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At the heart of First Book’s mission to help children in need read, learn and succeed is the distribution of educational content. Breaking down the barriers to accessing books and other information can lift the kids we serve and their communities out of poverty and into bright futures.

When President Obama announced the ConnectED Initiative two years ago, he set an ambitious goal to provide 99 percent of American students with access to next-generation broadband internet in their classrooms and libraries by 2018. And this past April, the President followed up on this commitment with the Open eBook Initiative, a program aimed at creating a world-class digital library and making it available to students aged 4-18 from low-income families.

First Book is proud to partner with the White House to support this bold program that will bring all of America’s classrooms into the digital age. Specifically, First Book will help ensure the eBooks library reaches students in low-income families.

Many of the 180,000 schools and educational programs we serve are already working to transform their districts’ teaching and learning in the digital age. We’re excited to support Open eBooks to reinforce their efforts and take strides to ensure all children have a world of knowledge within reach.

The post How First Book & The White House are Transforming Education Today appeared first on First Book Blog.

By ELvin Lim

Conservatives hate it; liberals love it. His Second Inaugural Address evinces Barack Obama coming into his own, projecting himself unvarnished and real before the world. No more elections for him, so also less politics. He is number 17 in the most exclusive club in America — presidents who get to serve a second term. Yes, there’s still the bonus of a legacy. But the legacy-desiring second-term president would just sit back and do no harm, rather than put himself out there for vociferous battles to come.

For better or for worse, Barack Obama believes that the constitutional compact from whence he derives the fullness of his authority gives him a responsibility. He believes that the framers of the Constitution “gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people. Entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.” But he did not mean that he was an originalist, or a “constitutional conservative.” Indeed, the very opposite is true. Obama believes that the “founding creed” is no less than this: “we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges.” Originalism means change, he is telling us.

This is a president no longer prepared to dally, or to punt on his liberal beliefs. “The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative. They strengthen us,” he said. “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law,” he also proclaimed. In his mind, there is no need to coddle the political right anymore, and he believes that the truth as he tells it will set us free.

So unreserved was Obama’s conviction that he took the sacred line of modern conservatism, “We the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still” and turned it into the most liberal of philosophies, that “our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.” Obama never really had much of a stomach for unadulterated libertarianism; in his heart of hearts, this former community organizer is a communitarian. This is why he cited “We the People” five times in his address.

Call Obama liberal, or call him correct; the point is half the country does not agree, and there are tough wars to come. That Obama has been so uncharacteristically upfront about his intentions signals, though, his belief that the national political tide has turned. That on gay rights, immigration, and so forth, either because of his electoral mandate or the changing demographics of the country, he believes he holds the upper hand.

And however short his second-term “honeymoon,” I think he does. Had Obama not been re-elected, his first term might have been construed as a fluke; a bit of electoral charity from a guilt-ridden America willing to give a half-African-Anerican a chance to deliver at the White House. But Barack Obama was re-elected by a vote differential of 5 million. Only the most measly of partisan spirits will deride this victory, and deny Obama the honeymoon that he justly earned.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.

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The post Obama’s Second Inaugural Address appeared first on OUPblog.

By Elvin Lim

The tragic shootings in Newtown, CT, have plunged the nation into the foundational debate of American politics.

Over at Fox News, the focus as been on mourning and the tragedy of what happened. As far as the search for solutions go, the focus has been on how to cope, what to say to children, and what to do about better mental health screening. It is consistent with the conservative view that when bad things happen, they happen because of errant individuals, not flawed societies. The focus on mourning indicates the view that when bad things happen, they are the inevitable costs of liberty.

At MSNBC, the focus has been on tragedy as a wake up call, not a thing in itself to simply mourn; on finding legislative and governmental solutions — gun control. This is consistent with the liberal view that when bad things happen, they happen because of flawed societies, not just the result of errant individuals or evil as an abstract entity.

The question of which side is right is an imponderable. Conservatives believe that in the end, our vigilance against tyrannical government is our first civic duty. This was the logic behind the Second Amendment. It comes from a long line of Radical Whig thinking that the Anti-Federalists inherited. That is why Second Amendment purists can reasonably argue that that citizens should continue to have access to (even) semi-automatic guns. They will say that the Second Amendment is not just for hunting; it is for liberty against national armies. Liberals, on the other hand, believe that a government duly constituted by the people need not fear government; and it is citizen-on-citizen violence that we ought to try to prevent. This line of thinking began with Hobbes, who had theorized that we lay down our arms against each other, so that one amongst us alone wields the sword. Later, we called this sovereign the state. The Federalists leaned in this tradition.

Should we fear government more or fellow citizens who have access to guns? Should government or citizens enjoy the presumption of virtue? Who knows. There is no answer on earth that would permanently satisfy both political sides in America, because conservatives believe that most citizens, most of the time, are virtuous, and there is no need to take a legislative sledgehammer to restrict the liberty of a few errant individuals at the expense of everybody else. Liberals, conversely, believe that government and regulatory activity are virtuous and necessary most of the time, and there is little practical cost to most citizens to restrict a liberty (to bear arms) that is rarely, if ever, invoked. Put another way: conservatives focus on the vertical dimension of tyranny; liberals fear most the horizontal effects of mutual self-destruction.

