Understanding Obama: Part 01

What happened in the United States in November 2008? And what happened in the United States between January 2009 and January 2017? The election of Barack Obama and the presidency of Barack Obama constitute a shocking narrative: the country’s president did not like, trust, or understand the nation or its constitution.

To parse the verbs, the reader will note that Obama expressed a distaste both for the people of the United States and for the Constitution of the United States; he placed no confidence in, and refused to rely upon, the nation or the process which the nation codified into its constitution; and he demonstrated a lack of insight or comprension regarding the very people who voted for him and the very constitutional system which put him into the nation’s highest office.

The irony will not be lost: the president did not like, trust, or understand the citizens who voted for him and the constitutional process which made him president

Further irony lies in the fact that Obama was at one time paid to be a professor of constitutional law at a university.

In any case, historian David Limbaugh notes that “the destructive policies and actions of the Obama administration” form “Obama’s broad-based assault on the American republic.” Obama conducted a “war on our Constitution and our political economic liberties,” and an “assault on America’s economic, social, cultural, national security, business, and industrial institutions.”

The net result of Obama’s presidency is that many - millions - of voters who enthusiastically cast their ballots for him were dismayed enough, after observing his behavior in office, to vote for President Donald Trump.

The election of President Trump - whether the reader loves or hates him - is the ultimate fruit of the Obama administration.

Obama’s performance in office - from his appointment of corrupt and incompetent individuals like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, to the 1.7 billion dollars he wasted trying to start a healthcare website - drove citizens to vote against the candidate who seemed to be a continuation of Obama’s policies.

The reader should not, however, hold Obama responsible for the failure of his presidency and his administration. The culpability lies rather with his handlers - the people who found and groomed him, directed his campaigns and political career, shaped his policies and wrote the speeches he delivered. Obama was, in some ways, a victim of a political machine which used him as a mouthpiece and as a frontman.

Winning a War with Dollars Instead of Bullets: Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative

The Cold War was a decades-long period of tension which shaped the second half of the twentieth century. Although there were periods of violence and bloodshed — like the Korean War and the Vietnam War — many of the Cold War years were times of tense and anxious peace.

The ‘peace’ which filled many of the Cold War years was not a pleasant peace. On the ‘western’ side, the United States and its NATO allies developed high-tech weapons. On the ‘eastern’ side, the Soviet Socialists and their Warsaw Pact allies did the same.

The stress and apprehension of these ‘peaceful’ years were caused by the knowledge that terribly powerful weapons were being stockpiled. Had these weapons been used on a large scale, the results would have been disastrous.

Peace was preserved by the fact that neither the United States nor the Soviet Socialists truly wanted to use these weapons. Leaders on both sides wanted to intimidate their opponents by owning these weapons, but they knew that using these weapons was an action to be avoided.

The Cold War was ‘cold’ because, rather than fighting and directly engaging their armies with each other, both sides wanted to pressure the other side by simply manufacturing these weapons.

The Cold War and its end were not about physical combat, but rather were ultimately about economics. Which side would be able to afford to develop and build the most terrifying weapons?

So it was that, upon taking office in January 1981, President Ronald Reagan began one of the most ambitious, and one of the most expensive, defensive systems ever conceived. In March 1983, President Reagan publicly announced the “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI), as historian Robert Maginnis writes:

By the mid-1980s, the economic strain of Russia’s very expensive military overreach was especially tough, a major reason to end the Cold War. The strain increased significantly once the newly minted President Ronald Reagan committed the US to increased resources for defense and introduced his bank-breaking “Star Wars” initiative, an expense the Kremlin was unprepared to match.

The SDI would make most of the USSR’s missiles useless. If the Soviet Socialists launched missiles at the United States, most of them would never reach their targets, because the SDI would stop the missiles in flight.

In order to overcome the SDI, the Soviet Socialists would have to develop an entire generation of sophisticated missiles. Such an effort would require billions of rubles or dollars.

The Soviet Socialists simply could not afford to develop offensive missiles which could successfully attack the United States. Missiles which could break through the SDI’s defensive shield were plainly too expensive.

The Cold War ended, then, because the Soviet Socialists ran out of money. The United States, rather than outfighting the USSR, merely outspent the Soviets.

Becoming President: Nixon in 1968

The political mood in the United States in 1968 was tumultuous. Richard Nixon competed with Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination.

In the Democratic Party, it seemed at first that incumbent President Lyndon Johnson would easily win the party’s nomination; but in March 1968, Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election.

After LBJ withdrew from the contest, four candidates seemed strong: Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, and Eugene McCarthy. It was not at all clear which of these would win the party’s nomination.

