Bush-Obama Transition

Peter Baker at NYT:

The world was a volatile place when President George W. Bush was leaving office. So on the way out the door, he and his national security team left a little advice for their successors:

India is a friend. Pakistan is not. Don’t trust North Korea or Iran, but talking is still better than not. Watch out for Russia; it covets the territory of its neighbor Ukraine. Beware becoming ensnared by intractable land wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. And oh yes, nation-building is definitely harder than it looks.

Fourteen years ago, Mr. Bush’s team recorded its counsel for the incoming administration of President Barack Obama in 40 classified memos by the National Security Council, part of what has widely been hailed by both sides as a model transition between presidents of different parties. For the first time, those memos have now been declassified, offering a window into how the world appeared to a departing administration after eight years marked by war, terrorism and upheaval.

Thirty of the memos are reproduced in “Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama,” a new book edited by Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s last national security adviser, along with three members of his staff, and set to be published by the Brookings Institution on Wednesday. The memos add up to a tour d’horizon of the international challenges that awaited Mr. Obama and his team in January 2009 with U.S. troops still in combat in two wars and various other threats to American security looming.

...

The memo on Russia concludes that Mr. Bush’s “strategy of personal diplomacy met with early success” but acknowledged that ties had soured, especially after Russia’s invasion of the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008. The memo presciently warned about Russia’s future ambitions.

“Russia attempts to challenge the territorial integrity of Ukraine, particularly in Crimea, which is 59 percent ethnically Russian and is home to the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, must be prevented,” the memo warned five years before Russian forces would seize Crimea and 13 years before they would invade the rest of the country. The memo added that “Russia will exploit Europe’s dependence on Russian energy” and use political means “to drive wedges between the United States and Europe.”

Low Approval of US Leadership

Julie Ray at Gallup:

In 20 of the 29 countries and areas that Gallup has results for so far in 2020, approval ratings of U.S. leadership are at new lows or they tie the previous lows.

Median approval across the 29 countries and areas stood at 18% in 2020, down from 22% for this same group in 2017. On its face, this decline is not good news for the next U.S. administration, but even worse news is the number of allies on the list of countries where approval dropped to historic lows: Ireland (20%), the United Kingdom (15%), Denmark (14%), Switzerland (10%), Germany (6%) and Iceland (5%).

NATO ally Albania stands out as the only country of the 29 where the U.S. earns majority approval -- and it typically gives the U.S. some of its highest marks -- but the 56% of Albanians who approve of U.S. leadership is also a new low.

...

It's too early to say that the U.S. is on tap to see its worst rankings ever for any year and what effect the U.S. election could have on the image of U.S. leadership. The global picture should be clearer by Inauguration Day in 2021 when most of Gallup's 2020 fieldwork in nearly 100 more countries should be complete.

However, as it stands today, President-elect Joe Biden will have a lot of repair work to do when he takes office in late January -- perhaps even more work than awaited President Barack Obama when he took over from a highly unpopular President George Bush.

Since Biden left office as vice president, approval ratings of U.S. leadership have dropped 51 percentage points among long-time ally Portugal, 44 points in the United Kingdom and 37 points in Germany. But Obama overcame similar deficits when he took office, which shows that it can be done.

Transitions

John Dickerson at The Atlantic:

In his new memoir, Barack Obama reveals that there was a terrorist threat on his Inauguration Day. As he addressed the nation, he was prepared to interrupt himself to read evacuation instructions for the millions gathered on the National Mall. Obama had been in the job just seconds, and he was experiencing his first stomach drop—the possibility of a mass-casualty event.

...

Transitions are hard for newly elected presidents, even under normal circumstances. “Almost all of them have foreign-policy ideas they come with,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told me when I interviewed her for my book on the presidency. “On day one, ‘I will,’ and on day one, they don’t, because it’s so complicated. They’re almost all frustrated because the world doesn’t accord with the world that they thought they were going to be able to shape. And you really can’t see that from the outside. Then you get in there and the stuff starts flowing.”