What is a president to do? It depends on which side of the debate he stands. Barack Obama believes that the danger we pose to ourselves exceeds the danger of tyrannical government (for which a right to bear arms was originally codified). The winds of public opinion may be swaying in his direction, and Obama appeared to be ready to mould it when he asked: “Are we really prepared to say that we are powerless in the face of such carnage?”

Here is one neo-Federalist argument that Obama can use, should he take on modern Anti-Federalists. If the Constitution truly were of the people, then it is self-contradictory to speak of vigilance against it. In other words, the Second Amendment is anachronistic. It was written in an era of monarchy, as a bulwark against Kings. To those who claim to be constitutional conservatives, Obama may reasonably ask: either the federal government is not sanctioned by We the People, and therefore we must forever be jealous of it; or, the federal government represents the People and we need not treat it as a distant potentate and overstate our fear of it.

If this is to be the age of renewed faith in government, as it appears to be Obama’s mission, then the President will be more likely to convince Americans to lay down our arms; he will persuade us that our vigilance against government by the people is counter-prouctive and anachronistic. But, to move “forward,” he must first convince the NRA and its ideological compatriots that we can trust our government. Only the greatest of American presidents have succeeded in this most herculean of tasks, for our attachment to the spirit of ’76 cannot be understated.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.

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The post On the Second Amendment: should we fear government or ourselves? appeared first on OUPblog.

By Elvin Lim When the dust settles on the history of the Obama presidency, a major theme historians will have to consider and explain, is the startling contrast in his record in domestic policy versus his successes in foreign policy, which now include the assassination of Bin Laden and the toppling of Qaddafi. To put the matter in another way: if 2012 were 2004, and Obama would be judged purely on his foreign policy alone, he wouldn't have to be doing any bus tours in the battleground states now.

By Elvin Lim On 9/11 each year, the media reenacts the trauma the American people experienced in 2001. Images already burnished in our minds are replayed. Memorials services are held, moments of silence are observed, and the national anthem is sung. National myth-making occurs at the very site where national disaster occurs, so that a new birth of freedom rises phoenix-like from the ashes of ruin.

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By Elvin Lim

Something of a myth of American democracy is that decisions are made in the ballot box by voters on election day. Actually, these outcomes are structured by fundraising efforts by would-be candidates years in advance.

Aspirants to the GOP presidential nomination, now entering the crucial second quarter before election year and on the eve of their formal declarations of candidacies, are now racing for credibility by racing for cash. And those without name recognition, in particular, have to rake in as much as they can before June 30 and the slower summer months begin, so that their second quarter federal disclosure reports do not look so pitiful that their campaigns would end before they even began.

President Barack Obama, for his part, appears on top of his own game. Having quickly declared his candidacy, his campaign manager Jim Messina has already mapped out a plan of getting 400 major donors to raise $350,000 each by the end of the year. By forcing the campaign finance issue so early and so soon on GOP hopefuls, he is already shaping the GOP primary outcome. Even more so than in the typical cycle, Republican primary voters will face pressure to forego a candidate of purer conservative principle with less fund-raising potential such as Rick Santorum in favor of a candidate with more fund-raising potential (or the name-recognition to achieve to same) such as Mitt Romney. Obama’s early campaign kick-off, then, has heightened the GOP’s dilemma between boring but credible candidates, and exciting but unknown candidates — a reason why the party has not already settled on a clear frontrunner the way it had done for every campaign since 1952.

In the House and Senate, both parties understand that elections have to be bought as much as they must be fought. Democrats in both chambers appear to have begun to narrow the “enthusiasm gap” of 2010, and raised a little more money than Republicans in the first quarter of this year in spite of the expectation that donors are typically unenthusiastic in the fundraising cycle which follows their party’s defeat at the polls. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised $11.69 million, just slightly more than the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee’s figure of $11.2 million. A positive sign for Democrats is that the senators holding important swing seats the GOP hopes to re-capture, such as those of Bill Nelson (FL), Debbie Stabenow (MI), Claire McCaskill (MO), and Sherrod Brown (OH), did well by raising over a $1 million each in the first quarter. But this could merely mean that these senators are gearing up for a tough, and perhaps uphill battle ahead.

Democrats fared better in the House as well, but the numbers again are very close. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised $19.6 million, compared to the National Republican Campaign Committee, which raised $18 million. The DCCC is taking comfort in the fact that the average freshman Republican congressman raised less in the first quarter of 2011 than the average freshman Democratic congressman did in the first quarters of 2007 and 2009 – the years after the Democrats had just enjoyed their victories. There were, however, clear winners on the Republican side, and topping that list was Michelle Bachmann, who raised over $2 million in the first quarter. The critical question for the year ahead is whether the Tea-Party’s enthusiasm for Bachmann is portable enough to help other Republican members achieve their fund-raising goals. If the Tea Party proves capable of inspiring cheques as well as it has inspired hearts, the Republican party will have no problem keeping the House and gaining in the Senate next year.

