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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Thursday, January 22, 2015 | A9
OPINION
that ambivalence. But what is just
not possible to choke down is
President Obama’s decision in
2011 to reduce the U.S.’s residual
military presence to virtually
zero. It was a decision to waste
what the Marines and Army had
done.
Announcing the decision at the
White House on Oct. 21, Mr.
Obama said, “After taking office,
I announced a new strategy that
would end our combat mission in
Iraq and remove all of our troops
by the end of 2011.” (Emphasis
added.)
Military analysts at the time,
in government and on the outside, warned Mr. Obama that a
zero U.S. presence could put the
war’s gains and achievements at
risk. He did it anyway and ever
since Mr. Obama has repeatedly
bragged about this decision in
public speeches, notably to the
graduating cadets of West Point
last May.
In January, months before that
West Point speech, the terrorist
army of Islamic State, or ISIS,
seized back control of both Fallujah and Ramadi in Anbar prov-
ince. The month after the West
Point speech, the city of Mosul
and its population of one million
fell to Islamic State, and here we
are with the barbarians on the
loose there, in Yemen, in Nigeria
and in France.
Watching “American Sniper,” it
is impossible to separate these
catastrophes from seeing what
the Marines did and endured to
secure northern Iraq. Again, anyone is entitled to hate the Iraq
war. But no serious person would
want a president to make a decision that would allow so much
personal sacrifice to simply evaporate. Which, in his serene selfconfidence, is what Barack Obama
did. That absolute drawdown was
a decision of fantastic foolishness.
In the one spontaneous moment of Tuesday evening’s
speech, Mr. Obama cracked back
at some chiding Republicans that
he’d won two elections. And he’s
right. The first election was a remarkable, historic event for the
United States. His second election was a historic electoral mistake, leaving the country and the
world to be led by a president
who is living on his own fantasy
island.
He said in the State of the
Union that we are leading “a
broad coalition” against ISIS. We
are? What coalition? Mainly it’s
the Iraqi army and Kurds battling
for survival alongside U.S air support.
The president said we are
“supporting a moderate opposition in Syria.” But twice in 2014
Mr. Obama derided the Syrian
moderates as dentists, pharmacists and teachers. U.S. support
for the moderates is de minimis.
On Ukraine, Mr. Obama said,
“We’re upholding the principle
that bigger nations can’t bully
the small.” But bullying is exactly
what Russia’s Vladimir Putin is
doing to Ukraine because Mr.
Obama refuses to give its army
even basic defensive weapons.
Then there’s the grandest foreign-policy self-delusion of the
Obama presidency—the neverending nuclear arms deal with
Iran. Mr. Obama said we’ve
“halted the progress of its nuclear
program.” Slowed perhaps but no
one thinks we’ve “halted” Iran’s
multifacility nuclear-weapon and
ballistic-missile project. Only in
the Obama fantasy is it halted.
Sen. Robert Menendez, the
New Jersey foreign-policy Democrat, who sat bolted to his seat
during the speech, said the next
day that the administration’s talking points on Iran now sound
“straight out of Tehran.”
i
i
i
There is a lot of American flag
in “American Sniper.” When Chris
Kyle’s 2013 funeral procession
drives down I-35 in Waco, people
with American flags line the
streets and overpasses. Until the
American people vote for a new
president in 2016, what all of
that represents will remain a
world away from Washington.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
What Was Obama Thinking?
P
resident Obama’s State of
the Union address on Tuesday evening was oddly disconnected.
It was disconnected from
events abroad. He said that “the
shadow of crisis has passed.”
Earlier that day Iranian-backed
rebels stormed the compound of
the president of Yemen, an American ally. Islamic State, which Mr.
Obama referred to a year ago as
the “jayvee team,” now controls
large parts of Syria and Iraq—
leading the president to ask for
congressional authorization to
use force against it.
Iran’s nuclear ambitions remain undimmed. Mr. Obama
spoke about Russia but failed to
mention its annexation of Crimea. He did not mention al
Qaeda or Islamic extremism, despite an al Qaeda affiliate claiming responsibility for the Paris
massacre.
Mr. Obama’s speech was disconnected from economic reality.
The recovery he touted is the
weakest in U.S. history and the
only one in which median household income dropped. While two
million more Americans are on
payrolls today than in December
2007 when the recession began,
there are 14 million more people
not in the workforce as the nation’s population grew faster
than the pool of available jobs.
There are two million more peo-
By Barton Swaim
Delivering the State of the Union address, Jan. 20.
ple working part-time because
they can’t find full-time jobs.
Mr. Obama’s speech was also
disconnected from his record. In
2009 he projected unemployment
would reach 5% in December 2013
if his stimulus bill was passed.