In addition to the surprises and tonnage of incoming challenges, simply starting the job is a gargantuan undertaking. It may help to imagine a presidential transition as a private-sector company going through a merger. With only two months of preparation, the new CEO must take over a $2 trillion enterprise with 4 million employees and hire 4,000 managers, 1,500 of whom have to be vetted by a hostile board of directors. Then, on his first day in the corner office, the new top man must be ready to face the most difficult challenges of running the business while simultaneously launching a brand refresh and implementing an entirely new strategic plan. Oh, and he’ll have to do all of his prep work through Zoom, during a pandemic spike that he’s supposed to manage between meetings about how to revive a crumpled economy. “Every day matters in a transition, and every day that is lost is more important than the previous day,” David Marchick, the director of the Center for Presidential Transition, told me. “You can’t make it up.”

Obama on the Constitution

Obama 2020 convention speech:

I'm in Philadelphia, where our Constitution was drafted and signed. It wasn't a perfect document. It allowed for the inhumanity of slavery and failed to guarantee women -- and even men who didn't own property -- the right to participate in the political process. But embedded in this document was a North Star that would guide future generations; a system of representative government -- a democracy -- through which we could better realize our highest ideals. Through civil war and bitter struggles, we improved this Constitution to include the voices of those who'd once been left out. And gradually, we made this country more just, more equal, and more free.

...
You can give our democracy new meaning. You can take it to a better place. You're the missing ingredient -- the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed.

Obama on the Man He Defeated

From President Obama's eulogy for Senator John McCain:

We didn't advertise it, but every so often over the course of my presidency, John would come over to the White House and we'd just sit and talk in the Oval Office, just the two of us. We would talk about policy, and we'd talk about family and we'd talk about the state of our politics. And our disagreements didn't go away during these private conversations -- those were real and they were often deep. But we enjoyed the time we shared away from the bright lights.

And we laughed with each other, and we learned from each other. And we never doubted the other man's sincerity or the other man's patriotism, or that when all was said and done, we were on the same team. We never doubted we were on the same team. For all of our differences, we shared a fidelity to the ideals for which generations of Americans have marched and fought and sacrificed and given their lives. We considered our political battles a privilege, an opportunity to serve as stewards of those ideals at home and do our best to advance them around the world.

We saw this country as a place where anything is possible. And citizenship as an obligation to ensure it forever remains that way. More than once during his career John drew comparisons to Teddy Roosevelt. I am sure it has been noted that Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" seems tailored to John. Most of you know it, Roosevelt speaks of those who strive, who dare to do great things, who sometimes win and sometimes come up short but always relish a good fight. A contrast to those cold, timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Isn't that the spirit we celebrate this week? That striving to be better, to do better, to be worthy of the great inheritance that our founders bestowed.

 So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It's a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that. Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that will ever come can depend on what you do today. What better way to honor John McCain's life of service than as best we can follow his example to this country. To prove that the willingness to get in the arena and fight for this country is not reserved for the few, it is open to all of us, and in fact it is demanded of all of us as citizens of this great republic.

Former Rivals on McCain

Our statement on the passing of Senator John McCain: pic.twitter.com/3GBjNYxoj5

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 26, 2018

Heavy hearts with the loss of a great friend. pic.twitter.com/dU6kDtScU4

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) August 26, 2018

"Some lives are so vivid, it is difficult to imagine them ended. Some voices are so vibrant, it is hard to think of them stilled. John McCain was a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order.” [...] Full statement by President George W. Bush https://t.co/FQVYWIUyGL pic.twitter.com/W8LCxJXRLi

— George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) August 26, 2018

Miles's Law: "A Bill The President Can Sign"

House GOP leaders oppose an effort to bring immigration reform to the House floor via a discharge petition.  The issue illustrates Miles's Law: where you stand depends on where you sit.  Partisan advantage determines where congressional leaders will stand on procedural issues.

Speaker Ryan said: “I want to have actual law and that means the White House has to be a part of this and it’s got to be a bill the president can sign ...What I don’t want to do is have a process that just ends up with a veto."

