134

Judd, Naomi 301 

K

Kerry, John, as "elitist loon" 181

Kick butt/ass 67, 111, 127

Kid Rock 300

King, Martin Luther King, Jr., on passionate action 86

Kissinger, Henry 286

Kristol, Bill 135

Kudlow, Larry 206, 257

L

Letterman, David 351

Lieberman, Joe 285-286, 301

Lies told about Sarah Palin 74-75, 77, 79, 95, 102, 148, 202-204, 215, 232, 236-239, 246-247, 272-275, 289, 314, 318-320, 338, 343, 346-348, 350-352, 365-366, 378, 380

Lies told by Sarah Palin N/A

“The Little Guy” 84

Lobbyists, refusal to “hang with” 137                 

Lombardi, Vince, on winning 333

Lower 48 14, 16, 17, 42, 93, 125, 169, 207, 208, 274, 332, 346, 349

M

Main Street 84

Mama Bear/Grizzly, self-description as 71 182

Marx, Karl 84

Matalin, Mary 381

Maverick 90, 252, 299

McCain, Cindy 209-210, 221-222, 286, 290, 337

McCain, John

Phone call from 6, 208

Meeting 210

As POW 210, 225, 240, 244, 245

Boldness/independence of 210, 223, 228

American hero 225, 252, 269

As "maverick" 252

Suspension of campaign, as "odd strategic choice" 269, 270

Meat

Love of 18, 133, 134

Alaskan sayings about 18, 19, 134

Explaining value of to silly vegans 133

Media

Fear that it would misinterpret her words 39

Unnecessary searching for “dirt under” candidates’ “fingernails” 112

Disinterest in Alaska energy news 204-205

As friends of Obama 215, 270, 287

As 90 percent liberal 270

Outlets of, that Palin wanted to talk to 255, 256

McCain campaign's refusal to let Palin meet with 253-258

McCain campaign's lack of preparedness for, when it came to questions about Palin 236

Unkindness, ineptitude toward Palin 215, 232, 236-238, 270-271, 280, 314, 316-318, 338-339, 343-348, 351,353, 359, 371, 378, 399

Unfair attacks on Joe the Plumber 305-306

As "buffoons" 378

Melville, Herman 118

Miller, Dennis 303

Miss America Scholarship Pageant

Initial skepticism of 42

Fear of swimsuit portion of 42

Comparing “butts” in 43

Winning every segment in local portion of 43

Runner-up in Miss Alaska portion of 43

Question about female vice-presidents in 43

Monegan, Walt 139, 201-204, 215, 246, 368, 369

Moose

Hunting of 16, 31

Love of eating 18

Sightings of 20, 113, 188

Dressing of 31

Holding eyeballs of 32

Chili 133

Antlers of 300

In SNL sketch 309 311

Morris, Dick 135

Murkowski, Frank 5, 81, 82, 84, 89, 90, 95, 96

Murkowski, Lisa                 

Nepotistic appointment of 94

Being mistaken for 190

N

National Review 305

National Rifle Association 133

Neiman Marcus 230

New York Times 277, 281, 306, 324,                 

O

Obama, Barack

As "not saying much in his speeches" 227

Lack of international experience 228 229

Lack of administrative experience 229

"Styrofoam Greek columns" of 243

Rallies of, whose size was comparable to those of Sarah Palin 266

Radical associations of 359

As cause of rising deficit 388

Obama, Michelle 269, 372

"Ordinary"/good/regular/hard-working/sincere/patriotic people 62, 81, 84, 68, 108, 111, 114, 129, 140, 155, 220, 221, 225, 242, 248-249, 279, 302-305, 307, 336, 345, 401

P

Pain, as necessary to achieve goals 17, 30, 41, 375

Paine, Thomas, on giving children future peace 146

Palin, Bristol

Potential origins of name 57

Pregnancy

Telling parents about 207, 208

McCain campaign's knowledge of, before Sarah Palin's selection 214, 233

Media finding out about 233, 234

McCain campaign's skewing of Sarah Palin's statement about 234, 235

Countering accusations of being a hypocrite about 373

Palin, Piper

As Right to Life poster child 2

As half the size of state-fair-winning cabbage 17

Palin, Track

Wishing his name was normal 53

Palin, Todd

God's deliverance of 34

"Steel core of" 36

Cussing, chewing, not-going-to-church ways of 37

As Iron Dog champion 187 188 189

“First dude" nickname of 135 194

Accusations of being "Shadow Governor" 136, 367

False rumors about divorce from 352

Sexiness of 352

"Palling around with terrorists" 306

People or groups who have been mean to/spread rumors about/slighted/insulted/otherwise annoyed Sarah Palin

Wasilla "good ol' boys" 71-72

Nick Carney 73

Nick Carney's wife 77

Wasilla police chief 73-74, 79

People who thought Palin's daughter was smoking pot, when in reality it was the old mayor's daughter74-75

Anne Kilkenny

                  As "Birkenstock-and-granola Berkeley grad" 76

                  As "town crier" 117

                  As "town crank" 236

Wasilla librarian 77

Wasilla city employees 72

Mayor's secretary 90

John Stein 79-80 236 237

Opponent in the lieutenant. governor's race 83-84, 72-73

Governor Frank Murkowski 91-93, 98

GOP operatives 98

State Democrats 98

Hollis French 100, 201. 369

Walt Monegan 201

Big Oil 158 159 164 196

State senate president 182 183 184

Hypothetical critics of fifth pregnancy 171

First legislative director 152

State lawmakers who didn’t like her new rules as governor 152, 154

Gubernatorial debate moderator 116

Andrew Halcro 117, 203, 236

"Maniacal blogger" 236

Andree McLeod 117, 236, 353, 354, 367

Alaska media 118, 183, 342, 367

McCain campaign 229, 234-236, 253-255, 256-257, 261, 268-269, 280-285, 293, 298, 307, 309, 316-319, 328, 331, 334-339, 343, 363

                  Steve Schmidt 235, 253, 264-265, 284-285, 318, 320-321

                  Nicolle Wallace 277, 316, 339

                  Mark Wallace 281, 283, 339

National media 215, 232, 236-238, 270-271, 280, 314, 316-318, 338-339, 343-348, 351,353, 359, 371, 378, 399

                  The Atlantic Monthly 238

                  The Huffington Post 238, 354

                  Katie Couric 271-279, 315

Obama campaign, along with media 215, 232

The Left 307

Alec Baldwin 313-314

Women's rights groups 352

Pete Rouse 369

Kim Elton 368-269

Naomi Rice Buchwald 372

Local Alaskan opposition 344, 353-356, 365-367, 373 

Pitbull with lipstick 243

Plato, on battles 24

Poehler, Amy 311

Politico 318

Politics

impatience with 2

“machines” of 3, 116

“good ol' boys” of 4, 67,71,72,85

“as-usual” system of 5, 6, 70, 109, 119, 144

fighting corruption of 5, 94, 99, 112, 119, 128, 142, 162, 163, 224, 225

skewed priorities of 18

as sport 48, 100

presidential type as "blood sport" 262

motherhood as training for 115

family as training for 145

“entrenched interests” of 108 116

"of personal destruction" 352 

Pregnancy, fifth child

Taking test for 171

Not revealing 180, 184, 191

Revealing 191-92

Labor in Texas 193-195

Guilt about not revealing 195

Lies in media about 238, 347

R

Reading and writing

Love of 15, 16, 27, 28

Op-ed contributions displaying aptitude at 206, 277

Reagan, Ronald

Great policies of 3, 46, 384, 386, 387

General awesomeness of 45-47

Self-comparison to 158

Other 59, 297, 391-394, 400

Rich, John 301 

Ruedrich, Randy 5, 94, 95, 96 237

Russia 274-275

S

Salter, Mark 213, 22, 335

Same-sex marriage, opposition to 143, 215, 216

Sarkozy, Nicholas, prank phone call 326-329

Scheunemann, Randy 228, 286, 288, 289, 290, 291, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321

Schmidt, Steve

Nickname of, "the Bullet" 212

Gruffness of 212-213, 262

Slowness to shift McCain campaign from Iraq war to economy 214-215

Knowledge that Bristol Palin was pregnant before Sarah Palin's selection as vice presidential pick 214

