Excellent, Andrew Sullivan! .. energizing effervescent echo .. repeat ..
But the right isn’t alone in getting Obama wrong. While the left is less unhinged in its critique, it is just as likely to miss the screen for the pixels. From the start, liberals projected onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country, where anything requires 60 Senate votes even to stand a chance of making it into law. They have described him as a hapless tool of Wall Street, a continuation of Bush in civil liberties, a cloistered elitist unable to grasp the populist moment that is his historic opportunity. They rail against his attempts to reach a Grand Bargain on entitlement reform. They decry his too-small stimulus, his too-weak financial reform, and his too-cautious approach to gay civil rights. They despair that he reacts to rabid Republican assaults with lofty appeals to unity and compromise.
They miss, it seems to me, two vital things. The first is the simple scale of what has been accomplished on issues liberals say they care about. A depression was averted. The bail-out of the auto industry was—amazingly—successful. Even the bank bailouts have been repaid to a great extent by a recovering banking sector. The Iraq War—the issue that made Obama the nominee—has been ended on time and, vitally, with no troops left behind. Defense is being cut steadily, even as Obama has moved his own party away from a Pelosi-style reflexive defense of all federal entitlements. Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life. Gays now openly serve in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act is dying in the courts, undefended by the Obama Justice Department. Vast government money has been poured into noncarbon energy investments, via the stimulus. Fuel-emission standards have been drastically increased. Torture was ended. Two moderately liberal women replaced men on the Supreme Court. Oh, yes, and the liberal holy grail that eluded Johnson and Carter and Clinton, nearly universal health care, has been set into law. Politifact recently noted that of 508 specific promises, a third had been fulfilled and only two have not had some action taken on them. To have done all this while simultaneously battling an economic hurricane makes Obama about as honest a follow-through artist as anyone can expect from a politician.
What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for.
[...]
This is where the left is truly deluded. By misunderstanding Obama’s strategy and temperament and persistence, by grandstanding on one issue after another, by projecting unrealistic fantasies onto a candidate who never pledged a liberal revolution, they have failed to notice that from the very beginning, Obama was playing a long game. He did this with his own party over health-care reform. He has done it with the Republicans over the debt. He has done it with the Israeli government over stopping the settlements on the West Bank—and with the Iranian regime, by not playing into their hands during the Green Revolution, even as they gunned innocents down in the streets. Nothing in his first term—including the complicated multiyear rollout of universal health care—can be understood if you do not realize that Obama was always planning for eight years, not four. And if he is reelected, he will have won a battle more important than 2008: for it will be a mandate for an eight-year shift away from the excesses of inequality, overreach abroad, and reckless deficit spending of the last three decades. It will recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it irreversible.
[...]
Sure, Obama cannot regain the extraordinary promise of 2008. We’ve already elected the nation’s first black president and replaced a tongue-tied dauphin with a man of peerless eloquence. And he has certainly failed to end Washington’s brutal ideological polarization, as he pledged to do. But most Americans in polls rightly see him as less culpable for this impasse than the GOP. Obama has steadfastly refrained from waging the culture war, while the right has accused him of a “war against religion.” He has offered to cut entitlements (and has already cut Medicare), while the Republicans have refused to raise a single dollar of net revenue from anyone. Even the most austerity-driven government in Europe, the British Tories, are to the left of that. And it is this Republican intransigence—from the 2009 declaration by Rush Limbaugh that he wants Obama “to fail” to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s admission that his primary objective is denying Obama a second term—that has been truly responsible for the deadlock. And the only way out of that deadlock is an electoral rout of the GOP, since the language of victory and defeat seems to be the only thing it understands.
If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.
That makes Dr. Kim the front-runner to take the helm of the multinational development institution on June 30, when its current president, Robert B. Zoellick, will step down at the end of his five-year term. Tradition has held that Washington selects the head of the World Bank and Europe the leader of its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, since they were founded during World War II. .. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
Dr. Kim’s name was not among those widely bandied about since Mr. Zoellick announced his plans to move on last month. Highly respected among aid experts, Dr. Kim is an anthropologist and a physician who co-founded Partners in Health, a nonprofit that provides health care for the poor, and a former director of the department of H.I.V. .. http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/aids/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier .. /AIDS at the World Health Organization.
“The leader of the World Bank should have a deep understanding of both the role that development plays in the world and the importance of creating conditions where assistance is no longer needed,” President Obama said Friday. “It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency.”