In June 1968, a Palestinian terrorist murdered Robert Kennedy. This created further confusion in the Democratic Party. George McGovern entered the race after Kennedy’s death, additionally complicating the situation.

Eugene McCarthy represented the anti-war radicals; Humphrey represented the labor unions and major urban political machines within the Democratic Party; Wallace represented the segregationists who opposed Nixon’s support of civil rights legislation.

At the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in August 1968, the party ultimately chose Hubert Humphey as its candidate, but the ‘big story’ in the media was the major rioting in downtown Chicago in the area surrounding the convention. Radicals and revolutionaries of various stripes, beginning with anti-war activists but then spreading to all manner of troublemakers, caused damage and injury. Hundreds of rioters and hundreds of police were wounded.

When the dust settled, then, it was Nixon vs. Humphrey in 1968. Recalling the campaign, Donald Rumsfeld writes:

Amid anger and protest, Nixon offered himself as a source of reassurance and stability. For voters it was a welcome change from the anguished presidency of Lyndon Johnson. But because he had been defeated in two high-profile elections during the past decade, he had to battle the impression that he was a loser.

Humphrey suffered from the internal fractures within his Democratic Party. By contrast, the Republican Party was unified behind Nixon.

But Nixon had suffered a prominent defeat in the 1960 presidential election against Kennedy, and had further endured a loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. How could Nixon shake the reputation of being a loser?

Nixon gained much public sympathy after the 1962 election, when Howard Smith, a news broadcaster on the ABC network, invited Alger Hiss to comment on Nixon’s losses.

Alger Hiss was a convicted felon — a Soviet spy who’d been paid to reveal U.S. government secrets to the KGB in Moscow, and who’d been paid to give misleading advice to U.S. policymakers, including President Roosevelt — and the America public was not happy with the network for giving airtime to a Soviet Socialist espionage agent.

Rebounding from his political losses, and gaining public sympathy from Hiss’s TV appearance, Nixon emerged as a strong leader. Nixon eventually won the November 1968 election by a landslide.

Ronald Reagan vs. John Maynard Keynes

Much of President Reagan’s economic policy was directed at undoing New Deal policies which were leftover from the Great Depression. These policies were fifty years old by the time Reagan was in office, and he thought that they needed to be updated, revised, or replaced.

Reagan was elected in 1980 and took office in 1981. In a 1986 comment in the Wall Street Journal, he noted that Keynesian economics were “a legacy from a period when I was back in college studying economics.”

Indeed, Keynesian theories began making an appearance with early publications like Indian Currency and Finance, published by Keynes in 1913. His major publications came later, like The Economic Consequences of Peace in 1919, A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill in 1925, and his large systematic explication in the Treatise on Money in 1930.

Keynesian views were widely understood by the time Ronald Reagan graduated from college in 1932.

Many historians see the influence of Keynes in FDR’s “New Deal” policies, policies which were designed to heal the damage done by the Great Depression, but which instead caused the Depression to last longer and do deeper harm to the economy.

By the time Ronald Reagan became president, many voters believed that it was time to discard Keynesian economics and find other, more credible, economic policy systems.

Re-Examining the Integration Narrative: School Desegregation Before Brown

The simple narrative taught in most history textbooks is that prior to 1954, schools in the United States were divided into two categories: those for Black children and those for White children. After the landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, schools across the country were gradually integrated, sometimes against resistance, to the point at which they are now largely, if not entirely, integrated.

This simple narrative is wrong.

When the case of Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al. was first presented to the Supreme Court in 1952, there were already many integrated schools around the United States.

Desegregated schools were nothing new; in fact, they were almost a century old. Some schools, like Berea College in Kentucky, were integrated even prior to the Civil War.

There is a great deal of documentation about desegregation before 1954.

Yearbooks from high schools reveal substantial integration among students in towns like Muncie, Indiana. In the mid-1940s, African-American students and white students were mixed together in academic classes, in sports, and in music groups like choirs.

Similar instances of desegregation appear in high schools in other cities.

Integrated schools since the time of the Civil War were more common in the North than in the South, more common in smaller towns than in large cities, and more common in parochial private schools than in preparatory boarding schools. The main targets of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision were public high schools in large cities in the South.

Some small towns integrated out of economic necessity rather than moral principle. Many parochial schools considered it part of their mission to integrate. Some schools in the North had never been segregated, and so had no need to desegregate.

Oversimplified narratives in history textbooks could lead students to assume that all schools were segregated prior to 1954, while in reality, by 1954, there were large numbers of integrated schools.