Yet after spending more than $1
trillion on a variety of stimulus
measures, unemployment was
Perhaps he wants to
bait Republicans into
debating his agenda,
with less time for theirs.
5.6% last month—and would be
8.3% were it not for the millions
who dropped out of the labor
force. Mr. Obama touted rising
U.S. oil production that’s led to
lower gasoline prices—but this
was brought about by drilling on
private and state lands. Mr.
Obama has reduced drilling on
federal land or in federal waters.
His lecture to Congress about
civility and bipartisanship would
have been convincing had he not
governed in an unusually ruthless, hyperpartisan way for six
years.
On CBS’s “Face The Nation”
last Sunday, White House senior
adviser Dan Pfeiffer said the
administration would “double
down on our efforts to deal with
wage stagnation and declining
economic mobility.” The president has been in office for six
years and none of his efforts have
made either problem better. A
record number of Americans are
in poverty and 15% more people
receive food stamps today than
when he took office. Much of this
is thanks to a stagnant economy
that Mr. Obama’s tax-and-spend
policies have kept in the doldrums.
It is hard to fathom why the
president offered so many proposals that have zero chance of
passing the Republican-run Congress. The most likely explanation is while he is uninterested in
governing, he is intent on positioning Democrats for the 2016
presidential race. But while his
class-warfare theme is timeless,
his policy proposals are highly
perishable.
He could be trying to burnish
his legacy. But free community
college and higher capital-gains
taxes on family farms and small
businesses are not the stuff of
heroic political legends.
He could be trying to blame
Republicans for gridlock by offering ideas they won’t pass, hopefully overshadowing coverage of
Mr. Obama’s vetoes and obstructionism.
He could be trying to chew up
the clock. When Republicans talk
about his agenda, there is less
time to talk about theirs.
Or it could be that Mr. Obama
is trying to become more rele-
vant by making himself even
more obnoxious to the Republican congressional majority and
thereby provoke conflict.
Republicans should decline the
invitation, instead treating Mr.
Obama’s proposals mostly with
benign neglect. If he complains
about obstructionism, Republicans should point to the failure of
the White House and congressional Democrats to press his initiatives by drafting bills, seeking
committee approval and offering
them on the floor.
Most important, Republicans
should fill the policy vacuum left
by Mr. Obama’s dead-on-arrival
package with a robust, progrowth reform agenda that focuses on the middle class—one
that simplifies the tax code, rolls
back onerous regulations, further
expands domestic energy production, restrains spending, controls
the debt, increases trade and
modernizes entitlements.
Many of these proposals will
be difficult to pass. More than a
few will be vetoed. But some congressional Democrats will support the proposals and, more significantly, voters will see
Republicans leading the way to
concretely improve the state of
the union.
Mr. Rove, a former deputy
chief of staff to President George
W. Bush, helped organize the political-action committee American
Crossroads.
A Phrase Whose Time Has Passed
‘N
o army can withstand
the strength of an idea
whose time has come,”
remarked Sen. Everett Dirksen on
the floor of the U.S. Senate at the
height of the debate surrounding
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It
was a great moment in American
political history, captured by
Todd Purdum in his new book “An
Idea Whose Time Has Come.” Even
so, it’s hard not to register a minor
objection to Sen. Dirksen’s use of
the phrase: Equality before the law
was not an idea whose time had
come—it wasn’t an “idea” at all, it
was a moral principal, and it existed long before the 20th century.
The phrase “an idea whose
time has come” pops up a lot
these days, usually though not
always in conjunction with leftleaning or “progressive” policy
changes.
“The idea of making community college free,” wrote Gary Stix
of the Scientific American about a
proposal put forward recently by
President Obama, “is one whose
time has come.” A social-studies
teacher last month told Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks
that the introduction of an ethnicstudies requirement in L.A.
schools is “an idea whose time has
come.” And in a Washington Post
article last summer about workplace-flexibility legislation, Joan
Lombardi, a child-care expert, told
the paper that, yes, “It’s an idea
whose time has come.”
The line works well on the campaign trail—it lends a bit of intellectual frisson to stump-speech
rhetoric—but you shouldn’t take it
too far. President Obama, at a
Labor Day rally in 2014, told the
How liberals try to lend
their policy prescriptions
an unearned appearance
of historical inevitability.
crowd: “There’s only one thing
more powerful than an idea whose
time has come.” And what would
that be? “Millions of people organizing around an idea whose time
has come.” That makes no sense
at all.
The phrase, or something like
it, supposedly originates from the
final chapter of Victor Hugo’s
journalistic novel, “The History
of a Crime” (1877), about LouisNapoleon’s coup d’état of 1851-52.