In a statement, Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary and an alumnus of Dartmouth, praised Dr. Kim: “Development is his lifetime commitment, and it is his passion. And in a world with so much potential to improve living standards, we have a unique opportunity to harness that passion and experience at the helm of the World Bank.”
Dr. Kim, .. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~president/bio/ .. who was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2003, was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1959 and moved with his family to the United States when he was 5. He graduated from Brown University in 1982, earned an M.D. from Harvard University in 1991 and received a Ph.D. in anthropology there in 1993.
While working with Partners in Health in Lima, Peru, in the mid-1990s, Dr. Kim helped to develop a treatment program for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the first large-scale treatment of that disease in a poor country. Treatment programs for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are now in place in more than 40 nations, according to Dr. Kim’s biography on Dartmouth’s Web site. He also spearheaded the successful effort to reduce the price of the drugs used to treat this form of tuberculosis.
“Jim is all about delivery and about delivering on promises often made but too seldom kept,” said Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, .. http://www.pih.org/ .. in an e-mailed statement. “I can think of no one more able to help families, communities and entire nations break out of poverty.”
During his short tenure at Dartmouth, Dr. Kim won a reputation as a level-headed technocrat who frequently encouraged students to think globally.
“Most every college president has to get up and say it’s important to go off and change the world,” said Jonathan S. Skinner, an economist at Dartmouth. “But there aren’t many college presidents who’ve gone out and have changed the world.”
Dr. Kim’s ascension to the head of the World Bank is not a sure thing. But the United States supported the candidacy of Christine Lagarde, the former French finance minister, to head the International Monetary Fund last year, presumably assuring that Europe would support Dr. Kim’s nomination.
In recent years, major emerging economies have criticized the decades-old gentlemen’s agreement giving the United States control of the World Bank’s presidency. The Group of 20 countries has called for a fairer, more transparent selection process for the top posts at the World Bank and the I.M.F., and the World Bank itself has reaffirmed its commitment to an open and merit-based process.
“We are trying to ensure that we start having a process whereby we can choose the most qualified person, regardless of nationality,” said Amar Bhattacharya, the director of the Group of 24, an umbrella group of developing countries. “The struggle is about the credibility of the process as much as it is about who wins.”
Dr. Kim, as an American, will not escape some of that criticism. But his background working in poorer countries may partly insulate him, and Mr. Obama was reportedly drawn to him in part because of his work fighting tuberculosis and AIDS.
Dr. Kim is not the only candidate for the World Bank job. On Friday, Angola, South Africa and Nigeria put forward Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, .. http://bit.ly/GIzzoD .. the Nigerian finance minister and former World Bank official.
José Antonio Ocampo, the former finance minister of Colombia and a United Nations official, is rumored to be another candidate.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, the development economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, had put himself forward for the position and won the support of some developing countries, including Kenya, although the United States was not supporting his candidacy. On Friday, Mr. Sachs withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Dr. Kim.
“Dr. Jim Kim is a superb nominee for the World Bank presidency,” Mr. Sachs said in an e-mailed statement. “I congratulate the administration for nominating a world-class development leader for this position.”
The World Bank will stop accepting nominations at 6 p.m. Eastern time Friday. If there are more than three candidates, the board will name a shortlist soon thereafter. The bank has said it intends to select its new president in the time for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings in April. .. http://www.imf.org/external/spring/2012/schedule.htm
The bank provided $57.4 billion in support to low-income and middle-income countries last year. Under Mr. Zoellick’s leadership, the bank raised an additional $90 billion for its fund for the world’s poorest. It also opened up huge troves of data to the public to aid research on development and poverty.
HURRAY! PRESIDENT OBAMA! For My Mother: Don’t Let Larry Summers Lead the World Bank
Posted on March 22, 2012 by rnaiman
Life has a way sometimes of throwing two superficially unrelated things across your path simultaneously in a way that forces you to contemplate their underlying connections.
Even at this late date, press reports suggest that President Obama is still considering nominating Larry Summers to be the next President of the World Bank.
Yesterday morning, my mother passed away.
So, as I’m contemplating the sweep of my mother’s educational, professional, and personal accomplishments across the course of her life, I’m also contemplating reports that President Obama is still thinking about nominating the guy who suggested that women innately can’t compete at the top of math and science to be the next President of the World Bank.