For American politics, look not to the polls; for where the money goes, so goes t

In honor of National Poetry Month, we’ve dug up a video of President Barack Obama reading a poetic Dr. Seuss story out loud.

As Obama prepared to read, he announced: “I am going to try to do the best rendition ever of Green Eggs and Ham.”

Do you think he accomplished his goal?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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By Elvin Lim

The vitriol that liberals and conservatives perceive in each other is only the symptom of a larger cause. There is something rooted in the two ideologies that generates anger and condescension respectively, and that is why a simple call by the President for participants to be more civil will find few adherents.

Liberals are thinking, what is it about conservatism that it can produce its own antithesis, radicalism? Whether these be conservatives of the anti-government variety, such as Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bomber) or Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), or conservatives of the anti-abortion variety such as Clayton Waagner, Eric Rudolph, or the Army of God -all conducted terrorism to preserve a way of life.

One of the deepest paradoxes of American conservatism is that the preservation of the past takes effort. As William F. Buckley put it, conservatives “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” As the Founder of modern American conservatism noted, the enemy is History itself, because History moves. Congressman Joe Wilson took Buckley’s yelling advice to heart in 2009, when he blurted out “You lie!” to the President when he was addressing the Congress in the chamber of the House. Yelling is a far cry from shooting. But the point is that conservatism on this side of the Atlantic wasn’t exactly born a phlegmatic creed.

Conservatism in America has always been about fighting back and taking back, articulated with a healthy dose of bravado and second amendment rhetoric. Sarah Palin understands this and that is why her crowds cheer her on. People like her because she is feisty. But that has also worked against her. Palin just couldn’t help herself but fight back when she was accused of inciting Jared Loughner into his shooting frenzy. Whereas the very liberal John Kerry thought he was above the fray and was slow to respond to the Swift Boat veterans’ attacks against him, Sarah Palin is often too quick to respond to her attackers, and sometimes she does so without having considered her choice of words (like “blood libel.”)

That is why House leaders about to stage a vote against Obamacare are about to traverse a dilemma-ridden path. To say what they want to say requires outrage and gusto, but when they do this they risk being accused of giving fodder to the would-be Jared Lee Loughners in their midst.

This is not to say that there isn’t vitriol on the liberal side. But it is of an entirely different form. Whereas conservatives are apt to feel anger, liberals project condescension. Again, part of this is structural, because Progressivism of any variety has one thing on its side – history itself. Because in the long run, Progressives have change on their side, they only need to wait and the world as conservatives know it shall pass. This, in part, explains liberal condescension. Conservatives conserve because they want to insulate themselves against the vicissitudes of life and History’s inexorable movement. Progressives or liberals, on the other hand, embrace change because they feel it is inevitable.<

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By Elvin Lim

The new House rules require that bills be posted online for 72 hours before they come to the floor for a vote.

If this is a nod to the Tea Party movement, either the nodders are naive or the Tea Party movement has no clue what the Constitution really means.

One needs quite a lot more than a public reading of the US Constitution to unpack its meaning. For to understand the Constitution is not only know what it says, but how it works.

The more the House succeeds as a check against itself, the less it would be able to be a part the original checks and balances the Framers invented. The checks they envisioned were mostly inter-branch, not intra-branch.

Consider the various rules the House has now adopted to constrain its own powers. The Supreme Court doesn’t do this. The President certainly does not. Whereas the House has mandated its members to post bills online for 72 hours before they are brought to the floor of the vote, presidents in the 20th century have been happy to conceal their actions behind the protective veil of “executive privilege.” Whereas all bills and resolutions sent to the House now have to be accompanied by a statement of constitutional propriety, we are not likely to see a president voluntarily tie his/her hand like that. If anything, presidents purport to have independent authority to interpret the Constitution as they so please. Congress has now ceded its prerogative to do so.

The Tea Partiers do not appear to understand that power is a zero-sum game between the executive and legislative branches, and this is particularly ironic given that not a few of them are routing for the current president’s political demise.

A weak legislative branch may beget a weak American state, and the latter, to be sure, is ultimately what the Tea Partiers want. But there is more than one branch able to the task of expanding the state. Tea Partiers might have missed the fact that whereas Republican legislators helped to expand the scope and size of the federal government during the Civil War and Reconstruction, in the 20th century, presidents have been the motive force behind the expansion of the American state. Think of Theodore Roosevelt and the civil service, Franklin Roosevelt and Social Security, Lyndon Johnson and Medicare. Crippling the legislature only makes it more susceptible to the executive whim. Betimes the executive exercises impulse control, but most of the time, presidents grow the state. Whether it pertains to the social security state or the military industrial complex, it’s still the federal budget that has been exploding, and the emboldened executive of our times has quite a lot to do with it.

There are real consequences for our republic whenever someone one or one movement purports that someone else does not have the privilege of interpreting our Constitution. Quite often, they are simply ceding the interpretative power to someone else – either the President or less often, the Courts. Worse still is when the would-be constitutional purist reserves interpretation only for himself by purporting that the Constitution only needs to be read for its meaning to be manifest.