Telling Sarah Palin not to talk to Alaska media 252

Alliance with Nicolle Wallace 261

Insistence that Palin eat more carbs 284-285

"rotund figure" of 285

Smoking problem of 285

Insults of 318, 320-321, 328, 334

Confrontation with Schuenemann about Palin 319-320

As "pile of laundry" 335

Scully, Matthew 239-240, 243, 307, 332, 334-335

As "bunny-hugging vegan" 239

Sebelius, Kathleen, Vogue fashion shoot with 204, 205

Sex education 238-239, 371

Sexism

Of sports media 28, 29

Of sports generally 29

Of local "good ol' boys" 71

Of Wasilla city officials 72

Of Wasilla Mayor John Stein 79-80

Of Wasilla police chief 79

Of media covering presidential campaign 287

Of clothing controversy 315

Of David Letterman 351

Of women's rights groups 352

Sinise, Gary 303

SNL 26, 293, 308-314

Snow machines 18, 34, 37, 302

Specter, Arlen 301 

Sports

Passion for 27-33, 39-43, 102, 280

As reason for first child's name 43

As possible reason for second child's name 57, 76

McCain campaign's denial of time for 280

Stapleton, Meg 129, 201, 202, 203, 204, 253, 254, 363, 383, 398, 399, 400

Stone, Oliver 314

T

Tasergate 203, 247

Tea parties

Political variety of 206, 259, 362, 395

Real variety of 135, 189

Teleprompter

Failure of at GOP convention 242

Palin's success without 242

Thatcher, Margaret

On female power 287

On capitalism 360

Policies of 384

Tito the Builder 305-307, 401

Trailblazer 122

"Trig-truthers" 347

Troopergate 201, 203, 246, 368-369

Turkey decapitation incident 345

Turner, Janine 300

U

Underdog 110, 123

V

Van Susteren, Greta 355

Veganism, as questionable lifestyle choice 133, 239

Voight, John 300

W

Warren, Rick 302

Wasilla police chief

Unkindness/unfairness toward Sarah Palin 73-74, 79

Firing of 79

Wallace, Mark 227, 228 279-283, 339

Wallace, Nicolle

Meeting with 227

TV quality of 228

Hiring of New York stylists 230

Pushing for Katie Couric interview 255, 256, 272, 277

Friendship with Katie Couric 272

Palin's doubts about 256

Alliance with Steve Schmidt 261

Other 299, 316, 317, 320, 339, 347

Williams, Hank Jr. 301

Wilson, Gretchen 300

Wooden, John 105

Wooten, Mike (i.e. the trooper in Troopergate) 100-102, 202 246

Wright, Jeremiah "God Damn America" 307

Y

"You betcha" 309

“You can’t blink” 198

Seyward Darby is the assistant managing editor of The New Republic. 

WASHINGTON--Imagine a time when government work was exciting, widely admired, and much sought after.

It seems an outlandish thought at a moment when you cannot turn on your television without hearing government spoken of as almost an alien creature. It is cast as far removed from the lives of average Americans and more likely to destroy the achievements of private citizens than to accomplish anything worthwhile.

True, we don't apply our anti-government sentiments to at least one group of Americans who draw government paychecks: our men and women in uniform. All the polls show they are, deservedly, held in high esteem. But civilians who do the daily work of government are more likely to be referred to as "bureaucrats,” “time servers,” and various unprintable things than as public servants.

This has not always been the American way. There were important eras in our history when citizens in large numbers were drawn to government service with a sense of mission and exhilaration. The New Deal was certainly such a time and so were the days of the New Frontier and (it is unjustly derided now) the Great Society.

They came in part--take note, President Obama--because they were inspired by leaders who made it a point to call them into government. Caroline Kennedy has said that when she was growing up, “hardly a day went by when someone didn't come up to us and say: 'Your father changed my life. I went into public service because he asked me.'”

But inspiration is not enough. The military, after all, does not rely solely on patriotic feelings to build its force, and neither should the civilian parts of government. One of the most powerful incentives the military has is the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which offers assistance to those seeking higher education. It's time for a civilian ROTC.

That's the idea of a bipartisan group of Senators and House members who are proposing to create the Roosevelt Scholars program, named after Teddy Roosevelt. Reps. David Price, D-N.C., and Mike Castle, R-Del., have introduced a bill in the House, and a similar measure is expected in the Senate this week from Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

Although there is sentiment to include undergraduates in the program, the House bill is aimed at graduate students, because the federal government has a special demand for highly qualified employees who are otherwise attracted (and heavily recruited) by the private sector. In exchange for generous scholarships in fields such as engineering, information technology, foreign languages and public health, the scholars would commit to three to five years of service in an agency of the federal government.

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“With the aging of the boomers and those who responded to Kennedy's call to service, we need to replenish the government work force,” says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service.

Stier, a one-man evangelizing squad on behalf of government service, notes that the government must fill 273,000 “mission-critical” positions in the next three years. This will require vast improvements in the way government recruits and a new willingness to invest in its work force.

The military, he says, gets roughly 40 percent of its officer corps through ROTC. It makes sense to undertake a comparable investment in the civil service.

In the small and underappreciated world of those who care passionately about improving government's performance and prestige, there are competing visions of how to achieve this. One group of activists and legislators has been pushing to create a Public Service Academy, modeled after the military academies, to prepare a new generation of leaders in government.

It's a good idea and would send another powerful signal that government work is and should be valued. But with the extraordinary constraints on the federal budget, the prospects of the large investment that would be required to build a new institution are not exactly rosy. A civilian ROTC would be a good first step. The Roosevelt program has the benefit of drawing on the entire higher education system's capacity to produce specialists.

The Roosevelt program could also be an antidote to two debilitating trends in our politics. It would push back against the tendency of politicians to deride government (an odd habit, since politicians are themselves engaged in government service). And it might open the way for a bipartisan achievement at a time when such endeavors are in very short supply.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.

E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

Is it worth sacrificing health care reform for ideological purity on abortion? That’s the question Democrats are facing after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to avoid derailing health care legislation, reluctantly accepted an amendment offered by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak that prohibits people who receive any federal health care subsidies from buying insurance plans that cover abortion. More than 40 liberal House Democrats have promised to vote against any final bill that includes the provision, but that risks alienating the 40 House Democrats who voted for both the amendment and the House’s health care bill, as well as some Senate moderates. President Obama has vowed to maintain the status quo on abortion and hinted that it’s possible to imagine a more moderate abortion compromise. But, if the compromise doesn’t materialize, pragmatic pro-choice Democrats are likely to make the same calculation as Pelosi: The Stupak amendment is objectionable in principle, but it’s not worth scuttling health care reform in practice. This is a wrenching political choice that will have negative consequences, but there may not be any escape.

 

How many women would the Stupak amendment affect? It wouldn’t immediately impinge on the roughly 60 million women ages 18-64 who presently get health insurance through their jobs or their spouses’ jobs rather than Medicare. At least in the short term, nothing would change for these women because they wouldn’t receive any federal funds. But most of them aren’t reimbursed for abortion coverage under the current system. There’s a debate about how many private health care plans cover abortion--estimates have ranged from 46 percent to nearly 87 percent. But, regardless of the number, the Guttmacher Institute found that only 13 percent of all abortions in 2001 were directly billed to private insurance companies. Some women may have filed for reimbursement on their own; others may have been reluctant to file claims because they didn’t want their employers or spouses to know they had abortions; and other women were uninsured. Nevertheless, 74 percent of women who had abortions paid for them out of pocket.

That doesn’t mean the Stupak amendment would maintain the status quo on abortion funding. It would restrict the choices of women who buy private health insurance on the new health-insurance exchange designed to provide affordable coverage. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, under the House bill, 21 million Americans will buy insurance through the exchange by 2019. This group will include some of the 17 million women, ages 18-64, who are currently uninsured (and, obviously, don’t receive any abortion coverage) and some of the 5.7 million women currently purchasing coverage through the market rather than through employers--including self-employed and unemployed women, and those whose jobs don’t offer benefits.

It’s some subset of this last group--the women who switch from private plans that now cover abortion to private plans on the federal exchange--who would be most affected by the changes. The overwhelming majority of people who buy private insurance on the exchange will be receiving federal affordability credits, and the Stupak amendment says that, if you receive a federal subsidy, you can’t buy insurance that covers abortion. (The amendment allows women who are farsighted enough to plan for unplanned pregnancies to buy a single-service abortion-insurance “rider,” but, in practice, past experience suggests these riders won’t be readily available.) “The bottom line seems to be that abortion coverage, if it exists at all on the exchange, will be rare,” says Adam Sonfield of the Guttmacher Institute. This may not be a great financial burden for the majority of women who have first-trimester abortions, which are relatively cheap--in 2006, the average cost of a first-trimester abortion was $413--but it could represent a more serious burden for women who have later-term abortions, which are more expensive.

Of course, if the exchange succeeds in providing affordable coverage, as Democrats hope it will, more women may switch from their current self-insured plans to exchange plans. The more health care reform succeeds, in other words, the more reproductive access will suffer. And efforts to control costs will suffer too, since childbirth is far more expensive than abortion.

Is there a way out of this trap? There’s no question that the compromise originally championed by some House Democrats was far preferable as a matter of principle and policy. It would have required private insurance companies on the exchange--as well as the new public option--to create segregated funds to ensure that only private, rather than federal, dollars subsidize abortion coverage. The model is the 1976 Hyde amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds to reimburse the cost of most abortions under Medicaid but allows the states to subsidize abortions for Medicaid recipients on their own. (Seventeen states use public money to fund abortions for some poor women.) Pro-life groups have resisted the segregation of public and private funds, arguing that the two are ultimately fungible. (They are less concerned about fungibility when it comes to federal grants for soup kitchens run by churches, which can then free up funds to celebrate Mass.) At this point, perhaps the most promising compromise for moderate Democrats would be to drop abortion coverage in the public plan but allow women on the exchange, including those receiving federal subsidies, to purchase private plans that include abortion coverage. But that compromise may be resisted by both pro-choice and pro-life purists and, thus, may not be politically feasible.