The translators of my copy of the
book render the sentence literally:
“One resists the invasion of
armies; one does not resist the
invasion of ideas.” The concept of
invading ideas was somewhere
paraphrased as ideas having their
time come, and so an English
Composite
By Karl Rove
Getty Images
arack Obama was 15 minutes into his State of the
Union speech when I arrived home to watch it, having
just walked back from seeing
“American Sniper.”
Watching a movie about a
Navy SEAL who served four tours
fighting in Iraq was not the best
way to enhance the experience of
a Barack Obama speech. As a matter of fact, it was pretty unbearable.
Because Clint
Eastwood
directed “American
Sniper” the movie
is about more
than the story of
WONDER Chris Kyle, the
highly skilled rifle
LAND
marksman from
By Daniel
Texas. In 2006,
Henninger
Mr.
Eastwood
presented two movies about the
famous World War II battle of
Iwo Jima. “Letters from Iwo
Jima” told the story from the perspective of Japanese soldiers, and
“Flags of Our Fathers” from the
Americans’ side.
So “American Sniper” is not a
crude paean to “our boys” in the
Iraq war. What it does is convey
the extraordinary personal,
psychological and physical sacrifice of the U.S. Marines who
fought al Qaeda in Fallujah, Ramadi and the other towns of
Iraq’s Anbar province beginning
in 2003 and through the period of
the Anbar Awakening, which
ended with the Marines pacifying
the province.
It’s just a movie, so even
“American Sniper’s” small slice
only hints at the price America
paid—some 3,500 combat deaths
and another 32,000 wounded—to
bring Iraq to a point of relative, if
fragile, stability in 2011.
Opinions will differ, often bitterly, on the war in Iraq and the
reasons for it. In the movie, a
painful funeral scene captures
BOOKSHELF | By Daniel Shuchman
adage was born. In context, Hugo
is insisting on the glory and nobility of the French empire despite
the ruin to which Napoleon III had
almost brought it. For the young
Hugo, then, the invading idea—the
idea whose time had come—is
now a rather outdated one: French
imperialism.
And indeed many of the ideas
whose time we’re told has come
are similarly outdated. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at
a town-hall meeting in October
that early-childhood education “is
an idea whose time has come.” But
early-education programs go back
half a century, and even studies
commissioned by the federal government tend to show no lasting
benefits to children. The idea’s
time may not have gone, quite, but
it’s going.
There is something else that
rankles about the phrase. It’s that
whiff of arrogance you always get
from the rhetoric of inevitability.
Those who use it claim to win the
argument without having worked
for it; they appeal to fate, which
for some unstated reason is on
their side. If you think their ideas
are naïve or half-baked, that’s
because you haven’t come to
terms with reality. (Or are “on the
wrong side of history,” as the
president likes to say.) Of course,
lots of terrible ideas once had
their times come, too, and they
were all promoted with the rheto-
ric of inevitability: communism,
socialism, eugenics, racial hegemony of various kinds.
Consider the way in which supporters of same-sex marriage routinely call it an idea whose time
has come. They do put forward
arguments in its favor, but more
often they appeal to the inexorable forward march of progress, as
though political inevitability
alone were proof of moral soundness and social value. “Same-sex
marriage seems to be an idea
whose time has come in these
United States,” wrote Huffington
Post blogger Stephen V. Sprinkle
last February. Washington Post
columnist Dana Milbank in 2013
described same-sex marriage’s
progress as “the inevitable march
toward an idea whose time has
come.”
Maybe they’re right. Maybe the
time for same-sex marriage has
come. But if we’re going to redefine an ancient institution—or
rather make it a mere contract instead of an institution—maybe we
ought to do so for reasons other
than a vague sense that it’s time.
So, true enough: One does not
resist the invasion of ideas. But
surely one can resist the invasion
of an insidious cliché.
Mr. Swaim’s book “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics” will be published in July by
Simon & Schuster.
When America
Paid Its Debts
A Nation Wholly Free
By Carl Lane
(Westholme, 265 pages, $28)
A
t the height of the 2012 election campaign, Barack
Obama was interviewed on the “Late Show With
David Letterman.” His host expressed concern
about the national debt and asked the president how
much it was when he took office. Mr. Obama said he
could not remember “precisely.” (The debt was in fact
$10 trillion and had grown to $16 trillion by the time of
the interview.) The president assured him that “we don’t
have to worry about it short-term” but that it could
become a long-term problem. Further, he suggested
Americans need not be alarmed since “a lot of it we owe
to ourselves,” not foreign creditors.
