"President Barack Obama... claimed the right to kill U.S. citizens abroad without trial, used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers and expanded domestic counterterrorism."

"He helped perfect the arsenal that Trump would later inherit. It was the left, not the right, that normalized censoring disfavored online speech during the pandemic, often using intelligence-linked partners to do so. It was establishment liberals who applauded when the FBI investigated Trump-world operatives — not on the basis of principle, but because they liked the target. Now the weapon is back in circulation, only in different hands.... That’s how weapons work.... Power, once created and normalized, rarely stays dormant — and never stays partisan...."

From "Trump is using weapons that liberals helped build," by Vinnie Rotondaro (at The Hill).

ADDED: It's as though Trump is saying: I am your mirror image — don't you hate it?

"Pelosi promised a narrow, expedited impeachment, and that’s what the House will deliver: a targeted effort centered on a single act of malfeasance."

"It’s been a fast-paced process meant to satisfy liberal activists without alienating moderate members worried about support from swing voters. Once it’s completed, Pelosi can say that Democrats ran a sober investigation and found definitive evidence of wrongdoing. She can even say that this wasn’t an obstacle to getting things done — it was hardly an accident that after announcing the articles of impeachment, Pelosi also announced that the House would vote to approve the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, President Trump’s renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Pelosi wants to get to the bottom of the president’s wrongdoing and she wants to protect her moderate members. But a quick, narrow impeachment isn’t the way to go.... Individual Democrats might have run on health care in 2018 and other 'kitchen table' issues, but it was anti-Trump energy that put these districts within reach, and it will be anti-Trump energy that drives the outcome next year. If the president is unpopular — if he’s mired in controversy — Democrats will likely win. If it’s the reverse, if Trump can overcome scandal and recover ground with some voters, he’ll win re-election. And those vulnerable House Democrats? They’ll lose, along with the party’s nominee. The quick impeachment... hands the process to the Republican Senate and its majority leader, Mitch McConnell... The better alternative — the stronger alternative — is to wait.... If Democrats aren’t compelled by the reality of broad, pervasive corruption, then they should be compelled by the politics of a longer, more deliberate impeachment process."

Writes Jamelle Bouie — in "Two Articles of Impeachment for Trump Are Nowhere Near Enough/The House should take its own sweet time and investigate many more aspects of the president’s perfidious behavior" — openly discussing the impeachment in terms of electoral politics.

If the President's alleged action — pushing Ukraine to investigate Biden solely for his own political advantage — is "perfidious," then the House Democrats' political calculations around impeachment are perfidious.

I guess Bouie assumes only Trump haters will read his column, because it just doesn't make sense for anyone considering believing the Democrats' assertions about their channeling somber values from the Framers and earnestly striving to save the Republic.

Bouie goes on to say "There’s no reason for Democrats to end things now. They have enough material to keep the pressure through the new year." But the whole point of using impeachment rather than allowing normal electoral politics to play out over the course of next year is that it's intolerable to allow this dangerous, harmful President to remain in power. He's abusing his power, and the abuse must stop. If that's not true, and the Democrats are using the impeachment power to inflict political damage on the President, then the Democrats are themselves abusing power. Bouie seems to be advising the Democrats to lean into abusing power and get the most out of it.

Here's Bouie's last paragraph:

Democrats, in other words, can use the power of impeachment to set the terms of the next election — to shape the national political landscape in their favor. In a political culture governed by negative partisanship and hyperpolarization, restraint won’t save the Democratic majority. But a relentless anti-Trump posture — including comprehensive investigations and additional articles of impeachment — might just do the trick.

Does he not hear what he is saying?! He's telling Democrats to drop the pretense of principle and patriotism and go all out for political advantage.

ADDED: 2 afterthoughts:

1. Writing "advising the Democrats to lean into abusing power and get the most out of it" made me think of the famous Patrick Henry line: "If this be treason, make the most of it." Impeachment enthusiasts can say: If this be abuse of power, make the most of it. Speaking of channeling the giants of the Framer generation. But Henry was not one of the Constitution's Framers. He was their opponent. He thought they were up to perfidy.