No, I am not talking about John Boehner, but Jared Loughner, the man taken into custody for the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who wrote on a Youtube video [3:15] the following:

“The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the Constitution of the United States of America.

You don’t have to accept the federalist laws.

Nonetheless, read the United States’ of America’s Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws.

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By Elvin Lim

These are deliquescent days in Washington. As the Democratic party works out a deal to keep both Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn in the leadership hierarchy, and the Republican party takes stock of what it means to welcome 35 new Tea Party members into its caucus, the President must be wondering, what now?

Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen are advising Obama to not seek re-election. Others are simply predicting a one-term presidency whether or not Obama likes it.

But these grim prognostications are pre-mature, if only because most presidents have been able to marshal their incumbent benefits to win a second term in office. When David Axelrod exits the White House in January and passes the baton over to David Plouffe, the White House will go into full campaign mode. These guys do not like losing, and they have one thing going for them: the best self-promoter the business has ever seen.

Team Obama will have a few other things going for them. First, they no longer have to set the agenda. Whereas for the last two years, the White House has acted and the Republican party has reacted, a role reversal is about to happen. And one of the rules of American politics is that s/he who sets the agenda gets the blame when the constitution’s multiple veto points invariably alters or derails the agenda. Second, now that the House will be controlled by the Republicans, Obama will be able to do what presidents do best: assign blame to the inefficient First Branch and take things into his own hands. Presidential discretion is a very powerful thing and it is especially powerful when the president’s hand appears to be forced by an uncooperative House. Third, as Nancy Pelosi is likely to remain the leader of the Democrats in the House, she can continue to be the lightning rod for conservative critics (and proof to the liberal base that the Democratic party made a good-faith effort to be true to its progressive principles), while the president will be freed to perform the role of bipartisan leader so that he can try to win back the independent voters who have lost their love for him.

There is no reliable litmus test for Obama’s re-electability until a credible Republican alternative is placed before the electorate. No such person exists right now – not even Sarah Palin, who seems newly interested in the job, but who is likely only to remain a fundraiser and kingmaker, but not the successful candidate, because she is even more polarizing than Hillary Clinton was in 2008. In the months ahead, the Republican party will take up the challenge of reconciling itself with the principles of Tea party libertarianism, and the party’s success in 2012 will turn in large part on its ability to complete this reconciliation before the primary season of 2012 begins.

All told, the American presidency is strongest when it is weakest and weakest when it is strongest. Think of Bill Clinton when he was being impeached, or George Bush when he declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. Obama was weakest when he stood triumphantly before Corinthian pillars made of styrofoam and now that he has been humbled, no longer over-estimated, and indeed condemned to a single term, he is more likely than not to rise phoenix-like. Such is the nature of prerogative.

As historians begin to examine President Bush’s newly released memoir, Obama should take heed that if history has not yet been written for his predecessor, then it has certainly not been written for him.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of

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By Elvin Lim

The generic Democratic ballot appeared to rebound a little last week, in part because of the Republican Pledge to America, the story of Christine O’Donnell of Delaware spreading in the liberal base, and in part because of anticipation of the One Nation march on the National Mall this weekend. Could it be that Democrats may actually be able to keep their majorities in Congress if this trend continues?A cold look at history tells us that the odds are still low. One of the iron laws of American politics is that the president’s party almost always loses seats in the House in off-year, mid-term elections. Since 1870, there have been 35 mid-term elections and on all but four occasions, the president’s party lost seats in the House (the average loss is 34 seats).

On these four occasions, the gains made by the president’s party were minor. Republicans and Democrats respectively picked up 9 seats in 1902 and 1934 (perhaps having the last name, Roosevelt, had something to do with it.) In 1998, the Democrats picked up 4 seats in part because of the public backlash against the Clinton impeachment proceedings. In 2002, the Republicans did not lose any seats (or gain any) and bucked the historical trend because the country was rallying behind the president after September 11. (Democrats searching for hope this year should observe that three of these exceptions occurred in year two of a new presidency; 1998 was the only exception to the famous “six-year itch.”)

On average, Democrats have proven to be more adept at losing seats than Republicans, consistent with the conventional wisdom that the Republican party is a more orderly party and better able to act in unison than Democrats can. Democrats have typically lost 39 seats in the house in mid-term elections (exactly the number the Republicans need to take over to gain majority control this year), while Republicans have lost an average of 32 seats in mid-terms.

The virtue of being a not-so-big-tent party is that there tends to be less internal disagreement within the Republican party than in the Democratic party. It took a Tea Party movement to create dissension within Republican ranks, and yet some would argue that the movement has only rallied and unified the base.

On the Democratic side however, value, demographic, and ideological pluralism has always been a double-edged sword. For here is the telling history of 2009-2011: whereas Republicans are united that Obama was a mistake, Democrats are far from united about what mistakes Obama has made. The liberal faction of the Democratic party, for example, began losing faith in Obama when he compromised on universal health-care, and conservative “blue-dog” Democrats parted ways with their brethren just when the president proposed a middle-way in the form of a government sponsored “public option.” This is the perverse outcome of the party boasting more registered members than the Republican party (or for that matter, any other organization in the world.)

