John McQuaid

Thanksgiving is a time for taking a deep breath and appreciating the under-appreciated. So I thought I would challenge myself this year. Let’s take a moment, reflect, and give thanks that Joe Lieberman is in the Senate.

Bear with me here. In the 1990s, I liked Lieberman. Most of his policy positions were reasonable. He was sometimes sanctimonious, but he also pushed Democrats to speak on moral issues important to Americans that many in his party reflexively considered out-of-bounds. (Today, President Obama can freely, eloquently address religion and morality in politics, in part because Lieberman paved the way.)

Lately, though, like many others I puzzle over what brought Lieberman to his current pass: standing alone, outside a party structure, antagonizing Democrats seemingly just because that’s what he does – and, of course, now threatening to bring down the whole health care reform effort.

I’m not a fan of psychoanalyzing politicians, but Lieberman is a special case. He appears to be motivated in part by pure self-regard, uncontaminated even by loyalty to constituents, interest groups or (of course) party. His drift from hawkishness into full-on neoconservatism, for example, clearly has a strong personal dimension: Lieberman views himself as the one man who sees the truth on national security in a party of cautious temporizers. This has some political advantages (except the most important one, getting re-elected) that also play to his ego: In the Republican Party, he’d be unexceptional. As an Independent caucusing with Democrats, Lieberman stands out.

On health care as well, Lieberman’s self-regard looks to be a strong motivating factor. Yes, he’s protecting the Connecticut insurance industry by threatening to filibuster any bill containing a public option. But there are probably more effective ways to get what he wants, and he clearly relishes being a holdout. The fact that his stance probably hurts his reelection prospects (unlike other Democratic holdouts with more conservative constituencies) only seems to encourage him. As Peter Beinart notes in The Daily Beast, Lieberman is bitter about a series of losses and slights by Democrats – his disastrous showing in the 2004 presidential campaign, the lack of robust party support two years later when he ran for reelection as an independent:

Gradually, this personal alienation has eaten away at his liberal domestic views. His staff has grown markedly more conservative in recent years, and his closest friends in Congress are now Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham. For Lieberman, the personal has become political, and it has pushed him further to the right.

So here’s why we should offer a smidgen of thanks he’s around. Lieberman offers a window into how the Senate really works, and in some sense only Lieberman allows us to see the true capriciousness of those crazy, arbitrary rules on holds and filibusters. Other Senators routinely block and delay legislation on on behalf of party or special interests. That’s just politics. Lieberman shows us how one man’s quirks can hijack an entire national agenda.

I’ve just joined True/Slant, a blogging and journalism platform started earlier this year. I’m still exploring the site myself, but it looks to be an interesting and lively community. You can join and, as on other social media sites, follow the contributors you like, chime in on comments and discussions, et al.

At least for the moment, I’m going to be doing most, but not all, of my blogging over there. I’ll still be posting here, though more intermittently, and continuing to contribute to the HuffPost and Guardian.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

There’s no question that the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other detainees on trial in New York City for the 9/11 attacks is both audacious and risky. That may explain the ambivalent reactions to it across the political spectrum. I don’t know what to make of it myself – it could certainly turn out to be a trifecta: a legal/political/moral disaster. But it also might work: as in, a trial conducted, evidence aired, a defense presented, and the defendants presumably convicted and the legal system vindicated, or at least still in one piece.

The reaction to the Holder decision on the right has been particularly disjointed. Some argue it’s a reasonable choice. But in some corners it’s causing a kind of rhetorical-logical meltdown. Here’s what Dick Cheney said earlier this week in a radio interview:

I can’t for the life of me figure out what Holder’s intent here is in having Khalid Sheikh Mohammad tried in civilian court other than to have some kind of show trial. They’ll simply use it as a platform to argue their case – they don’t have a defense to speak of – it’ll be a place for them to stand up and spread the terrible ideology that they adhere to.

These claims, echoed by Charles Krauthammer and other neoconservatives, scramble history, the law, and current political realities. The term “show trial” has a specific historical meaning: a staged proceeding in which innocent victims of the state are made examples of. The most famous examples are Moscow trials of the 1930s, in which dozens of Stalin’s suspected political enemies “confessed” to made-up crimes against the Soviet Union. Most were tortured and/or threatened. Many were ultimately executed.