I can’t offer my mother as a direct counterexample to Larry Summers’ infamous suggestion that you can explain the relative absence of women in the top reaches of math and science on the basis of innate differences between men and women, at least in a narrow sense. As it happens, my mother did not especially excel in math and science.
But the arc of my mother’s professional and intellectual life is evidence of a broader and more fundamental counterclaim, one that should by rights stand in the ranks of “obvious insights,” but which political experience shows must be continuously nailed to the wall of public consciousness: the life choices that people make and the aptitude that they display in different arenas are massively and continuously shaped by their perceptions of social expectations.
My mother told me that when she was a young adult – in the early 1950s – a guidance counselor asked her want she wanted to do with her life. Without hesitation, my mother – who had been co-editor of the school newspaper – answered that she wanted to be a journalist. Well, the guidance counselor responded, do you want to have a family? Yes, of course, absolutely, my mother said. Well then, the counselor responded, you can’t be a journalist. You should go into teaching: then you can combine having a professional career with having a family.
And that is what my mother did. Instead of becoming a journalist herself, among other things, she taught other people how to be journalists.
I don’t see this story in terms of individual prejudice of a guidance counselor blocking my mother from pursuing her aspirations, and I don’t think my mother saw it that way either. I think she saw the counselor’s comments as indicative of a broader social reality that she faced at the time, in which she had to make a judgment about choosing her path. Of course, even before 1950, other women in similar circumstances made different choices; even before 1950, some women became accomplished and even famous journalists. My mother made a choice, but it was a constrained choice; indeed, it was an unnecessarily and unjustly constrained choice.
I didn’t sense that my mother had any regrets about the constrained choice that she had made. She had a comfortable and fulfilling life, especially in comparison to growing up during the Depression, when her father worked two jobs to make ends meet, a farmer by day and a cab driver by night. She graduated college with highly marketable professional skills: a fast typist, good at shorthand, a quick and efficient writer. When she met my brilliant but troubled father, she pushed him to finish his math degree and supported them both financially with her marketable skills while he did so. He was then able to get a well-paying and intellectually rewarding job as an engineer with Western Electric, then Bell Labs. So while she loved my father, she also saw him as a wise investment that she’d made: a company she’d purchased, if you will, when it was undervalued by the market, and that she’d nursed back to financial health and profitability.
My mother said to me once: “Your father thinks we’re poor. When I remember growing up during the Depression, I just have to laugh. I’m going to the opera, I’m traveling around the world, and I’m poor? Give me a break.”
So I don’t think she regretted the overall outcome at all. But I think she did regret that she’d been compelled to make an unnecessarily and unjustly constrained choice.
And this is why (among other reasons) I consider the idea of Larry Summers leading the World Bank in 2012 to be totally unacceptable. I think a basic job requirement of leading a major international development institution is that you have an expansive view of human potential. And I think an essential component of having an expansive view of human potential is having a strong sensitivity to the degree to which people are making choices that are unnecessarily and unjustly constrained. And I think the record clearly shows that Larry Summers does not meet this standard, and therefore he is not qualified to lead the World Bank.
I think it’s a fair characterization overall to say that academic economics, especially in the United States, strongly conditions those trained by it to focus on the degree to which economic outcomes are determined by the individual choices that people make. And there’s no doubt that those are important considerations that deserve focus. But I think it’s also a fair characterization overall to say that academic economics, especially in the United States, tends to desensitize those trained by it to the degree to which the individual choices that people make are unnecessarily and unjustly constrained.
That doesn’t mean that someone trained as an economist can’t lead a development institution, any more than it means that a general can’t be Secretary of State, or that a doctor trained in Western medicine can’t direct hospice care. It means that there’s an extra set of questions that you have to ask when someone is presented to you who is coming with that training: is this a person that sees a bigger picture that’s not confined by the biases of their training, a person who can incorporate the insights of people who have different training and life experience?
It is apparent that Larry Summers fails this test.
If you agree, sign Public Citizen’s petition against the nomination of Larry Summers to be the next President of the World Bank.
Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy.
"What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time—as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and tourists—but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.
Or take the issue of the banks. Liberals have derided him as a captive of Wall Street, of being railroaded by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner into a too-passive response to the recklessness of the major U.S. banks. But it’s worth recalling that at the start of 2009, any responsible president’s priority would have been stabilization of the financial system, not the exacting of revenge. Obama was not elected, despite liberal fantasies, to be a left-wing crusader. He was elected as a pragmatic, unifying reformist who would be more responsible than Bush."
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