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Let’s imagine that it’s impossible to pass a health care bill without a version of the Stupak amendment. Might the Supreme Court strike the amendment down? In upholding the Hyde amendment in 1980, the Court stressed that Congress could refuse to subsidize medically necessary abortions because it left “an indigent woman with at least the same range of choice … as she would have had if Congress had chosen to subsidize no health care costs at all.” By contrast, the Stupak amendment doesn’t leave self-employed women who receive federal subsidies with the same range of choice: It makes it much harder for them to find alternative coverage for abortion and therefore, in practice, leaves the federal government less neutral toward abortion than even the Hyde amendment. For this reason, it’s possible that some liberal Supreme Court justices might conclude that the Stupak amendment violates the Constitution. But this argument is unlikely to convince a majority of the Roberts Court, which means that pro-choice Democrats shouldn’t count on the Court to bail them out.

In short, abortion is one area where the common ground Obama seeks may not exist. In that case, the president may conclude, like Nancy Pelosi, that it’s not worth sacrificing health care reform over an important but ultimately peripheral battle in the culture wars. If giving millions of uninsured women access to life-saving procedures like dialysis and chemotherapy requires making it harder for a much smaller number of self-insured women to get abortion coverage, the pragmatic calculation is understandable. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic.

In the theology of the Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), God has a pretty long shit list. Read the colorful placards at the group’s daily demonstrations and you get the idea: “God Hates Fags,” “God Hates Fag Enablers,” “God Hates Obama,” “God Hates America,” “God Hates The World,” “God Hates YOU.”

Led since its 1955 inception by Fred Phelps, who turns 80 tomorrow, the church is populated primarily by his progeny. Since taking their crusade to the streets in 1991, the WBC faithful claim to have staged 41,226 protests in 685 cities and towns across all 50 states plus DC--on Monday, they terrorized Sasha and Malia Obama’s school--not to mention Puerto Rico, Canada, and Iraq. (A U.K. visit was called off in February, when the British home secretary banned Phelps from the country.)

WBC achieved particular notoriety in 2005, when it began picketing military funerals. Taunting mourners with signs thanking God for dead soldiers and IEDs, church members declared that a “raging mad God” was waging a holy war on America for its acceptance of homosexuality and other “abominations.” (The father of one fallen Marine, who sued WBC, was initially awarded millions in damages by a jury, but the verdict was overturned in September by a federal appeals court.)

Hated on the left for their homophobia, disowned by the right for their anti-Americanism, the WBCers live in a world unto themselves. And that world, they say with supreme confidence, is nearing its end. “By the time you see the Antichrist Obama sitting in the highest office in the world, you know you’ve got a short time line, scripturally speaking,” explains Shirley Phelps-Roper, one of Fred Phelps’s 13 children and the group’s de-facto spokeswoman. Now, in the final act of that Biblical script, WBC has cast itself the part of the prophet Jeremiah--a lonely voice warning a disobedient nation of its impending doom. (Unlike Jeremiah, WBC boasts a state-of-the-art website, complete with a running meter of how many “reprobates have split hell wide open since you loaded this page.”)

With Armageddon approaching, WBC has trained its sights on a new target: The Jews. Though the gay-bashing and funeral-crashing continue apace, the church is now on a mission to call forth the 144,000 Jews who will be saved, according to the Book of Revelation, when their Christ-rejecting brethren perish in the rapture. (“Some Jews Will Repent,” says one of the group’s more optimistic signs.) Recently, the hunt for these “elect Jews” sent a WBC contingent on a whirlwind tour of New York, where members picketed synagogues and other Jewish sites in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island’s Great Neck (or “Great Stiffened Neck,” as WBC calls it), throwing in stops at “fag-infested” high schools for good measure.

What happens when a merry band of anti-Jewish, anti-gay rabble-rousers visits one of the most Jewish, gay-friendly areas in the country? Let’s just say that, in terms of brash willingness to speak their minds, these holy rollers may have finally met their match. TNRtv reports:

Benjamin Birnbaum is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. Ben Eisler, formerly a video reporter-producer at The New Republic, recently joined WJLA/News Channel 8 as an on-air reporter.

WASHINGTON--For some years, Democrats have denounced parodies casting their party as utterly closed to the views of those who oppose abortion. Last weekend, Democrats proved conclusively that they are, indeed, a big tent--and many in the ranks are furious.

From the outraged comments of the abortion rights movement, you'd think that Rep. Bart Stupak's amendment to the House version of the health care bill would all but overturn Roe v. Wade.

No, it wouldn't. The Michigan Democrat's measure--passed 240-194, with 64 Democrats voting "yes"--would prohibit abortion coverage in the public health care option and bar any federal subsidies for plans that included abortion purchased on the new insurance exchanges.

Stupak argues that the federal government has stayed out of the business of financing abortion since passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976 and that none of the policies available on the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program cover elective abortion. The structures that reform would create, he says, should carry the same restrictions, which do not apply in cases involving rape and incest or when a mother's life is in danger.

Abortion rights supporters counter that, at the very least, individuals who pay part of the cost of their policies should be allowed to choose abortion coverage.

Whatever else is true, Stupak's amendment is unlikely to have a significant effect on the availability of abortion, since most abortions are not paid for through health insurance. The Guttmacher Institute, for example, reported that only 13 percent of abortions in 2001 were directly billed by providers to insurance companies--although the institute cautioned that this figure did not include "women who obtain reimbursement from their insurance company themselves."

The odd thing is that everyone in this fight insists that the only goal is to maintain the status quo on abortion. But defining the status quo has been a legislative and negotiating nightmare.

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Democratic leaders once thought they had found the middle ground with an amendment offered by Rep. Lois Capps of California. She proposed segregating the money paid in for health insurance. Abortion coverage could be purchased with the premiums paid by individuals, but not with government money.

Abortion opponents argued that this separation of funds was artificial, and that all money paid to the government plan was, by definition, public. So Rep. Brad Ellsworth, a right-to-life Democrat from Indiana, suggested an alternative that became known as "Capps on steroids." It substantially strengthened the barriers between public and private funds, particularly in the public plan.

But a key group of Democrats who supported the rest of the House bill (roughly 10 by the best count I have been able to get) was still not satisfied, partly because the Roman Catholic bishops were not satisfied. These Democrats turned out to be essential on a bill that ultimately passed by five votes.

Last Friday night, Stupak put forward a final compromise to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that would have prohibited abortion coverage in the public plan but would have allowed an annual vote on the abortion ban for the private plans. Pro-choice Democrats rejected this, and the stronger version of Stupak's proposal then passed.

What happens now? Democratic supporters of abortion rights need to accept that their House majority depends on a large cadre of anti-abortion colleagues. They can denounce that reality, or they can learn to live with it.

There is also a challenge for abortion's foes, above all the Catholic bishops who have a long history of supporting universal coverage but devoted most of their recent energy to the abortion battle. How much muscle will the bishops now put behind the broader effort to pass health care reform? Their credibility as advocates for social justice hangs in the balance.

And if the Senate forces a change in the Stupak language, one obvious approach would involve a ban on abortion in the public plan--if such an option survives--and the application of Ellsworth's rules to the private policies sold in the insurance exchange. The alternative would be Stupak's original compromise offer to Pelosi. There are not many other options.

The truth is that even with the Stupak restrictions, health care reform would leave millions of Americans far better off than they are now--including millions of women. This skirmish over abortion cannot be allowed to destroy the opportunity to extend coverage to 35 million Americans. Killing health care reform would be bad for choice, and very bad for the right to life.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.

E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

When President Obama arrives in Tokyo on Friday, he will confront a country that seeks to be an ally of the United States. For Japan has never been an American ally. It was first a rival, then an enemy, and finally, after it lost the war it foolishly started with the U.S., it became a protectorate, not an ally.  

The distinction matters. An alliance is an institution negotiated between two sovereign governments in which each agrees to a series of reciprocal obligations that have the force of law. A protectorate arrangement, by contrast, sees the protectorate retaining a degree of control of its internal affairs, but surrendering authority to manage external relations--most crucially, in the area of military decision-making. In return for the protectorate's ceding of this key aspect of sovereignty, the dominant partner in the arrangement agrees to provide for the defense of the protectorate. 

Anyone who has followed closely the debate over national health insurance has probably noticed some peculiar inconsistencies in Americans’ attitudes toward the legislation. A Pew Poll released on October 8 found “steady support” for specific elements of the health care plan, including the public alternative to private insurance, the employer mandate, and the requirement that everyone have insurance. Nonetheless, popular support for the plan itself was declining, with 34 percent “generally [in] favor” and 47 percent “generally opposed.”

What accounts for this disparity? Certainly, some people fear that Medicare will be cut, or that “death panels” will be set up, but one of the most persistent concerns is not about specific provisions; rather, it’s that the federal government will be taking over health care. In a Washington Post poll last month, a plurality worried that the health care plan “creates too much government involvement.” In a poll taken October 9–13 by Public Strategies in conjunction with Politico, 52 percent of respondents feared that Congress would go “too far in increasing the government’s role in health care.” In a Harris poll in early October, 65 percent agreed, and only 22 percent disagreed, with the “criticism” that “the proposed reform would result in a government-run health care system.” In other words, Americans are looking to the government for help, but they still don’t like the government.