If Democrats, unlike Republicans, don’t do unity well, then it may well be that they could be better off, or at least no worse off than they are today, should Republicans take one or both Houses of Congress this year. If divided party control of government shall come to pass, it would be because the Democrats were already splintered from the very moment they were blessed with united or single party control of government. Put another way, it may not really matter what happens come November, because Democrats were only united in name in 2009-2011 (and that was possibly what made the infighting more intense).

Indeed, D

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By Elvin Lim

The “Summer of Recovery” has failed to materialize, and with that, the White House has had to start planning for 2012 earlier than expected.

After all, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had already conceded this summer that the House may fall to Republican hands. (Nancy Pelosi didn’t like the sound of his prescience then, but Gibbs was merely thinking strategically for his boss.) The one thing Democrats have going for them is that nearly every political commentator believes that an electoral tsunami awaits Democrats this fall, which means that they have low expectations on their side. And because the Democrats currently have a healthy majority, it would be nearly impossible that the flip will generate a Republican majority bigger than the one Democrats now enjoy. Victory for the Republicans would not taste so sweet because it would be fragile.

There is a silver lining inside this silver lining for the White House. If Republicans take control of the House, then at noon on January 3, 2011, President Obama will finally be able to do what presidents do best – blame the stalled progress on his domestic agenda on congressional intransigence, and switch to the domain in which presidents are able to act (and receive credit) unilaterally – foreign policy.

About a week and a half ago, Obama appeared to be embarking on this strategy, when he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. Whereas his second Oval Office address started with foreign policy issues and meandered awkwardly toward the economy (because the President was still hoping for a “summer of recovery”), the President’s first press conference inverted this order of priorities.

This press conference was delivered in the middle of the work day. It was directed to Washington elites and insiders, not the American public, for whom more talk of the economy would have been politically appropriate this election year. But the president began with the economy, but then ended with the Arab-Israeli conflict – displaying not only the agenda-setting power of the media to determine what presidents talk about, but also the instinct of presidents (even liberal ones) to withdraw to foreign policy as the presidential domain when domestic policy is not producing political credit for them.

It is no coincidence that very few Democratic candidates are campaigning on healthcare reform, even though it is the signature accomplishment of the Obama presidency and Democratic congress and the topic which headlined the political discussions of 2009. This is why Obama did not mention healthcare reform at all in his first and second Oval Office addresses, and he only brought it up haltingly and defensively in his first press conference last Friday.

With unemployment still at about 9.6 percent, everyone knows that the preeminent issue for Election 2010 is the economy. But Obama actually has, by a 10-point margin, higher approval numbers in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief than his handling of the economy. The White House realizes that the lack of results or higher casualties in Afghanistan doesn’t matter. What matters is that Obama is doing exactly what a Republican president would have done in Afghanistan and when there is nothing to fight about, the public approves.

After spending half of his first term on an ambitious domestic agenda for which he has gotten no credit but only blame, Obama may fin

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

In September 2009, General Stanley McChrystal stood before an audience in London and advocated for an increase of troop levels in Afghanistan. He was out of line then, and he was out of line last week, when he mocked a number of key Obama administration officials on Rolling Stone magazine. But if the President insists on being the Commander in Chief, he should have known that his generals’ insubordination is encouraged if not guaranteed, and there was little to be gained by so publicly dismissing McChrystal.

General McChrystal’s firing brings into sharp relief the martial sub-culture in American politics–our deference to things and persons military. What is less often admitted, even by the President himself, is that this culture begins with three specific words in the Constitution–”Commander in Chief”–an anachronism in our age of republican self-government.

The first thing a soldier learns as a recruit in the military is that s/he does not think. An effective war machine enlists the complete obedience of nameless and dog-tagged soldiers, not the reflective judgment of citizens. The military is a good fit with monarchy like that (as it is said, war is the sport of kings). At every rung of the rank ladder, there is total obedience from subordinate to superior. All authority culminates in the King–the only person who does any thinking.

By this account, General McChrystal has been a bad soldier, for he dared to think, and worse still he dare to think aloud. The General did not understand that no good could be done for America’s effort in Afghanistan if he or his aides publicized their differences with Vice President Joe Biden, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, and Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke. For all his talk about winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, it is almost as if the General wanted to ensure, by his indiscretion, that there would be no diplomatic solution to the problems in Afghanistan, so that we will forever be seeking a military one.

But I think the problem is rather deeper than one soldier’s insubordination or indiscretion. It is about a militaristic political culture intertwined with our democratic outlook–for we do not have a King doing the thinking, but a Congress of the People–and there is an uneasy juxtaposition formalized in our constitution which President Obama failed, perhaps understandably, to effectively navigate last week.

Our constitution is quite conventional in accepting the norm that soldiers should not think. What is less noted is that this principle applies to the Commander in Chief as well. The Constitution states that it is Congress who declares war and who controls the purse strings. That is to say, even the President, designated the Commander in Chief, is in the end, only a executor to whom is delegated the job of implementing the legislative will.