Why Do Governments Do What They Do? Economic Policy As Political Choice

Governments, all too often, intervene in economies, regulating, incentivizing, subsidizing, and generally gumming up the works, making marketplaces less nimble, and slowing creative processes. Why?

Some imagine the government as the neutral umpire, the objective referee who keeps the playing field level and fair. Others imagine government as the benevolent patriarch, reaching in with parental wisdom to adjust market forces. But neither of these images prevails.

Instead, governments routinely get in the way of wealth creation, and inhibit the very opportunities which they often claim to foster. James Buchanan, recipient of the Nobel Prize, sought to explain this quirky characteristic of governments, as journalist Dylan Matthews writes:

Buchanan is most famous for breathing new life into political economy, the subfield of economics and political science that studies political institutions, and in particular how they affect the economy. In particular, Buchanan is strongly associated with public choice theory, an approach which assumes that individual actors in political contexts are out for themselves, and then uses game theory to model their choices, with the hope of gaining insight into the incentives faced by political actors.

Policymakers have various motives, and the average of these motives - much like the net effect of several vectors in physics and engineering - determine their policy choices. Legislators are not thinking in the abstractions of equations and graphs which constitute academic economics.

Governmental regulators are flesh-and-blood human beings who are concerned about public perceptions, about private success, and whose preconceptions and ideologies shape their decisions with as much efficacy as empirical data.

Before Buchanan, economics was primarily about how individuals make choices in the private sphere. He was among the first to argue that it could explain their choices in the public sphere as well. Traditionally, economists have treated the government as a dictatorial “social planner” which is capable of impartially correcting failures in private markets. Buchanan's contribution was pointing out that that social planner also responded to incentives, and that they sometimes pushed him to make markets worse off than he found them.

Legislators, even those with the best of motives, nudge policies in suboptimal directions merely by being one of many vectors which will be averaged out: a perfect policy, when averaged with many other policies, does not steer policy toward perfection.

The legislators who have less than the best motives will clearly see opportunities for gain as they shape policy. This need not be flagrantly illegal or immoral, but merely an opportunity to benefit his constituency, which is, after all, the reason he was elected. But what benefits his constituents in the short term might harm others areas of the country in the long run, and therefore ultimately be suboptimal for everyone.

Government intervention will never be the crystalline abstraction which some academic economists hope it to be. At its best, it will be an approximation, an averaging of policies, in which even very good policies, when averaged, might produce less than very good results.

The safest conclusion, itself also not quite perfect, is to minimize regulation. Given that governmental intervention is never perfect, it would be wise to have as little of it as possible.

The Story Behind the Story: Flint Was Not the First Water Crisis

The problems with government-provided drinking water pipelines in Flint, Michigan began in 2014, and by 2015 had obtained a high level of attention in news media. Since then, the problems have been resolved, and the water supply for citizens of Flint is once again safe to drink.

This story has been well documented in various media - and from various political viewpoints. The basic narrative is clear.

What is less well known is that this is not the first such water crisis.

A decade earlier, a similar series of events unfolded in the comfortable upper-middle-class neighborhoods of Washington, D.C.

The story broke in 2002 in little-known, alternative media outlets like the Washington City Paper. Surprisingly, there was little response from the government or from the mainstream media.

The neighborhoods affected by lead in their drinking water were economically middle- or upper-class, and racially mostly white.

The problem was largely ignored for over two years. Citizens were drinking lead-tainted water on a large scale.

In 2004, the Washington Post began to follow the story. Gradually, the size and scope of the problem became clear to the mainstream media. Eventually, action was taken, and the problem was corrected.

Comparing Washington to Flint, several contrasts emerge.

Flint’s problem was publicized and corrected quickly - within a year. Washington’s problem was ignored for over two years, and only after two years were steps taken to correct the problem.

Why the difference?

Flint had two variables which worked in its favor:

First, Flint has a manufacturing sector; Washington doesn’t. While Flint’s factories have declined in number and activity over the decades, there are still functioning manufacturing facilities in the city. The very first warning about water quality problems came from a General Motors plant. GM was concerned that high levels of lead in the water could damage machinery. If GM hadn’t raised the alarm, the problem could have continued for much longer.

Second, Flint has a significant African-American population; the affected neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. were mainly white. The residents of Flint were used to alerting political activists about their concerns, and the activists, in turn, were in the habit of worrying about Flint. Activists were more likely to engage about a public health issue in Flint than in a comfortable neighborhood in Washington.

So it was that Flint’s water-quality problems gained attention quickly and were corrected quickly, while the citizens of Washington were exposed to high levels of lead for a longer time. The public health problems in Washington are correspondingly greater, as data show.