And this isn’t just confined to the health care debate. You get the same inconsistencies if you look at polls about government regulation of finance and business. Polls show majority support for specific new measures, such as restricting CEO salaries and establishing a new consumer financial-protection agency, but the Public Strategies/Politico poll found that 68 percent of respondents preferred “better enforcement of existing regulation” over “new regulations.” Again, Americans are turning to government, but they distrust letting it do too much.

This pattern of belief is deeply rooted in the American psyche and has regularly stymied efforts at reform. Americans have supported, or have come to support, specific governmental remedies, such as Social Security, the minimum wage, and environmental and consumer protections. But, when a new program that expands government is proposed, they have displayed a general ideological predisposition against the power of government. As Obama tries to get his reform agenda through Congress, this predisposition is already proving to be a formidable obstacle.

 

Americans’ skepticism about government dates at least from the Revolution. In The Liberal Tradition in America, published in 1955, political scientist Louis Hartz described the Americans of 1776 as “Lockean liberals.” He was using the term “liberal” in its classic connotation--more like today’s free-market conservative or libertarian. Americans, he perceived, envisaged the state as strictly limited to protecting property relations among equal producers. They saw strong government--which they identified with the British crown--as a threat to economic and political freedom. Government, in Thomas Paine’s words, was a “necessary evil.”

The first adherents to this Lockean liberalism were followers of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson--small farmers and (in Jackson’s case) urban workingmen who attacked the statism of the Federalist elite. But, after the Civil War, a rising business class invoked it against the political left, claiming that a policy of laissez-faire would best ensure a prosperous America. Lockean liberalism became free-market conservatism.

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By the end of the nineteenth century, panics, crashes, yawning inequality, and other market failures provoked a challenge to this free-market conservatism; populists, socialists, progressives, and, later, liberals called for the state to curb the market. But, even during the high tides of liberal reform, free-market ideology held sway. In 1935, Americans overwhelmingly backed specific New Deal programs, but Gallup found them opposed to an increase in government regulation by 53 percent to 37 percent. In a pathbreaking 1967 book, The Political Beliefs of Americans, political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril found that Americans suffer from a contradiction between “ideological conservatism” and “operational liberalism.” According to their analysis of surveys they had conducted, only 16 percent of Americans--with blacks and Jews leading the way--were ideologically and operationally liberal.

There are a number of converging factors that help explain why ideological conservatism has endured and so often bested operational liberalism. Lockean liberalism clearly benefited from its identification, in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, with rapid economic growth. Like the British of the early twentieth century who clung to the gold standard as the secret of their past glory, Americans clung to the myth of the unfettered free market. At the same time, there was never a strong statist tradition from which reformers could draw their precedents. Americans lacked not only a feudal absolutist past, but also a history of successful state capitalism: Liberals and progressives could only invoke European or Federalist precedents. The great progressive manifesto that advocated a strong state, Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, appeared in 1909 and has been largely ignored ever since.

Lockean liberalism also got a boost from business lobbies and Republicans, who, in the first half of the twentieth century, worked to align “free enterprise” with the “American way of life” and liberal or progressive statism with socialism, communism, and fascism. Later, Republicans succeeded in identifying liberalism with taxes on the middle class and spending on minorities.

The success of this rebranding did in Obama’s two Democratic predecessors. Republicans, working with the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, defeated Jimmy Carter’s popular proposal for a new consumer-protection agency by raising the specter of a new government bureaucracy. It was downhill from there. A similar coalition beat back Bill Clinton’s signature program for national health insurance by portraying it as a state takeover of health care. From September 1993, when Clinton’s plan was introduced, to March 1994, the percentage of Americans who believed it represented “too much government involvement” rose from 38 percent to a clear plurality of 47 percent. Not long after Republicans captured Congress in 1994, Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.”

 

Liberals and progressives have fared poorly in the face of this staunch anti-statist tradition, but there have still been periods when they have broken through and enacted major reforms--during Woodrow Wilson’s first term, Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, Lyndon Johnson’s first two years, and Richard Nixon’s first term. They succeeded for different reasons at different times, but several conditions recur.

To begin with, market breakdown has always helped the cause of operational liberalism. Wilson and the reformers in Congress were able to pass legislation establishing the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission because a succession of depressions and bank panics had worried business and angered workers and farmers. Roosevelt’s reforms, of course, came on the heels of the 1929 crash and the Great Depression, which raised questions about the sanctity of the market.

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Democratic ability to neutralize business and energize the left has also been key to reform. Roosevelt and Democrats in Congress took advantage of divisions within business, as well as the public’s distrust of business leaders, to get their program across. They also benefited from the energy of organized movements on their left. If it had not been for the pressure exerted by a renascent labor movement and by the followers of populist Huey P. Long and pension advocate Francis Townsend, Roosevelt (who was privately something of a Lockean liberal) might never have backed, and Congress might never have passed, tax reform, Social Security, and the National Labor Relations Act.

These same conditions--a divided business community and an energized left--were also key to the spate of reforms adopted during Nixon’s first term. Business, fearful of an alliance between labor and the New Left, and of popular movements for environmental and consumer reform, acquiesced to proposals for regulatory reform put forward by Democratic majorities in Congress. Incredible as it may seem now, a 1970 Fortune survey of executives from the 500 largest firms found that 57 percent believed government should “step up regulatory activities.” That support would quickly plummet, but it allowed a great burst of liberal reform to occur.

Of course, having party majorities in Congress has also been important. In 1935, Democrats and two allied parties held 71 of 96 Senate seats and 332 out of 435 House seats. In 1965, Johnson could count on 68 senators and 295 House representatives. These huge majorities allowed Roosevelt and Johnson to function in a quasi-parliamentary manner, ignoring their partisan opposition in Congress and passing reforms representing compromise between the center and left of their own parties.

Finally, reformers have learned how to craft their proposals in ways that would not raise anti-statist hackles. Wilson, Roosevelt, and the Democrats in Nixon’s first term targeted specific abuses of the market for regulation. They claimed to be improving, rather than limiting, the operation of the market. Wilson’s Federal Trade Commission was billed as the means to promote market competition. Roosevelt replaced planning with regulation after the Supreme Court threw out the National Recovery Administration. And liberals promoted welfare measures, including old-age pensions and unemployment compensation, that were aimed at meeting public needs that the private market could not or would not meet. They were consistent with a mild strain of Lockean liberalism.

 

Obama took office promising a version of Roosevelt’s first hundred days, and conditions were auspicious for major reform: The market had broken down to the extent that a second Great Depression loomed on the horizon; business was divided and demoralized; the public was ready to entertain drastic measures, even if they entailed an increase in governmental power; liberal and left-wing movements were invigorated by Obama’s victory; and Obama and the Democrats enjoyed majorities in the House and the Senate.

Obama and the Democrats did get a stimulus bill through Congress, but getting the rest of their reform agenda has proven to be more difficult. A hundred days have given way to 200 and will soon give way to a year. What has held up their efforts at reform? The basic problem is that the economy, while not recovering, has stopped spiraling downward; public concern has begun to shift away from the failure of the market to the failure of government to revive the market. Ideological conservatism has re-emerged with a vengeance.

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According to the Pew poll, Americans who prefer “smaller government, fewer services” to “bigger government, more services” has risen from 42 percent in October 2008 to 48 percent this March to 51 percent at the beginning of October. In Gallup’s surveys, conservatives now outnumber moderates as well as liberals for the first time since 2004--with the most important change being an increase in the percentages who think there is “too much government regulation.”

Business and its Republican allies have also revived, and they have actively lobbied against Obama and the Democrats’ reform agenda. America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which led the fight against Clinton’s health care bill in 1994, has taken the field; the American Financial Services Association is trying to eviscerate financial regulatory reform; the American Petroleum Institute is running ads against climate-change legislation; and conservative Republicans have organized “Tea Parties” to protest the Democratic agenda. Left-wing and liberal groups have countered these efforts and attacked moderate Democrats who, in the face of business pressure, have begun to waver. But, as yet, they lack the disruptive power of the movements of the 1930s or late ’60s.

Support for specific liberal reforms persists and, in some instances, has even grown this fall. But, increasingly, that support has had to co-exist with a vibrant and unsettling ideological conservatism. Obama and the Democrats’ opening for reform is not nearly as large as those enjoyed by Roosevelt or Johnson in their early years in office. That has put a premium on the political skill of Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership at deflecting criticism and outmaneuvering their opposition. They have performed well, but by no means perfectly.

To allay suspicions of statism, Obama and the Democrats have had to avoid the impression that they are advocating a federal takeover of the health care system, government planning to avert a climate crisis, and federal control of the banking system. And they have done their best to do so. In framing their proposals, Obama and the Democrats have opted for regulation rather than nationalization and for programs that supplement rather than replace what the market already does. When Republicans and business lobbies have attacked the public option in the Democrats’ health care bill as a Trojan horse for a government takeover of insurance, Democrats have successfully framed it as an expansion rather than a constriction of free-market choice. In a Washington Post poll from October 18, respondents favored it by 57 percent to 40 percent. In a CNN poll conducted at the same time, respondents favored a public option by 61 percent to 38 percent.

The administration has also sought to divide business. It has wooed some hospital and drug firms to back its health plan; it has taken advantage of rifts between banks and investors to push its financial regulatory reform; and it has courted pro-green firms that back its climate bill. When Apple, Exelon, and other companies quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over that body’s opposition to climate-change legislation, it was a major victory for the administration.