A few years ago, Ryan approved of sending the president bills that he would veto. On September 14, 2014, Scott Wong reported at The Hill:

Republicans plan to test President Obama’s willingness to use the veto pen if they capture control of the Senate in November, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in an interview with The Hill.

The Budget Committee chairman and 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee said Obama hasn't had to make tough decisions on vetoing legislation because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has shelved most of the bills sent over by the GOP-led House.

“Right now, Harry Reid is protecting the president from making difficult decisions,” Ryan said Thursday, “and I believe that we can unblock a number of things that should at least get to the president’s desk and make him make a decision.”

Ryan followed this plan by sending President Obama a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, knowing that he would veto it. 

State of the Union Audience

Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 1, 2018

John Wagner at WP:

That number matched a figure released by Nielsen based on viewership on 12 broadcast networks and cable channels.

But it was smaller than those who watched Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress last year (48 million) and smaller than those who watched former President Obama’s first State of the Union address in 2010 (48 million) and smaller than those who watched Obama’s joint session speech in 2009 (52 million).

The Nielsen numbers do not include data on streaming, which has significantly grown in popularity in recent years. But the figure Trump cites for Tuesday’s viewership does not include streaming data, which is difficult to measure.

Reacting to a Shooting

On January 12, 2011, President Obama spoke at a memorial for the victims of the Tucson shooting:

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations, to try to impose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we've seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health system. And much of this process of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do, it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "When I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we have to guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is, none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future. But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. That we cannot do. [Applause] That we cannot do.

As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let's use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.

Trump Transparency

John Wagner reports at The Washington Post:

The Trump administration announced Friday that it will not follow former president Barack Obama's policy of voluntarily disclosing the names of most visitors to the White House complex, citing “grave national security risks and privacy concerns.”

The announcement — from an administration that has faced pointed questions about its commitment to transparency — marks a significant shift from the Obama White House, which released the names of nearly 6 million visitors, including scores of lobbyists.

Why is @BarackObama spending millions to try and hide his records? He is the least transparent President--ever--and he ran on transparency.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2012

A Really Unpopular President

Erin Dooley reports at ABC:

President Trump's approval rating has fallen to 37 percent -- the lowest of his fledgling presidency, according to Gallup. His disapproval rating rose correspondingly, hitting 58 percent.

At this point in his first term, President Obama's approval rating was hovering in the low 60s, while President George W. Bush's was in the mid-50s. (Obama's approval rating would later sink to a low of 40 percent, while Bush bottomed out at 25 percent.)

In fact, Trump's current approval rating is lower than any other commander-in-chief at this point in his first term since Gallup started tracking the issue in 1945, the year Harry Truman took office.

Frank Newport writes at Gallup:

During Trump's time in office so far, encompassing a little less than two months, American Jews have given him a 31% job approval rating -- 11 percentage points below his overall average of 42% during the same period.

This below-average rating of the Republican president is not unexpected. The dominant predictor of how an American rates the president is partisan orientation, and Jews tilt heavily Democratic -- 64% identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (Jan. 20-March 15 data), while 29% identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.

Trump's 31% approval rating among Jews thus reflects this underlying partisan tilt, given that overall 84% of Republicans approve of Trump, compared with 10% of Democrats.

Ranking Presidents

From C-SPAN:

As the nation marks Presidents Day 2017, C-SPAN is releasing the results of its third Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, in which a cross-section of 91 presidential historians ranked the 43 former occupants of the White House on ten attributes of leadership.

As in C-SPAN's first two surveys, released in 2000 and 2009, Abraham Lincoln receives top billing among the historians. George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt retain their top five status, while Dwight Eisenhower moves into the top five for the first time.

Former President Barack Obama enters the ranks for the first time in the #12 position. Notably, his leadership category ratings range from #3 for "Pursued Equal Justice for All," to #39 for "Relations with Congress." His predecessor, George W. Bush, has benefitted somewhat from the passing of years: His ranking at #33, is up three places from our 2009 survey. Dwight Eisenhower also advanced three spots since 2009, moving to the #5 position from #8 overall. Bill Clinton remains unchanged at #15.

