Obama goes into this massive week besieged by the agitprop machine

More than ever, domestic politics impact on foreign policy. The fate of the Middle East may rest on US healthcare reforms

Michael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 September 2009 21.00 BST

From the frontlines of my bewildering country, where a good third of the people seem to believe that global warming is a socialist plot cooked up to ensure America's future enslavement to someone or another, there is actually some good news to report. With the arrival this week of the United Nations summit on climate change, I can tell you that we're already doing a little better than you might suspect.
We've seen, according to a guest essay in yesterday's Washington Post, a dramatic 9% reduction in carbon emissions in just the last two years. Congress passed pretty strong new auto emissions standards in 2007, and just last week the Obama administration moved to toughen them further. Coal plants are closing. Wind farms are popping up. Solar cell installations – driven by federal, state and local tax incentives for homeowners and commercial real-estate developers – are up 40% in just a year. There are even signs that Americans are wrapping their heads around the idea of buying smaller cars.
So there is good news. We're not all flat-earthers.
But I will be straight with you. The United States is unlikely to be the nation that blazes the trail toward a bold new future in Copenhagen at the world gathering in December. And Barack Obama, though he may well deliver a stirring speech to the general assembly on Tuesday , is unlikely, at least at this point in his tenure, to be the leader who sets the example for the rest of the world to meet on new emission standards. The reason can be summed up in two words: domestic politics.
I'll explain exactly why, but first it's worth remarking that this is a comparatively new dynamic in the US. It used to be that there was a kind of a wall between domestic and foreign policy. A president's domestic policy difficulties had an impact on his foreign policy initiatives only in rare cases. Ronald Reagan's domestic policies were always hotly contended, and – it's little remembered now – he was fairly unpopular in 1982 and 1983, when the economy was in recession. He was under 50% in March 1983, when he delivered his famous "evil empire" speech about the Soviet Union. He used that speech, as presidents often have, to regain some momentum and trust.
Obama may be able to do the same this week and next at the UN summit and the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, but things are different now from what they were in Reagan's time. Obama faces a highly ideological rightwing media and pressure-group apparatus that is out to ensure he fails at everything he tries to do.
Yes, Reagan faced opposition, often quite tough, as all presidents have. But there were no 24/7 agitprop machines in those days like there are now, no virtually bottomless supply of corporate millions pouring into non-profit advocacy groups. This is different. Politics never stops.
Look at the healthcare debate. There is, to be sure, genuine and legitimate anxiety among many Americans about how reform will affect them. Their concerns are strictly about healthcare. But the professionally co-ordinated opposition to Obama's reform efforts is not merely about healthcare reform. It's about stripping away his legitimacy in more general terms and trying to persuade independent voters to take a jaundiced view of everything he does.
"Whitewater is about healthcare," rightwing radio host Rush Limbaugh famously said in April 1994, when the Clinton reform efforts were being judged by Congress. What he meant was that pumping the real-estate "scandal" (on which no one ever proved the Clintons did a thing wrong) was the way to keep alive questions about the Clintons' honesty, openness and trustworthiness. We can't quantify the impact the Whitewater matter had on the reform's failure that year, but the clouds that hung over the Clintons were certainly a factor.
Today's version of Limbaugh's statement might be: "Kenya is about healthcare." That is, the whisper campaign (wait, did I say whisper? Is there such a thing as a screeching campaign?) that Obama isn't really a citizen of the US is about a broader effort to tarnish him as a legitimate leader and make voters feel he isn't one of them. And let's face it. Obama being not only America's first black president, but also a northern, urban, cosmopolitan intellectual does give his opponents some material to work with.
That's our current situation in the US. Nothing is beyond the bounds of fierce ideological politics. And with regard to the specific issue of climate change, there is a legitimate substantive issue as well, which is that it's not only a foreign policy matter. It's a domestic issue too, and dealing with it in any honest way will in fact cost money, whether in the form of taxes or rate hikes. A lot of us are willing to pay them to deal with the problem. But a lot of others aren't.
The original goal was for Obama to sign the "cap and trade" legislation – it passed the House of Representatives but awaits action in the Senate – just before Copenhagen so that he or his designated plenipotentiary could show up there waving it triumphantly. Not going to happen. In fact, it's doubtful at this point that the Senate will ever pass it. If you've been reading this newspaper or any other about the Senate's role in the healthcare fracas, I trust you do not need me to explain why.
So, dramatic US action on climate change is one of those things that is just going to have to wait awhile. Healthcare is taking up all the oxygen right now. Assuming, as still seems likely, that it passes, the odds that the White House will get legislators – who'll already be skittish about how changes to the healthcare system might impact on their re-election chances – to swallow another big pill like that are slim indeed.
In the meantime, the foreign policy realm doesn't exactly present itself as a garden of potential triumphs. Afghanistan is a necessary mess, but a mess all the same. The Middle East proceeds in its normal, dismal fashion. Obama will meet with Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas tomorrow as well, but US envoy George Mitchell has had no luck in recent weeks trying to persuade Netanyahu to compromise on the settlements.
This bring us to another important point about the agitprop machine. One of the points is to drive Obama's numbers down. That happened over the summer. Just lately, he's been rebounding a bit, up to the mid-50s in two polls last week. But 55% isn't 69%, which is where he once was. Netanyahu and Abbas – and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – can read polls too, and you better believe they do. In the current American climate, the weaker a president is at home, the weaker he becomes on the world stage. Thus a healthcare defeat would have dreadful consequences for the possibility of Middle East peace, an arrangement with the Iranians and various other important priorities.
We're in inch-by-inch political trench warfare in the US, folks. There's an old American aphorism that politics stops at the water's edge, meaning that the squabbles we have over domestic politics should not extend into foreign policy. A conservative senator from the 1940s said it, in fact. He wouldn't find a receptive audience among his descendants today.