Where the Obama administration has stumbled is in handling the Republicans in Congress. In its eagerness to avoid attacks from business and conservative Republicans, and to win over the few Republican moderates, the White House has appeared willing to ditch significant parts of its reform program, including the public option from its health care bill and strict regulation of derivatives from its financial-reform proposal, even though these kinds of measures have remained popular among the public.

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The White House has also mishandled liberal and left-wing movements when they have run ads against wayward Democrats who appeared unwilling to back the administration’s reform agenda. Generally, the White House has tried to discourage them from taking positions independent of the administration’s. And it has thrown its support to Organizing for America, a quasi-political machine that grew out of the campaign and that is united by its loyalty to Obama rather than by its support for liberal reform. That’s a mistake. Obama and the Democrats need active, unruly, and independent pressure from the left to combat Republican conservatives, intimidate Democratic fence-sitters, and persuade business that, if it doesn’t back Obama’s reforms, it could face much more radical measures.

Still, with these exceptions, Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have done well under conditions that are not as favorable for reform as they seemed in January. Obama and the Democrats understand not only the opportunity for reform, but also the long-standing ideological obstacles they face in obtaining it, and they have adopted a strategy of dividing business and framing their proposals as market reforms. If they continue to do so, and if they are not scared off by pressure from the right, they should succeed in getting a health care bill and new financial regulations. A climate-change bill will be more difficult but not impossible, as long as they can keep the voting public focused on the specifics of liberal reform rather than the atmospherics of ideological conservatism.

John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic.

Created by Ben Bernstein, Noah Kristula-Green, Julie Sobel, and Barron YoungSmith

(Click here to see a full-sized version of the matrix.)

1. Howard Dean: The former DNC chairman, who opposed the war in Iraq, is an Afghanistan hawk for national security and humanitarian (women's rights) reasons. He believes that "we can win this war militarily."

2. Bruce Riedel: The Brookings fellow, who coordinated the Obama administration's initial review of Afghanistan policy, supports a robust counterinsurgency. He has warned that a limited mission would empower Al Qaeda and the Taliban, fueling the perception that the United States is again ready to "cut and run."

3. Stanley McChrystal: Obama's general in Afghanistan has requested between 40,000 and 80,000 more troops in order to pursue a robust counterinsurgency strategy. Without them, he warned, the war “will likely result in failure.”

4. Fred Kagan: The conservative military theorist and author of the "surge" strategy in Iraq has written in favor of McChrystal's approach in Afghanistan, arguing that it will improve the situation in Pakistan, as well: "Can well-designed and properly-resourced operations succeed? There are no guarantees in war, but there is good reason to think they can."

5. Steve Coll: The journalist and head of the New America Foundation wrote a piece for Foreign Policy magazine titled "The Case for Humility in Afghanistan," in which he recommended that Obama "persist with the difficult effort to stabilize Afghanistan and reverse the Taliban's momentum. This will probably require additional troops for a period of several years, until Afghan forces can play the leading role."

6. Hillary Clinton: The secretary of state has been circumspect about her views on Afghanistan, but many observers believe she favors a troop increase. Last month, she told CNN that "Afghanistan has been under-sourced from the beginning. … We've never had the kind of military or civilian commitment that our mission had, you know, been needing."

7. David Brooks: The center-right columnist has argued in support of McChrystal’s troop request, calling the pursuit of a counterinsurgency strategy "imperative"—though, in theory, he opposes a troop increase unless Obama plans to see the effort through to the end. "If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now. It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later."

8. Robert Gates: While initially skeptical of a larger footprint, the defense secretary has indicated that he considers the mission in Afghanistan important enough to warrant troop increases.

9. Fred Kaplan: The center-left military historian thinks Obama should take a “middle way” approach by pursuing the McChrystal strategy, but with fewer troops.

10. Joe Biden: Biden, according to The New York Times, "does not favor abandoning Afghanistan, but his approach would reject the additional troops sought by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and leave the American force in Afghanistan roughly the same, 68,000 troops."

11. Rory Stewart: The British Tory writer has argued that we should "muddle through" by reducing troop levels to 20,000 and adopting a counter-terrorism strategy. "[T]hose pushing for an expansion of our military presence there are wrong. We don't need bold new plans and billions more in aid. Instead, we need less investment—but a greater focus on what we know how to do."

12. Andrew C. McCarthy: The conservative National Review columnist considers McChrystal's strategy a frivolous attempt at nation-building. "We have only one military mission in Afghanistan, and it is not to protect the Afghan population," McCarthy writes. "A well-meaning social experiment masquerading as a counterinsurgency … is not a good reason to have any troops in Afghanistan, much less to send in 40,000 more."

13. John Kerry: The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has argued that McChrystal's plan "reaches too far, too fast." According to Kerry, "We have already begun implementing a counterinsurgency strategy—but I believe that right now it needs to be as narrowly focused as possible."

14. Thomas Friedman: The center-left columnist recently came out against a troop buildup, arguing we need to “reduce our footprint.”

15. Pete Hoekstra and John Shadegg: In a Washington Times op-ed, the conservative congressmen argued that Obama's interrogation policy, and his decision to scale back NATO air strikes, have undermined the war effort. "Given these conditions, can we support keeping American military men and women in Afghanistan? The answer is no. If the Obama administration's priority isn't providing our troops with the tools to do the job and win, we shouldn't be there."

16. Nicholas Kristof: The liberal columnist recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “dispatching more troops to Afghanistan would be a monumental bet and probably a bad one, most likely a waste of lives and resources that might simply empower the Taliban.” Instead, he wants to improve the country by spending more money on education.

17. Carl Levin: The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee opposes sending more troops to Afghanistan at this time, arguing that "expansion of our own combat presence could feed a Taliban propaganda machine." Instead of a troop surge, he prefers a mission focused on training Afghan police and security forces.

18. Matthew Hoh: The high-ranking foreign service officer resigned from his Afghanistan post in late October, writing that "I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is truly a 35-year civil war."

19. Andrew Bacevich: The realist military scholar argues that accepting McChrystal's request "will void [Obama's] promise of change at least so far as national security policy is concerned." Bacevich would prefer that Obama "start withdrawing [U.S. troops] and devise a more realistic—and more affordable—strategy for Afghanistan."

20. George F. Will: The conservative columnist was one of the first to advocate withdrawal, writing that "America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters."

WASHINGTON--Here's a story you may have missed because it flies in the face of the dreary conventional wisdom: When advocates of public programs take on the right-wing anti-government crowd directly, the government-haters lose.

This is what happened in two statewide referendums last week that got buried under all of the attention paid to the governors' races in Virginia and New Jersey. In Maine, voters rejected a tax-limitation measure by a walloping 60 percent to 40 percent. In Washington state, a similar measure went down, 57-43.

They lost in part because opponents of the so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights measures (known as TABOR) did something that happens too rarely in the national debate: They made a case for what government does, why it's important, and why cutbacks in public services can be harmful to both individual citizens and the common good.

The idea that most voters hate government has an outsized influence on the thinking of both parties. Republicans try to exploit this feeling; Democrats try to get around it.

Only rarely do those who believe in active government take the argument head-on and insist that many of the things government does are necessary and, yes, good. The media almost never discuss what the sweeping dismantling of public services inherent in the rhetoric of the anti-government movement would mean in practice. It's far easier to replay footage from a few tea party rallies over and over, and discuss some vague “mood” in the electorate.

But in Maine and Washington, the voters knew they didn't have the luxury of expressing a mood. They faced up to how limiting future tax revenues would affect the things they expect government to do. And opponents of the TABOR measures brought that idea home in straightforward terms.

In Maine, one ad featured several taxpayers warning about what less government would mean in practice: “Our school budgets have already been cut. This would mean even less money for our classrooms. ... Community health centers could be cut. People rely on them, especially now.” A sympathetic-looking man then appeared on the screen to add: “My wife relies on our home nurse visits. What will we do?”

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Nor was the anti-TABOR campaign confined to what individuals get out of government. Another ad highlighted the larger social and economic impact of public education. “Without strong public schools, our kids won't be prepared for good jobs,” the announcer said. “Maine's future could be in doubt.”

In Washington state--where tax limitation was opposed by leading moderate Republicans, including former Gov. Dan Evans and former Sen. Slade Gorton--the No campaign offered a cross-generational message, focusing on cuts in both school budgets and home care for seniors.

Opposition to these measures went well beyond the ranks of ideological liberals. Recall that on the same day that Maine rejected TABOR, it also rejected gay marriage. In Lewiston, a socially conservative working class city, 59 percent voted against gay marriage--but 58 percent also opposed TABOR.

It's true that Washington and Maine have been reliably Democratic in recent presidential elections. But this is precisely why the defeat of these anti-tax measures was so important. Anti-government crusaders were getting ready to argue that if TABOR measures could pass in blue states, theirs was the wave of the future.

“I think the Maine TABOR will sort of be a spark to other states,” Grover Norquist, the country's premier anti-tax agitator, told voters during a visit to South Portland in October. “I'm talking to taxpayer activists and citizens' groups, all of whom are looking to see that if Maine, a moderate Northeastern state says, 'Yes, let's take a look at this,' it then becomes a stronger sell in Arizona and Washington and Oregon and Florida.”