Of course, this has not transpired in practice. And the framers of our Constitution are not guilt-less despite t

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the Republican party. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

American presidents do not have the luxury of savoring victories, but this is also an asset because they have a multitude of areas to prove their worth to the American people. Following the House’s historic vote on health-care last Sunday, President Barack Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, and made a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Sunday. Next month, he will attend a summit on nuclear security with 40 heads of state. The President is attempting a pivot to show that he is the president on domestic policy and health-care, and he can also be a president abroad.

And this is why the Republican campaign strategy of repealing the Democrats’ health-care bill for this November cannot be enough. Republicans have been playing catch-up all year, reacting to events rather than creating them. For a while, the Republican message-of-the-day was that the Democrats were tone-death on the jobless rate and misdirecting their energies on the health-care debate. But the jobless rate isn’t the central concern of politicians or economists as it was last year. Now the Democrats have passed health-care reform, Republicans have shifted their focus to wanting to repeal it. Not only is this a mere politics of reaction, it is also the politics of delusion. Republicans running on repeal are running on something that can never happen – because President Obama will wield his veto against 67 Senators should it come to that – and when Republicans fail to do what they promised to do, their base would only become disenchanted.
At the heart of the Republican search for a positive and not merely a reactive agenda for campaign 2010 is the search for its soul. And even in this, Republicans have been reactive, for many were too slow to recognize the phenomenon called the Tea Party Movement. This movement has the potential of making or breaking Republican dreams this November. Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman didn’t merely force Republican Dede Scozzafava out of the race in the special election in NY23, but he ended up splitting the vote on the political right and giving the election to Democrat Bill Owens. Similarly, Sarah Palin may be the brightest political star of the Tea Party Movement, but she polls poorly with moderate Republicans. To decipher what they are for, Republicans need to sit down and think about what to make of, and what to do with, the Tea Party Movement.

If Washington Democrats know what they are for, Republicans haven’t settled yet on anything other than what they are against. “Hell no” will give a Republican primary candidate the Tea Party Movement’s vote, but it doesn’t guarantee anything come the general election, not least because major provisions

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the problems Obama is currently facing. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

It is going to be difficult for the President to give us an uplifting State of the Union message next week, because it is in effect going to have to be a confession of the state of the Obama presidency.

Between the attempted bombing on Christmas Day which has become something like Obama’s Katrina, Martha Coakley’s humiliating defeat in MA (and the symbolic extinguishment of the Kennedy torch), and the inauguration of a new era of presidential-press relations in which even the liberal media has turned against their hero, Obama has a very difficult task to perform on Wednesday night. A successful speech requires an accurate diagnosis of what has gone wrong for this presidency. So let’s examine the attempted bombing, Coakley, and the media in turn for the lessons they offer to the President.

The Christmas bombing and Coakley’s defeat in MA are related. (Her poll numbers dropped precipitously after Christmas.) The attempted Christmas bombing reinforced the perception that not only was the administration not focusing on job creation, now there was evidence that it had taken its eye off the ball on homeland security. The President must give us reason again to believe that he has his priorities right, and he has his eye on the target – jobs. To some extent he’s already smartened up. Knowing that the President cannot turn around the jobless numbers any time soon, his advisers have told him to get out to show people that he feels our pain. And that’s why Obama has tuned back in, and on recent days has been on the road to vindicate populist rage at Wall Street. He should be mindful though that he is the President, not a traveling salesman.

Why didn’t Obama’s last minute campaigning for Coakley make a positive difference? Well, his comment about Scott Brown and his truck didn’t help, a mistake he should have learnt after his remarks last year in San Francisco about bitter people clinging on to their guns. There is nothing like liberal condescension that turns off Republicans and Independents, and the President needs to show humility and contrition in his speech on Wednesday.

There is an endemic sense in the media that Massachussetts. Yet to give to one state the power to speak for the nation is patently at odds with our constitution, though it would seem that our pundits prefer to give weight to statistical sampling over constitutional propriety. Even liberal journalists are turning against him now, because no one will stand forever for the losing team, liberal bias or not. Obama has to stay focused on the big picture, remembering that while Massachusetts spoke, the nation did not. His job on Wednesday is not to be lost in non-generalizable minutiae, but to inform us of the State of the Union.

So here’s the good news. For all the spate of unfortunate events the Obama administration had to endure since Christmas, it is still a golden rule of politics that no president polls well when the economy is in the doldrums, so it may have been this

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s health care debacle. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As the wise saying goes “if you’ve nothing good to say, don’t say anything.” But President Barack Obama went ahead anyway with a prime time press conference, and as Bill O’Reilly was right to observe on Wednesday night - he said practically nothing specific about what the shape of the health-care bill would look like and viewers were left scratching their heads.