The biggest presidential loser from our 2009 survey is Andrew Jackson, who was #13 in 2009, and who now stands at #18 overall.

Three presidents continue to hold the same bottom rankings as they did in 2000 and 2009: James Buchanan remains in last place at #43, preceded by Andrew Johnson (#42), and Franklin Pierce (#41).

Note that they rank even lower than William Henry Harrison, who served for only one month. The most-average U.S. president, as rated by our historian participants is Ulysses S. Grant, who ranks 22 out of 43 presidents.

A team of academic advisors has guided C-SPAN for each of its three surveys: Dr. Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University; Dr. Edna Greene Medford, Professor of History, Howard University; and Richard Norton Smith, presidential historian and biographer. The team approved the ten criteria, the same used in C-SPAN's 2000 and 2009 Surveys, consulted on the list of invited participants, and supervised the reporting of the results. Full rankings for each of the 43 presidents as well as shareable/social media graphics are available at www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2017 .

Catholic Conspiracy Theorists and the Fake Tocqueville

The New American, the publication of the John Birch Society, reports on a group of Catholic conspiracy theorists who want Trump to investigate a plot by President Obama and others to overthrow Pope Benedict and replace him with Pope Francis.

The Catholic quintet began their missive to President Trump with the famous quote attributed to French historian Alexis de Tocqueville: “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” 

“While we share your stated goal for America,” they write, “we believe that the path to ‘greatness’ is for America to be ‘good’ again, to paraphrase de Tocqueville. We understand that good character cannot be forced on people, but the opportunity to live our lives as good Catholics has been made increasingly difficult by what appears to be a collusion between a hostile United States government and a pope who seems to hold as much ill will towards followers of perennial Catholic teachings as he seems to hold toward yourself.”

Not only is the theory farfetched (to put it mildly) but the Tocqueville quotation is fake.  As this blog has pointed out over and over, Tocqueville never wrote any such thing.

Back When the White House Checked Facts

Trump and his aides routinely lie to the public and do not bother to check their facts.  Meredith Bohen writes at Vox:

As a research associate in the Office of Communications, I quickly learned some things about the nature of facts in politics. First, that fact-checking is in-depth work. My co-workers and I pored over speech draft after speech draft, methodically verifying that every individual factual statement in any of the president’s prepared remarks was backed up by reputable sources. We worked closely with the speechwriting and policy departments to ensure that each fact the president said represented his views in an accurate, verifiable way. If we couldn’t back it up, it had to go. We thought through the possible counterarguments that people from both sides of the aisle could make to rebut our statements, and we made sure we were on as solid ground as possible.

When I say we checked every fact, that’s not an exaggeration. Because we hunted down anything that could be debated as true or false, a page or two of remarks could take hours to comb through. Sometimes the job could feel like overkill (like when I spent half a day trying to verify the number of Bo and Sunny cookies served at the White House holiday parties). We even vetted each individual who was mentioned in remarks — even if they had been dead for a thousand years, and even if they were eighth-graders, which can really feel like overkill. But most of the time, the work of fact-checking felt like a necessary part of upholding the integrity of both President Obama and the office of the presidency as a whole.

Obama: A Divider, not a Uniter

Jeffrey M. Jones reports at Gallup:

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama averaged 83% job approval among Democrats and 13% among Republicans. That 70-percentage-point party gap in job approval ratings easily eclipses the prior high -- 61 points for George W. Bush. All other presidents had party gaps of 55 points or less.

Although the extreme polarization in Obama's ratings could reflect his policies and approach to governing, it also reflects the era in which he governed. The last three presidents -- Obama, Bush and Bill Clinton -- and four of the last five (including Ronald Reagan) averaged greater than 50-point party gaps in their job approval ratings.

George H.W. Bush was the recent exception. He averaged 67% overall approval during his first three years as president, when the U.S. economy was strong, the Cold War was ending and he led a successful war effort against Iraq. In those years, the party gaps in his approval rating were between 32 and 34 points, typical of presidents prior to Reagan. His last year in office, when the economy struggled to emerge from a recession, the party gap was 54 points, similar to the polarization level for the most recent presidents.