By that logic, it's now a weaker sell. That's why conservatives hope no one pays attention to the news from Maine and Washington, where voters decided not to be part of a laboratory experiment being pushed by the Beltway Right.

But will President Obama and his party take the lesson and go on offense against the simple-minded anti-government screeds now getting so much play?

Obama took a brief whack at doing so in his September health care speech. He noted that his predecessors “understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited.” Why aren't we hearing more of this?

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.

E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

One afternoon in October, a blue and white jumbo jet flew high above the Pacific Ocean, approaching the international dateline. On board was the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who was on an around-the-world trip that would end with a summit of NATO defense ministers, where the topic of the day would be Afghanistan. Gates was flying on what is often called “the Doomsday Plane,” a specially outfitted 747 that looks like a bulkier Air Force One and was built to wage retaliatory nuclear war from the skies. Its hull contains metal wiring to shield its avionics from the electromagnetic pulse emitted by nuclear explosions, and a super-reflective coat of paint renders it what the military calls “thermal radiation protected.” Officially known as the National Airborne Operations Center, the $223 million jet is the brainchild of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who feared that the Soviet Union could decapitate U.S. leadership with a surprise attack, and it bristles with communications equipment that can instruct American bomber pilots, ICBM crews, and submarine commanders to fulfill the compact of mutual assured destruction.

Today, the Doomsday Plane feels like a cold war anachronism. And, until recently, so did Robert Gates. For most of a CIA career that began under Lyndon Johnson, Gates had what he calls “a consuming goal”: defending the United States from the Soviet Union, which he still refers to as the “Evil Empire,” echoing the words of his onetime boss, Ronald Reagan. Some of Barack Obama’s top aides knew that era only as children. But it shaped a Washington national security establishment that is still struggling to adjust to a chaotic world of terrorism and counterinsurgency. No one straddles these contrasting periods more visibly than Gates, who today finds himself fixated not on Soviet missile silos but on Al Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even so, the past echoes: Gates was present as the cold war’s end gave birth to modern Afghanistan. He helped oversee CIA funding for the Afghan mujahedin, who drove out the Soviets, and the aid cutoff that began a cascade of chaos and violence that culminated in the September 11 attacks. “I think you need to have a highly developed sense of irony,” Gates told me in an interview aboard the Doomsday Plane. “Because twenty or twenty-five years ago, I was shoving arms across the border to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” a former mujahedin leader turned anti-American warlord.

What’s also ironic is the extent of Gates’s influence over Obama’s Afghanistan strategy deliberations. Perhaps no Cabinet member matches Gates’s impact in the Situation Room as the White House reviews its war plan. It may be Washington’s oddest partnership: a secretive white Republican intelligence insider in his sixties, and a charismatic young African American Democratic president who was barely 30 when the Soviet Union fell. Asked about the contrast, Gates flashes a wry smile: “I think about it all the time,” he says.

In recent weeks, the contrast has verged on something like tension. The day Gates departed Washington on his plane, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had suggested that a decision about General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops might wait until after a November 7 runoff election in Afghanistan. To his displeasure, Gates had learned about this new spin in the papers. He also was not impressed by the substance of it: “We’re not just going to sit on our hands, waiting for the outcome of this election and for the emergence of a government in Kabul,” Gates told reporters en route from Honolulu to Tokyo, where he was due to meet with his Japanese counterpart. His reedy Kansan voice barely cut through the engines’ dull roar. For a veteran of so many foreign policy crises, Gates seems oddly shy--he tends to avoid eye contact while speaking, looking to the side or into the middle distance. While Afghanistan’s fraud-ridden elections had “complicated the situation,” Gates continued, “the reality is, it’s not going to be simple, it’s not going to be complicated one day and simple the next.” Government legitimacy in Afghanistan would take time, he said, and “the president will have to make his decisions in the context of that evolutionary process.” Translation: We can’t wait for perfect conditions, Rahm. Let’s get on with it.

The episode was a reminder that, while the admiration between Gates and the Obama White House may be mutual, it may not be unconditional. Gates has so far won lavish praise for his management of the Pentagon. “Based on where we are today, I’d say he’s the best defense secretary I’ve seen in a long time,” says Andrew Krepinevich, a military analyst who serves on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. But the easy part is probably behind him. The past several months have demonstrated that Obama may be wary of a major long-term U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. Gates, by contrast, seems convinced that Taliban gains would be a strategic disaster. And other important policy differences lie on the horizon. Gates’s service to Obama has made him one of Washington’s most revered figures and completed a years-long rehabilitation of his once-controversial public image. The question now is how long it can last.

 

“I don’t think he’s gonna say a troop number.” It was Wednesday, and Gates was in Tokyo, at the modern Ministry of Defense headquarters. As he met with his Japanese counterpart to discuss U.S. military bases in Japan, Gates’s traveling press schemed out questions for a post-meeting press conference. “I think he’s made up his mind,” another scribe replied to the first. A decision was made to aim low and ask Gates whether he had reached a decision, leaving the specifics to another day. Gates appeared at a podium, solemn-faced next to the Japanese minister. “Have you come to a decision in your own mind about the best way forward?” a reporter asked. But the question had been posed in two parts, and Gates answered only the first, unrelated question. It would be one of several futile attempts by the Pentagon reporters on the trip to get Gates to say that he had reached a decision.

That was little surprise. Gates has been extremely measured in his comments about Afghanistan. After McChrystal argued for his troop recommendations at a London speaking appearance last month, Gates called it “imperative” that differences over policy be aired “candidly but privately.” That tone of discreet professionalism has become one of his defining qualities. White-haired and 66 years old, he is the elder statesman of the Obama administration--judicious, temperate, and objective, the model of a realist wise man. He has styled himself as the antithesis of the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of the Bush administration, talking skeptically about military action against Iran and giving Obama political cover to scratch an Eastern European missiledefense system devised by the Bush team. “He’s an intelligence analyst,” says former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, who has known Gates for many years and worked with him on the fall 2006 Iraq Study Group. “That is how he is trained. He brings that perspective--factual-based, digging for information, deliberative, calm. He weighs options. He’s not ideological.”

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But that was not always the case. In fact, the story of Gates’s early government career is one of a brash and sometimes obnoxious young hard-liner. The son of an auto-parts salesman from Wichita, Gates was recruited by the CIA while getting his master’s degree at Indiana University. After joining the agency, he took night classes at Georgetown University, earning his doctorate, with a focus on the Soviet Union. During a CIA career spanning four decades--which included stints on the National Security Councils of four presidents--Gates focused on the Soviet threat. Along the way, he showed signs of being an assertive ideologue. In 1984, for instance, he was so alarmed by the growing communist influence in Nicaragua that he advocated air strikes against the Sandinistas. In a memo to then--CIA Director William Casey, Gates called the leftist regime’s existence “unacceptable” and recommended that the United States “do everything in its power short of invasion to put that regime out.”

That fervor came back to bite him in 1987, when his ties to the Iran-Contra scandal sank his first nomination to head the CIA. No one publicly alleged that Gates, then the CIA’s deputy, had been directly involved in orchestrating the scheme to sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and then use the profits to fund Nicaragua’s Contra rebels. But there was evidence that Gates had been aware of the deal and had done nothing to stop or expose it. The independent Tower Commission found that the Reagan NSC had manipulated a CIA assessment of Iran to help provide the policy rationale for selling the country arms. Several Senators held Gates responsible, including Bill Bradley, who said that Gates had been aware that “the CIA tailored its intelligence assessment on Iran to fit the needs of the policymakers of the White House.” Seeing that he had little to no hope of confirmation, Gates withdrew from consideration.

As the cold war wound down in the late 1980s, Gates was also strikingly slow to appreciate the import of Mikhail Gorbachev and his campaign of perestroika. “He radiated a skepticism about Gorbachev that was so intense that his bureaucratic foes sometimes thought it contained a barely disguised nostalgia for the bygone era when Soviet leaders had glowered, stonewalled, bullied, and otherwise behaved according to stereotype,” write Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott in At the Highest Levels, an account of the cold war’s end. “He was very skeptical that Gorbachev could actually change the Soviet Union, and warned that Gorbachev might be succeeded not by another Gorbachev but by another Stalin,” adds James Goldgeier, a George Washington University professor and Soviet expert.

So strong was Gates’s skepticism of Soviet liberalization that he was willing to roil the foreign policy bureaucracy to express it, in ways that would make the circumspect Gates of 2009 blanch. In an October 1988 speech, for instance, Gates pronounced it “doubtful that Gorbachev can in the end rejuvenate the [Soviet] system”--adding that “Stalin would be proud” of Gorbachev’s manipulation of the Politburo. The speech contradicted the prevailing Reagan administration position, leading then--Secretary of State George Shultz to scold Gates for trying to make policy outside proper channels.

Undaunted, Gates planned a similar address the following year, when he was deputy national security advisor under George H.W. Bush. This time he was stymied. When a draft of his speech reached the office of Shultz’s successor, James Baker, his deputy (Dennis Ross--now a senior member of the Obama NSC) warned Baker that the speech was “ridiculous” and would undercut the administration’s position. “I agreed,” Baker later wrote in his memoir, and he prevented Gates from giving the speech. The Berlin Wall fell the following month.