It’s unusual for former cold warriors to sling this term around cavalierly, so I’m sincerely trying to understand the historical reference here. Is Cheney saying that a trial would be legally invalid, in part because U.S. government tortured KSM? Krauthammer makes a vaguely parallel argument – that because Holder considers a conviction a foregone conclusion, the trial itself would be a farce. But that’s sophistry – Holder is the nation’s chief prosecutor, not a judge who must maintain impartiality: of course he is going for a conviction. In any case, it’s incoherent to argue that the U.S. is applying an inadequate “law enforcement” approach to terrorism while also claiming it’s staging kangaroo courts.

Cheney and Krauthammer also argue that it’s KSM’s show trial, not ours: that he will seize the spotlight for a propaganda bonanza. (This strategy apparently never occurred to Stalin’s victims.) This seems overblown. A federal terrorism trial is by definition a highly circumscribed affair: no TV cameras or recording devices in the courtroom, tight rules of evidence, few opportunities for grandstanding by lawyers, let alone defendants. Of course, KSM could conceivably fire his lawyers and make propagandistic statements at some point, as Zacarias Moussaoui did. That would be unfortunate, yes – but intolerable?

I’d argue that despite the risks, a trial is basically a conservative act, the culmination of a process of accounting for the acts of 9/11 that has remained frustratingly open-ended. A successful prosecution would show we can absorb a terrible blow with our institutions intact and working. (It’s this sense of continuity and normalcy, of course, that Cheney and Krauthammer disdain.)

There’s another issue here, playing out almost subconsciously. Cheney must be worried about being put on trial himself someday for war crimes, among them the torture of detainees such as the 9/11 defendants. If he is, he’ll almost certainly denounce that as a show trial too.

As Jon Stewart put it, “so when does ‘hope’ turn into ‘change’?” As Arianna Huffington points out, we still don’t know. To any outside observer it sure looks like Obama has lost his campaign mojo and gotten crushed in the whinging gears of Washington’s political apparatus. But I’m not so sure.

I’ve been in Washington since the early 1990s. During that time, let’s face it: very little happened. Well, that’s not quite right: a lot of things happened, many of them consequential. There was a presidential impeachment, a government shutdown, and several military campaigns and wars. But when you get right down to it, what did all that mean in terms of the way the government ran and its basic priorities? Very little.

The basic structure of American politics – the array of interest groups and party structures, the government’s basic assumptions about what was politically possible and desirable – didn’t change much at all. Mainly, well, it got stupider. Media coverage got stupider. Electoral politics got stupider. And, especially during the Bush administration, government itself got stupider, or at least prone to spectacular breakdowns. With the assent and encouragement of the White House, large swaths of the federal government became hostage to narrow-minded interest groups of one kind or another that simply didn’t have a stake in making it work.

Meanwhile, the world was changing. Fast. Big problems such as global warming and collateralized debt obligations emerged. They were catastrophic and just plain weird, and they didn’t fit any of our usual political paradigms. When the government can’t respond effectively to the real world, it’s going to pile one disaster on another.

Obama clearly recognized this problem – a government adrift in a revolutionary age, with all its constituent parts hardwired to stay that way – and set out to change it.

But there was never going to be a revolution. Obama ran on change, but he also made clear that he is a centrist and an institutionalist. He believes in making things work, in practical results – not in blowing things up and starting from scratch.

As a result, the poetry of the Obama campaign has been transformed into the software users manual of the Obama White House.

Most of the work of actually reforming government is a) politically very, very hard and b) not especially inspiring or even interesting to the media or the public. That includes big stuff like guiding health care reform through Congress. Or lower-profile stuff like staffing scientific agencies with scientists rather than hacks. At every turn, there are obstacles large and small that have been in place for decades and can’t easily be dislodged.

I’m willing to cut Obama some slack. I think his approach is substantive where those of some of his immediate predecessors were variously incremental, empty or dangerous. But I’m still wondering: Can someone who is temperamentally conservative and pragmatic, and who clearly doesn’t relish political combat, ever make truly revolutionary changes? Or in our system, is this the only kind of president who can? That’s the riddle we’re all facing right now.