Clemency

Pew reports:

Barack Obama ended his presidency having granted clemency to more people convicted of federal crimes than any chief executive in 64 years. But he also received far more requests for clemency than any U.S. president on record, largely as a result of an initiative set up by his administration to shorten prison terms for nonviolent federal inmates convicted of drug crimes.

Overall, Obama granted clemency to 1,927 individuals, a figure that includes 1,715 commutations and 212 pardons. That’s the highest total for any president since Harry S. Truman, who granted clemency 2,044 times – including 1,913 pardons, 118 commutations and 13 remissions – during his nearly eight years in office, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Department of Justice statistics.

Clemency refers to multiple forms of presidential mercy. The two most common are commutations, which completely or partially reduce sentences for those in prison or on community supervision, and pardons, which forgive past crimes and restore civil rights. Two less-common forms are remissions, which reduce financial penalties associated with convictions, and respites, which are temporary reprieves that are usually granted to inmates for medical reasons.

American Memory: 9/11 Tops the List

 Claudia Deane, Maeve Duggan and Rich Morin report at Pew:

Shared experiences define what it means to be an American. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were such a unifying event for modern Americans. Nothing else has come close to being as important or as memorable, according to a new survey conducted by Pew Research Center in association with A+E Networks’ HISTORY.

Roughly three-quarters (76%) of the public include the Sept. 11 terror attacks as one of the 10 events during their lifetime with the greatest impact on the country, according to a national online survey of 2,025 adults conducted June 16-July 4, 2016.

The perceived historic importance of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, span virtually every traditional demographic divide. Majorities of men and women, Millennials and Baby Boomers, Americans with college degrees and those without a high school diploma rate 9/11 as one of the 10 most historically significant events to occur during their lifetime. And while they seem to agree on little else this election year, the survey finds that more than seven-in-ten Republicans and Democrats name the attacks as one of their top 10 historic events.

The one exception to this pattern is the views of blacks and whites. While the Sept. 11 attacks easily top the list for whites, it shares the top spot with the election of President Barack Obama among blacks. Similarly, the civil rights movement ranks behind only the election of Obama and 9/11 on the list of most significant events for blacks but is absent from the top 10 lifetime events for whites.

A Not-So-Popular Transition

Jeffrey M. Jones reports at Gallup:

Americans are evenly divided in their assessment of the way Donald Trump is handling his presidential transition, with 48% approving and 48% disapproving. By contrast, 65% or more approved of the way the past three presidents-elect were handling their transitions at similar points in time, including 75% for Barack Obama in December 2008.

Net approval:

Clinton....+52%
Bush........+39%
Obama.....+58%
Trump..........0

The Regulation President

Binyamin Appelbaum and Michael D. Shear report at The New York Times:

In nearly eight years in office, President Obama has sought to reshape the nation with a sweeping assertion of executive authority and a canon of regulations that have inserted the United States government more deeply into American life.

Once a presidential candidate with deep misgivings about executive power, Mr. Obama will leave the White House as one of the most prolific authors of major regulations in presidential history.

Blocked for most of his presidency by Congress, Mr. Obama has sought to act however he could. In the process he created the kind of government neither he nor the Republicans wanted — one that depended on bureaucratic bulldozing rather than legislative transparency. But once Mr. Obama got the taste for it, he pursued his executive power without apology, and in ways that will shape the presidency for decades to come.

The Obama administration in its first seven years finalized 560 major regulations — those classified by the Congressional Budget Office as having particularly significant economic or social impacts. That was nearly 50 percent more than the George W. Bush administration during the comparable period, according to data kept by the regulatory studies center at George Washington University.

Moon, Cancer, Nixon, Obama

"Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources that they’ve had in over a decade. (Applause.) So tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. (Applause.) For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the families that we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all."  -- Barack Obama, State of the Union, January 12, 2016.

Nixon said the same thing 45 years ago:

"I will also ask for an appropriation of an extra $100 million to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer, and I will ask later for whatever additional funds can effectively be used. The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal." -- Richard Nixon, State of the Union, January 22, 1971