Forgiving such missteps--Gates was still considered a sharp thinker and an even sharper manager--Bush nominated him to lead the CIA in 1991, but Gates’s confirmation process was once again contentious. Critics within the agency charged that, as deputy CIA director, Gates had slanted agency reports about the Soviet Union to please his superiors--particularly Casey, his staunchly anti-Soviet boss. According to one Soviet analyst, Gates had “corrupt[ed] the process and the ethics of intelligence.” Shultz himself later made this case, writing in his memoir that he confronted Gates in 1987 to complain that the CIA, where Gates was the number-two man, had allowed “policy views” to infect its analysis, and tried to “manipulate” him by cherry-picking intelligence. Gates vehemently denied this line of criticism with a meticulous point-by-point defense that helped to save his nomination. But some thoughtful Democrats, including Bradley and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were never convinced, perhaps agreeing with the tart assessment from the liberal columnist Mary McGrory that Gates had acted as “the perfect butler” for hard-line higher-ups.

Gates was finally approved as CIA director by a 64-31 Senate vote. But the hearings also revealed a disposition quite different from the cool-headed elder statesman that he is today. Former subordinates cast Gates as abrasive and even bullying--often sneering at the quality of their analysis and even their prose. (One former CIA subordinate has said that Gates would sometimes return memos he deemed inferior stapled to government “burn bags.”) “I think he was just a different guy back then,” says one current Pentagon official who admires Gates. “He was kind of Rumsfeld-esque.”

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Friends say that exposure to such harsh and even humiliating criticism changed Gates. Temperamentally, adds someone who has known Gates for many years, “I think he was a little more tightly wound back then.” More importantly, his bad call about Gorbachev and the Soviets also seems to have instilled in him a new sense of humility. It left Gates with a belief, as he writes in his memoir, that both the pressure of militaristic hawks and the outreach of diplomatic doves were required to bring down the Evil Empire he so hated. “Presidents need both hawks and doves,” he writes in the book’s conclusion, “because this aviary mixture allowed the Presidents, more often than not, to be the ‘owls.’” Such lessons would have been affirmed when Gates served as deputy national security advisor under Brent Scowcroft--that dean of Washington realists, and one of Gates’s closest friends--from 1989 to 1991. “I think he became more flexible,” Scowcroft says. “He was a skeptic about Soviet motives, and then things happened so rapidly--the Soviet Union imploded--and I think that gave him an increased reality in his outlook.” Adds Goldgeier: “Gates has become this great figure today and is such a wise man, but he was so wrong. I do think learning has taken place.”

Soon after he left government at the end of the first Bush presidency in 1993, Gates returned to the question of politicized intelligence. When the Gingrich Republicans took power after the 1994 elections, a group of audacious young House conservatives, eager for the United States to deploy a national missile-defense system, accused the Clinton White House of manipulating intelligence reports in order to downplay the danger of ballistic missiles from rogue states like Iran and North Korea. To drive the issue, House leaders created a special commission to study the threat. Perhaps considering him a hard-line ally, they put Gates in charge.

But the young GOP Turks didn’t get quite the result they’d hoped for. When the commission completed its work, Gates testified that the only politicization had come from “irresponsible” members of Congress who had made “unsubstantiated allegations challenging the integrity of intelligence community analysts.” Miffed by Gates’s findings, the House Republicans commissioned another panel--one that returned a more dire assessment of the rogue-state missile threat. (The leader of that study, poetically enough, was Gates’s predecessor as secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld.) “I honestly didn’t know which way [Gates] was going to go,” says Janne Nolan, who served on the commission. “It was very politically unpopular to take on the newly elected Gingrich Congress. Gates conducted himself in a way that was so judicious. I thought, ‘Wow, this is professionalism.’”

It wouldn’t be the last time Gates would defy the right on missile defense. This fall, he reversed his prior support for installing a long-range U.S. ballistic-missile-defense system in Eastern Europe, and, instead, endorsed creating a new system to counter medium- and short-range missiles. The move infuriated conservatives, but Gates said it was justified by new intelligence reports showing delays in Iran’s long-range missile programs. The decision helped affirm his reputation as an apolitical straight shooter--a view Gates himself encouraged. “I am often characterized as ‘pragmatic,’” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed explaining the decision. “I believe this is a very pragmatic proposal.”

 

In the Obama administration’s long-running debate over Afghanistan strategy, Robert Gates may hold the most important swing vote. On one side are people like Joe Biden and Obama’s political advisers, who warn that a major troop commitment could lead to a strategically and politically disastrous quagmire. On the other side are the military men whom Gates oversees, like McChrystal and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen, who has publicly called for a major troop commitment. Obama appears frozen between the two camps. But the president puts immense stock in his defense secretary’s advice, and White House officials have made clear their desire that Gates stay in his job for the foreseeable future.

This sort of inside power is Gates’s idea of heaven. In his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, he wrote, “I once told Scowcroft that he and I were alike in at least one respect--our egos were no smaller than those who had highly visible positions; we just satisfied ours in a different way, through the private exercise of influence.”

On one hand, Gates has no love for Washington--two brutal sets of confirmation hearings will do that to a man. He is wry about the city’s absurd rituals and often jokes about White House aides who jockey their way into photos with the president and grown men crying because they were denied seats on Air Force One. After he left government at the end of the first Bush administration, Gates hit the lecture and corporate board circuit and bought a house in Washington state--about as far from the District as he could get.

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But along with Gates’s disdain for Washington comes a deep weakness for it. His memoir is unabashed about the narcotic effect of knowing an explosive national security secret before it makes the news. “However many times I experienced this sequence,” he wrote, “it never lost the edge, the excitement of being a part of history. It is one of the great natural highs.” Thus, when George W. Bush, who knew of Gates through his father, called him back into government in late 2006, the allure was hard to resist. Sure, Gates was happy as the president of Texas A&M University, where he won accolades from faculty and students alike for bringing on new talent and boosting the school’s reputation. And, yes, Bush did have to ask twice: Gates turned down an early 2005 offer to become Director of National Intelligence. (“I had nothing to look forward to in D.C. and plenty to look forward to at A&M,” he later said.) But that changed after Republicans were routed in the 2006 midterm elections and Bush finally sacked the obstreperous Rumsfeld.

When Bush appointed Gates, it seemed a potential sign that the president was ready to wind down the Iraq war. Gates had, after all, served on the Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose blockbuster December report endorsed a major troop drawdown from the country. But, by the time the ISG report was issued, Bush was already considering his Hail Mary play of surging more troops into the country. And Gates, apparently, was onboard from the start. He sent an e-mail to the commission’s chairmen, James Baker and Lee Hamilton, recommending an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops for Iraq. Gates, in other words, was privately recommending more troops than Bush wound up committing.

In public, however, Gates was cryptic about his views, and many key players had little idea where the new defense secretary stood. “The pro-surge wing was always worried, ‘How committed is Secretary Gates to the surge?’” says Peter Feaver, who worked on Iraq policy for the Bush National Security Council. “It wasn’t clear to me how he felt about it,” echoes retired Army General Jack Keane, who some consider the surge’s chief architect.

“He played a very similar role” during the Iraq debate to the one he plays now, says Stephen Biddle, a defense policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations. Biddle says Gates may simply still be forming an opinion. But, he adds, “the other possibility is that being the uncommitted swing vote is a pretty influential position to be in. You can imagine that, just as a matter of bureaucratic practice, he would avoid trying to stake out a position on this early and, instead, end up being the arbiter.” In other words, a position that would give him the “private exercise of influence” on which he thrives.

 

In April of last year, a reporter asked Gates whether he might consider staying in his job under a new president. “The circumstances under which I would do that are inconceivable to me,” he replied. But managing two wars is a hard thing to walk away from. So, apparently, were the entreaties of a wildly popular new president. Barack Obama began thinking about Gates as a holdover soon after he won the Democratic nomination, at the behest of Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, an Army veteran who had developed a kinship with the defense secretary. (Reed would serve as “the emissary between Gates and Obama,” according to Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.) Keeping on Gates, it was clear, would offer political cover to a Democratic president lacking military credentials who proposed to withdraw from Iraq. Other key Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, supported the decision. They admired Gates’s forthright and apolitical demeanor--as when he was asked at his December 2006 Senate confirmation whether the United States was winning in Iraq and he replied, “No, sir.” Rumsfeld this was not.

Like Rumsfeld, however, Gates is a shrewd operator--a “bureaucratic black belt,” in the words of former under secretary of defense Eric Edelman. In the first months of the Obama administration, he kept a light travel schedule so that he could bond with the new White House team. There was a rough patch early on, though: During the transition, the Obama team arranged for Gates to meet with Richard Danzig, the former secretary of the Navy. Danzig had been a top Obama campaign adviser, and many people had expected him to become secretary of defense. After Obama tapped Gates instead, Danzig was in line to become his deputy at the Pentagon. By many accounts, the meeting did not go well. Even if it had, multiple sources say, Gates would never accept a deputy who was closer than he is to the president, especially one sure to be seen as a successor-in-waiting. “There’s no way he could afford to have Danzig there,” says a former Bush administration official who worked with Gates. “Everyone would start venue-shopping” when promoting their policy positions.