President Obama wanted to let Congress take ownership of the bill, rather than hand them a fait accompli (as Hillary Clinton did back in 1993/4), I hear Democrats chant in his defense. But if Obama wants to stay on the side-lines, then he should do so consistently. Either be genuinely deferential to Congress and stay out of the picture until a consensus emerges, or take complete ownership of the agenda - don’t try to do both. Yet the president is back in the limelight doing prime-time press conferences, and attending town hall meetings in Cleveland and such. Obama should decide which way he wants to go. If he is the salesman-in-chief, then he has to have something to sell, if not his consumers would be left completely befuddled as to why he’s putting on a show for no particular reason at all.

Liberals are mad that Obama didn’t throw a few more punches at Republicans. I think many are unwilling to admit the more pointed fact that he just didn’t do a very good job at all, because he didn’t have much to say.

So Wednesday’s press conference was a squandered opportunity. We are not in 2008 anymore when Barack Obama would announce that he is giving a speech and the whole world would stop to listen. The clock is ticking on his presidential luster, and the next time he says “hey, listen to me,” it’s going to be that much harder.

Let us be clear why health-care reform has stalled, at least till the Fall. Because the Congress, and in particular the Senate Finance Committee could not agree on a way forward. I don’t see why the President and his advisers thought that a prime time press conference last Wednesday night would have gotten things moving. In fact it probably achieved the exact opposite, when we heard on Thursday morning from Senator Harry Reid that a Senate vote before the August recess would not be possible. The president’s time would have been better spent persuading his former colleagues up on the hill in private conversations to compromise on a bill. When they’ve got a bill and all/most are united, then go out and do the media blitzkrieg, by all means. Wednesday night just wasn’t the time for that.

So it looks like the Permanent Campaign is back. The President has chosen to go back to campaign mode, selling himself. Because without a specific plan to sell, all his public appearances amount to going public for the sake of going public. This strategy belies a serious misunderstanding of American politics. Personal approval ratings do not translate to public support for specific policy proposals (not that they were forthcoming) - the president should have known this by now. They barely even translate into congressional support for presidential policies.

This error - of going public with nothing specific to sell - was compounded, and probably encouraged, by a complete underestimation of the push back from the conservative wing of the Demcoratic party (the “Blue Dogs”) worried about spiraling deficits. These were the people Obama should have been talking to. And given he’s still out town hall-ing and speechifying, I’m not sure he fully understands what came over him.

To make matters worse, Obama had to pour fuel over the fire of the Henry Louis Gates controversy during the press conference, accusing the Cambridge police of of a “stupid” arrest when he had incomplete possession of the facts. Have something to say about anything all the time has become the rhetorical ethic of the modern presidency. Obama’s observance of this ethic was a disastrous distraction to what little point he had to make at his press conference. The news cycles are now spending more time covering the Gates controversy than they are covering the health-care debate.

I’m afraid to say - though this is water under the bridge - that Hillary Clinton would have known better. This week, for the first time in his fledgling presidency, Obama looked like a total novice in Washington. His 4th press conference was a waste of time, and probably the first time since Obama broke onto the national scene in 2004 that his rhetorical wizardry had fallen so flatly on death ears. He seems to have bought the bad conventional advice - whenever you’re in trouble, just go out and give a speech - wholesale. The president should take heed:

1. The public is less attentive between election years and he must have something meaningful to say if he wants to keep their attention.
2. Especially on a complex issue like health-care where there are too many details to cover, the media is much more likely to jump at an opportunity to take the path of least resistance to cover something juicier, like Henry Louis Gates and racial profiling.
2. Just because the public (still) loves Obama doesn’t mean that they will love what he is doing as president (and not as presidential candidate).
3. It is often more important to talk to members of Congress - the people who actually pass legislation - than to deliver speeches around the nation where the only tangible return of applause is a fleeting sense of psychic gratification that one is loved.

President Obama, it’s crunch time. Stop yakking.

President Obama has addressed educational awareness through his latest act - declaring today, July 9th 2009, as National Summer Learning Day, and calling youth throughout the country to partake in service as well as extracurricular activities.

National Summer Learning Day will consist of several nonprofit sponsored events across the country. These fun filled educational activities range from a group of Chicago students from Kids Keep Learning taking a trip to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, to a group of Harlem kids, involved in REAL Kids reading and enrichment summer program at Harlem, participating in a formal induction for summer baseball teams.

National Summer Learning Day looks to improve the summer for all children, moving kids from the couch to the community. A decrease in reading and learning over the summer months contributes to the achievement gap between middle and lower class children. In fact, according to a study at John Hopkins University, a summer loss of 3 months results in a gap of 18 months by the end of 6th grade.

To learn more about the National Summer Learning Day, please visit www.summerlearning.org.

Last Thursday, June 25th, I was lucky enough to join the President, the First Lady, and hundreds of Congressional family members to prepare 15,000 backpacks with books and other items for the children of servicemen and women. With the incredibly generous support of Random House Children’s Books and Disney Publishing Worldwide, First Book was able to donate 30,000 books (two for each backpack!) with a retail value of almost $250,000.

The service event highlighted ‘United We Serve,’ President Obama’s call to all Americans to engage in service projects and create meaningful impact in their towns and communities. The ‘United We Serve’ summer service initiative began June 22nd and runs through the National Day of Service and Remembrance on September 11th. The initiative is being led by the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency dedicated to fostering service in communities across the country.

