The Permanent Campaign - A Lament

Yesterday President Obama delivered his State of the Union speech. I liked the speech -- I thought it was hardhitting and at the same time deftly framed to feel almost irrefutable. But that's not the point of this short post.

What I wanted to mention here is that over the past 48 hours, or in other words the day of the speech and the day after, I've received about 15 e-mails from the President (needless to say, not individually written to me) and Presidential aides to enlist me, in one way or the other, in supporting him and the speech. Some were duplicates, but the total may actually have been more than 15, though I must admit I don't read them all so I'm not absolutely certain I'm characterizing all of them correctly.

I am sure, however, that President Obama and his political aides believe the campaign has never ended, and will never end. They're probably right. If this is the price of defeating the Tea Party and its allies, I agree that it's worth it (though believing that doesn't make me read all the messages). But the fact that the campaign goes on forever is itself an element in the polarization of our lives -- in which there apparently can no longer be a moment when all that citizens are asked to do is think, rather than mobilize. 

Fox News gives Romney the shove

After the network I was watching had declared Obama the winner on election night, I thought I’d see what Fox News had to say. I was pleased to find that they too had called the race for Obama. But Romney had not conceded. Initially that wasn’t startling, but I began to worry that he really might not give up and that we might be in for weeks of wrangling and litigation. We now know that he did consider exactly this course of action – his aides reportedly had their suitcases packed and were ready to depart on waiting planes to pursue challenges to the apparent results. While Romney weighed his options, what was Fox News doing?

The answer is that Fox was growing increasingly impatient. Their anchor interviewed the Fox correspondent at the Romney party in Boston, and pushed him to acknowledge that the delay was more than normal. That wasn’t all. Not much later, the anchor expressed at some length the idea that an essential part of the ritual of elections was the gracious concession, followed by the gracious victory speech, meant to enact the symbolism of bringing us all together after the divisions of the campaign. And, the anchor said, it was time for this to happen. I had the strong sense that the Fox anchor believed that Romney or his aides were watching Fox right then and there, and that the anchor was telling him that it was over. There was even a suggestion, though only a brief one, that Romney hadn’t been such a good candidate in the first place – and, again, now it was time for him to go.

A little while later, Romney went. More precisely, another network (I think it was CBS) reported that Romney had made the required concession phone call to Obama. Then, Fox said, the campaign “pool” reporters got the same news. And then Fox got confirmation too. It’s interesting that Fox seems to have been the last, or at any rate definitely not the first, to be told. Was that because the Romney people were angry about having been lectured to over the airwaves?

I haven’t seen this aspect of the Fox coverage discussed since Tuesday – though I’m not reading the conservative sites whose writers might have been the most likely to actually be watching Fox that night. But this moment when Fox helped give Romney the shove shouldn’t be forgotten.

Stopping genocide and the law of war

Just a brief thought about reading Philip Gourevitch's book on the Rwandan genocide, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (1998).

The brief thought begins with this: a lot of people look pretty bad in this book, beginning of course with the murderous practitioners of Hutu Power politics, but continuing to include the French (patrons of the Hutu rulers of the country), the United States (fiddling while Rome burned), and human rights organizations (unable to distinguish victims from murderers).

But in one sense the most unsettling feature of these events is what they seem to have taught the United States and perhaps the world as well. If it is intolerable to permit genocide to occur, then when it is threatened you must act, and if necessary by the use of military force. Otherwise you tolerate the intolerable.

That's what Bill Clinton declined to do when the US bombed Yugoslavia to protect people in Kosovo from their own state. Clinton acted despite the lack of authorization from Congress, in the clearest violation of our War Powers Resolution ever -- but Barack Obama's support for intervention in Libya, similarly motivated, is the next clearest case. And it is not simple to discern in the United Nations charter, which appears to permit the use of force only in self-defense, a lawful basis for the use of force to block evil governments from murdering their own people -- yet such interventions seem increasingly to have found a rationale in a duty to protect.

The prospect of genocide compels such steps. But one result is to lower the always modest legal barriers, national and international, against war.