And Gates’s mild manner belies a toughness that many an incompetent has come to rue. When The Washington Post revealed horrific conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center soon after Gates took his job, he fired the secretary of the Army and its surgeon general resigned. After revelations that the Air Force had accidentally flown six nuclear warheads across the country and mistakenly shipped four nuclear fuses to Taiwan, Gates fired that branch’s secretary and chief of staff. And, when Gates came to doubt the man he had put in charge of the war in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, he dumped him for McChrystal. (Too harshly, some say: “The way he treated McKiernan was just gratuitously ruthless,” says one military expert. “He could have just quietly allowed McKiernan to retire. But he let it be publicly known that he was ending his career.”) “Secretary Rumsfeld had a very fierce bark, but perhaps not as much of the bite that was required,” says John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security. “Secretary Gates is not a screamer. He’ll just cut your head off. And you’ll walk away before you realize that your head is on the floor.”

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This spring, Gates applied that killer instinct to the toughest bureaucratic foe of all: the military-industrial complex. Shifting the Pentagon’s spending priorities is a legendarily daunting task. But Gates was convinced that, in a time of tight budgets and new threats, military spending was disproportionately skewed toward expensive high-tech defense systems designed for improbable contingencies like war with China. Thus, he was determined to craft a Pentagon budget that spends far more preparing for the sort of counterinsurgency operations that the military has been conducting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To pay for that shift, Gates dropped the ax on the Air Force’s beloved next-generation F-22 fighter jet (price tag: $143 million apiece) as well as the Navy’s DDG-1000 stealth destroyer (about $2 billion) and an ultra-high-tech Army modernization system slated to cost upward of $100 billion. The trade-off, as Gates’s April budget document concedes, is that the United States will assume a higher degree of risk in a major conventional war. That idea riled members of Congress whose states and districts are dependent on the jobs that big weapons systems bring. Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma warned that Gates was “gutting our military.”

But such talk couldn’t derail Gates’s budget plan, which Congress passed largely intact. And that, say Pentagon observers, is quite a feat. “The toughest place to make significant change in the Department of Defense is with its future,” says Keane, who served as the Army’s vice chief of staff. “He fundamentally changed the direction of the Army, forced them to institutionalize irregular warfare and changed the Army’s entire modernization program. That is astounding.” Gates, the cold warrior, had reshaped a Pentagon machine rooted in cold war thinking.

 

On October 22, the Doomsday Plane touched down in Bratislava, Slovakia. Gates had arrived for the NATO defense ministers’ meeting. Also in the city was McChrystal himself, there to brief the European allies on his ambitious counterinsurgency plan. The news from the conference would be an expression of “broad support” by the NATO officials for the McChrystal strategy-another endorsement of a plan that will require tens of thousands more troops.

But, as Gates stood at a podium fielding questions, he kept his views as oblique as possible. “Drawing conclusions at this point is vastly premature. We’re looking at a full range of activities,” he said.

Though he now appears firmly in support of a substantial troop increase, Gates has struggled to reach his own conclusion about Afghanistan. Perhaps that’s because he knows the complexity and unpredictability of the country all too well. In the late 1980s, Gates was instrumental in supplying arms and money to the anti-Soviet Afghan rebels. But, in another misjudgment of Soviet intentions, he never believed that Moscow would end its occupation. Even after Soviet leaders said in late 1987 that they would soon withdraw, Gates refused to believe it. He made a $25 bet with a colleague that it wouldn’t happen before 1989. When Gorbachev announced the withdrawal less than two months later, Gates coughed up the money.

And, when the first Bush administration abandoned Afghanistan--cutting off financial and political ties with the country--Gates didn’t warn of possible blowback. “We expected post-Soviet Afghanistan to be ugly,” he has written, “but never considered that it would become a haven for terrorists operating worldwide.”

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When I met with him in his small conference room onboard the Doomsday Plane, I asked Gates how much he thinks about the Soviet foray into Afghanistan that he helped to stymie. We were somewhere above China, and Gates was seated at the head of the table, with a secure phone in front of him. “I think about it a lot, as a matter of fact. I try to make sure that I draw the proper lessons from their experience--and, clearly, their experience has had the effect of making me cautious of a very large U.S. presence.” Indeed, for much of this year, Gates warned about the effect of a troop “footprint” that would make the United States look like an occupier. But, in the wake of McChrystal’s report, Gates has modified his view. “I heard General McChrystal when he says it’s not so much the size of the footprint as how you use those troops, and I accept that. I think that’s right.”

“It’s also important to realize that the Soviets carried out a war of terror against the Afghan people,” he continued. “I mean, they killed a million, probably made five million refugees, and no country in the world supported what they were doing. We have a completely different situation in all those categories right now. They also tried to impose an alien culture and social order on the Afghans that was completely contrary to their history and culture. So I think the important thing is, as we look at the Soviet experience, to draw the right lessons from it and not just automatically say that because they lost, everybody loses.”

Though he wouldn’t discuss his advice to Obama with me, Gates has made several public comments that suggest a belief in a large troop presence. Speaking at a CNN roundtable discussion in early October, for instance, Gates warned against ceding large swaths of territory to the Taliban, as a counterterrorism strategy may entail. “There’s no question in my mind that, if the Taliban took large--took control of significant portions of Afghanistan, that that would be added space for Al Qaeda to strengthen itself,” Gates said. Such an outcome, he added, would be “hugely empowering” for Al Qaeda’s recruitment and fund-raising.

Gates also seems less concerned than Biden and Obama’s political aides about faltering public support for the war. To be sure, he certainly appreciates the role of politics in foreign policy. Soon after he took over as defense secretary, he set out to lower “the political temperature” of the Iraq war debate. That was why Gates didn’t push for the reappointment of General Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; although Gates had nothing against the general, he was too tied to the fiasco in Iraq to be reconfirmed without an ugly political fight. “What he did was to say we couldn’t get him confirmed for a second two-year term without opening up discussions that would have been unhelpful to the national defense,” says Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina.

Or take Gates’s response, soon after he came to the Pentagon, to the soaring American casualties caused by roadside bombs in Iraq. Gates insisted that the Pentagon accelerate production of its heavy and expensive Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle. Doing so cost the Department of Defense $23 billion--a whopping sum even in Pentagon terms--and critics said the money could have been put to better use. Gates, who handwrites a condolence letter to the family of every fallen soldier, must have been genuinely moved to save American lives. But, adds a former Bush official, “there was a political motive, too. He understood that casualties were one of the things that was going to be a problem for us, and he wanted to give the president as much time as possible to execute his strategy.”

Still, political considerations have their limits for Gates. He did, after all, support the Iraq surge at a time when it was immensely unpopular among Americans. The same appears to go for Afghanistan. “In any war that has lasted any time at all, those wars have never been particularly popular,” Gates says. “Even toward the end of World War II, by 1944, people were beginning to be war-weary and wondering why it was taking so long. A president basically has to decide what’s in the best interest of the country and then lead public opinion.” Both the Obama and Bush administrations, he said, have not done a good enough job of explaining to the American people why the United States is fighting in Afghanistan. One exception he cited: Barack Obama’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he called Afghanistan “a war of necessity” to defeat Al Qaeda.

 

It remains to be seen whether Obama will take Gates’s counsel on Afghanistan. But that’s not the only potential friction point. Gates’s caution about allowing gays to serve openly in the military--officially, he says the issue is under consideration--may be one reason why Obama has been dragging his feet on a pledge to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Gates also openly disagrees with Obama about the future of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, a Bush-era effort to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal that was quashed by the Democratic Congress last year. Gates believes the program is vital to the continued viability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent--again putting him in opposition to Biden, who argues that development of new warheads would undercut Obama’s nonproliferation efforts and his call for a world free of nuclear weapons.

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That’s why observers on both the left and the right openly wonder whether, in the months ahead, Gates could find his job increasingly awkward. “The question is, is he loyal to Obama or to his vision on national security,” asks Larry Korb, a former Pentagon official at the Center for American Progress. “Does he think about what’s best for Obama, or what’s best for the country?”

Add to that the view of others who say that Gates has already accomplished what he set out to do: rehabilitate his image once and for all. “I don’t think you can underestimate how much the Iran-Contra scandals are driving him,” says one former national security official who has worked with Gates. “He has bumped Iran-Contra down to the fifth or sixth paragraph in his obituary. If he had not come back, his obit would have been, ‘President of Texas A&M who was mixed up in Iran-Contra.’”

Perhaps that’s an overstatement. Yet it is undeniable that Gates’s return to government has polished his image to an enviable shine. The hot-headed, scandal-tainted ideologue has been replaced by a pragmatic wise man shepherding a young president through wartime. But the war is not over. And, much as Gates contemplates returning to his quiet life in the Pacific Northwest--“every damn day,” he told me--he seems determined to leave Afghanistan in better shape than he found it. 

Doing that will require Gates to reflect on a past that he has, in other ways, left behind. Experience, he told me, “provides a perspective, or a prism, through which you look at the world. And, frankly, it can be both good and bad. Just like the Soviets in Afghanistan. Lots of lessons there. Lots of wrong lessons. You can get trapped by history.” Aboard a plane built for a cold war apocalypse that never came, it was clear that you can escape it, too.

Michael Crowley is a senior editor of The New Republic.