Curious about the books the President and the First Lady helped us pack?  Here’s the list — full of great choices for your own summer reading!

• Clementine by Sara Pennypacker and illustrated by Marla Frazee
• Magic Tree House #28: High Tide in Hawaii by Mary Pope Osborne
• The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
• The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
• Heroes of the Valley by Jonathan Stroud
• Holes by Louis Sachar

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Presidential rhetoric. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

On April 16, President Barack Obama ordered the release of Bush-era Office of Legal Council memos on counter-terror tactics, and in a statement, declared that “A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals,” echoing his inaugural position that “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

This is a perfect example of political equivocation, a rhetorical gesture that means one thing to liberals and another to conservative. For liberals, they heard the president say that we will not allow alleged threats to our safety to become the excuse for an assault to our ideals. For conservatives, they heard that just because the president must do whatever he must to keep Americans safe does not mean that we must compromise our ideals. And so everybody applauded Obama’s lyrical line on inauguration day.

In his April 16 statement, President Obama proceeded to explain his rationale for releasing the memos: “In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

The President is balancing on a precarious tightrope. In releasing the memos he is trying to appease a liberal base looking for transparency and some say vengeance, and in guaranteeing those who used harsh interrogation tactics immunity from prosecution, he is trying to assure conservatives that he is serious about maintaining the morale of those who serve our country. Ironic, because though the president was trying to seal a can of worms, he may have re-opened it.

This is the acrobatics of modern politics. A gesture to one side, and a wink to another is Obama’s only way out. The release of these memos was a gesture of good faith to Obama’s liberal base who want justice, and yet a show of solidarity with conservatives who do not want to see a witchhunt. Consider that the real action of deciding who will be prosecuted has been conveniently delegated to Attorney General Eric Holder. Decisive action will force even the most talented acrobat to fall off the tightrope - for it requires a consequential choice. But Obama can remain suspended in mid-air - in his presidential honeymoon - as long as the American people are content with mere gestures. This may not be the case this time, because liberals are outraged at what the memos detail and this will put immense pressure on Holder to initiate some high-level prosecutions, just as this has mobilized the conservative base to preempt an impending witchhunt.

For several decades now, we have been too tolerant of presidents who have excelled in rhetorical shape-shifting in order to appear all things to all people. This has occurred in part because the American people have come to believe that presidential words amount to presidential deeds. Words easily permit ambiguity; actions do not. We have bought an artificial consensus at a high cost: politics has become a spectacle of acrobatic tomfoolery. The American people appear unenthralled by Obama’s performance this time though, and while democracy will benefit from this, it is not good news for the president.

Judd Gregg has withdrawn from the nomination for Commerce Secretary.

You can watch a news video on this from the Huffington Post.


I'm not too sad about the news. You can see my concerns, expressed in my earlier post on the nomination.


Thanks to Ken for the news.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on the economic stimulus bill. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Necessity is a key word in Washington these days. President Barack Obama tells us that if we don’t pass a stimulus package the consequences will be unthinkable. “We can’t afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary,” he told the nation in his radio address last Saturday.

How can that which is imperfect also be absolutely necessary? Even though imperfection runs on a spectrum, the President will have us believe that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing. Well, we’ve heard this before. There are no ifs and buts when emergency calls. Better a decisive mistake than an indecisive impasse, said Machiavelli to his Prince. But as the Bard taught us, “they stumble that run fast.”

Fortunately, Obama isn’t the only one playing this game. Congressional Republicans have cloaked their ideological priorities in the language of necessity too. Aid to states was slashed in the Senate version of the bill, as was money designated for school construction. We are told
that none of these are pressing concerns that deserve a place in a stimulus package, and so the vocal Republican minority have decided that that is OK for state employees like teachers to lose their jobs even if the impact of this on the economy would be immediate and demonstrable – the very criteria they are using to decide what counts as a “stimulus.”

The Senate will likely pass its version of the stimulus package bill by a precarious margin early next week, and Congressional leaders should be able to work out the differences between the House and the Senate bills. The end result will not be bipartisan, and it will not solve all our economic woes. But in its imperfections we shall see that we are not slaves to anybody’s invocation of necessity. In our system of government, no institution, no party, and no one has a monopoly – at least not for long – on what necessity demands. Even at the brink of a grave recession, we remain free to disagree on if, when, and how. And so in our recalcitrance we shall live and suffer our liberty.

We're still waiting on President Obama to name someone to the position of Secretary of Commerce. Recent reports show two names have surfaced in the pool of possibilities: John Thompson, a Symantec CEO; and Padrasmee Warrior, CTO of CISCO. According to Reuters' report, John Thompson has the edge right now. According to CBS, he's got the job.

Other past rumors of contenders for the post included wealthy Penny Pritzker.

The CNMI needs to pay attention because the Secretary of Commerce has duties that directly impact on our situation here, including (but not limited to) a leading role in the National Marine Monument.

Amazing BBC newsclip here.

OTOH, MLK was wrong. It took us longer... Read the rest of this post