Carl Lane is not as complacent about our predicament: He characterizes the nation’s now $18 trillion in
debt as one of “extraordinary magnitude” that “invites
calamity.” Still, he hopes that a little-known episode in
American history
may show that the
problem can be
overcome. “A Nation
Wholly Free” is Mr.
Lane’s fascinating
exploration of what
led to the brief interlude of 1835-37, the
only time in its existence when the United
States had no debt.
The American
Revolution had left the
young nation saddled
with financial obligations. In subsequent
years, the Louisiana
Purchase and the War of
1812 added to the debt load,
and by 1816 the country owed a
then-colossal $127 million. Rapid economic
growth was improving the fiscal trajectory, however, and
late that year President James Madison reported to
Congress with “great gratification” that, because of the
revival of commerce and burgeoning tariff revenues, the
government would enjoy a surplus and could plan for a
long-term debt paydown. Thomas Hart Benton, a Missouri senator, would later describe the choice before the
republic: “whether a national debt could be paid and extinguished in a season of peace, leaving a nation wholly
free from that encumbrance; or whether it was to go on
increasing, a burthen in itself,” consuming the public
treasury “to eternity.” It was Andrew Jackson who
finally, forcefully, embraced the goal of debt repayment
and ensured its achievement through disciplined prioritization of surplus revenues and vetoes of new spending.
For Mr. Lane, it is essential to view America’s early finances in a broad context. Concern about the debt, he
believes, was not just rooted in fiscal prudence but was
inextricable from beliefs about the proper role of government and the scope of federal powers under the
Constitution. “Internal improvements” that required
substantial borrowing—such as roads and canals—were
For Andrew Jackson and many other early
Americans, debt was not just a fiscal danger,
but a path to corruption and national decline.
highly controversial. Many in the founding generation
held “an ideological bias against public debt because it
corrupted those who were entrusted to exercise power
responsibly.” Expensive projects within individual states
were viewed as we would now view congressional “earmarks”—tending to lead to waste and vote-buying. Debt
was not just a fiscal danger but a path to moral decline.
Relying on congressional records, Treasury reports
and personal diaries, Mr. Lane vividly illustrates how
these budgetary debates played out under three presidents: James Monroe (who, in 1825, committed to “discharge” all debt within 10 years), John Quincy Adams
(who was far more interested in an array of spending
initiatives) and, finally, Jackson.
As today, monetary affairs were inseparable from
fiscal ones, and not always for the good. Jackson had
determined to close the Second Bank of the United
States—the quasi-central bank of the day—on constitutional, fiscal and even social grounds. In 1832, Nicholas
Biddle, head of the bank, initiated a retaliatory plot to
undermine Jackson’s efforts to redeem public debt. Suffice it to say that the plot’s brazenness and complexity
make today’s conspiracy theories about the shadowy intentions of the Federal Reserve seem tame.
Notwithstanding this and other challenges, Jackson’s
Treasury secretary, Levi Woodbury, could report in 1835
that the last $443.25 of debt was about to be repaid and
that the United States would enjoy the “unprecedented
spectacle” of being a nation free of debt. The glow
would soon be darkened by the panic of 1837, whose disputed monetary, political and economic causes Mr. Lane
only touches on here.
In an epilogue on the modern implications of this episode, Mr. Lane turns stridently partisan, blaming only
Republicans for our debt “quagmire” while hailing President Obama’s “leadership” and “steadfastness” in addressing it. This is quite surprising because, in marked
contrast to the president’s evident nonchalance, Mr.
Lane urgently warns that “anything might trigger” a loss
of confidence in U.S. creditworthiness at any time, the
aftermath of which could be “widespread misery, civil
disorder, and the possible collapse of our institutions.”
Also, given the extent of our foreign debt, he says we
should take “little solace” from the dismissive “quip”
that we “owe the debt to ourselves.” Mr. Lane does not
offer any specific solutions other than the need for bold
leadership; he says that the keys to President Jackson’s
achievement were never taking “his eye off the ball” and
a willingness to make politically difficult decisions for
the “greater good.”
Unlike Americans of the early 19th century, we face a
situation in which the magnitude of our accumulated liabilities makes full debt repayment an impossible task for
the foreseeable future. Mr. Lane cites estimates that the
debt relative to the size of the economy in 1816 was only
11%. Today it is more than 100%. Even the most hawkish
budget plans call for continuing deficits, and thus increasing debt, for at least the next decade. With this
backdrop, the best we might do is constrain spending,
increase revenues, and generate sufficient economic
growth for long enough to allow “time, and the happy
progress of the country”—in the words of one Massachusetts congressman in 1826—to reduce the relative size of
the debt before a crisis occurs. We had better get busy.
Mr. Shuchman is a New York fund manager who often
writes on law and economics.
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