2. "Perfidy" means "Deceitfulness, untrustworthiness; breach of faith or of a promise; betrayal of trust; treachery" (OED). Notice the syllable "fi" — Latin for "faith." What is the faith here that is being broken? Everything about electoral politics is antithetical to faith. Where is the faith? I think in many Americans there is faith. We saw it in the Tea Party movement, and Trump absorbed and echoed that faith. In his time, before the emergence of the Tea Party, Obama expressed that faith...



The last 2 winners of the Presidency understood and repurposed the people's faith. If they'd done anything more profoundly sincere, they would have been too naive to be President, but if they'd done anything less, they would not have won.

Christopher J. Scalia writes "Trump is a pragmatist, too. That’s the problem."

The son of Justice Scalia, who works at a PR firm in Washington, has this in The Washington Post:

“Whatever works” is the unofficial slogan of pragmatists. It also sounds a lot like Trump, who has promised to fix everything from health care to trade with China by making “great deals for this country.”...
Clinton invokes the term [pragmatism] to mean finding solutions based on her knowledge of, and her experience in, the political establishment. Trump, meanwhile, wants to tear down the establishment. In fact, because pragmatism implies impatience and frustration with the usual ways of doing business, it can involve breaking a system rather than working within it....

Obama, too, realizes that pragmatism doesn’t need to involve compromise. Perhaps the peak (or nadir) of the president’s pragmatism is his 2014 vow that he wouldn’t wait “for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.” The separation of powers is dusty dogma — git r done!...

[T]he word’s generally positive connotations could very well lend Trump that always-coveted air of gravitas, gilding his unpredictable and inconsistent ideas with a semblance of respectability and intellectual seriousness.

ADDED: Reminds me of the way Justice Scalia used to take umbrage at Justice Breyer.

The top 5 — most viewed — posts of the past week.

5. "A very long post about what Donald Trump said about libel in his interview with the Washington Post editorial board."

4. "Obama derides the 'sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist.'"

3. "WaPo seems surprised that people regard yoga in school as an Establishment Clause problem."

2. "The Washington Post reporter who — based on a single word, 'beautiful' — said Trump 'hit on' her."

1. "Somehow Trump has rigged it so that anti-Trump ads work as pro-Trump ads."

Obama derides the "sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist."

"Oh, you know, you're a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you're some crazy communist that's going to take away everybody's property."

Those may be "interesting intellectual arguments" — "socialist theory or capitalist theory" — but it's better to "be practical and just choose from what works."

He was speaking in Argentina, and he repeated what he'd said to President Castro in Cuba:

"The United States has one big advantage... our Muslim populations — they feel themselves to be Americans."

"And there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition, that is probably our greatest strength. Now, it doesn't mean that we aren't subject to the kinds of tragedies we saw at the Boston Marathon. But that, I think, has been helpful. There are parts of Europe in which that's not the case, and that's probably the greatest danger that Europe faces, which is why as they... work with us to respond to these circumstances, it's important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems, but there also has to be a recognition that the stronger the ties of a... Frenchman of North African descent to French values, French republic, a sense of opportunity — that's gonna be as important, if not more important, in, over time, solving this problem."

President Obama (via Jaltcoh).

"The Obama administration is adamant that the president is acting within his powers to implement laws already passed by Congress..."

"... and to prioritize resources but officials won't reveal the legal reasoning until tonight's speech. Other Obama supporters were reluctant to speak publicly about the potential legal arguments ahead of the address."

Are educated, intelligent adults allowed to complain that they didn't get what Obama's smiling 2008 campaign persona made them feel they could get?

Ah, it's a free country. You can complain about anything you want, but you look foolish if you don't take responsibility for your own gullibility.

Thomas Frank interviews Cornel West:

Frank: I... remember... being impressed by Barack Obama who was running for president... I sometimes thought that he looked like he had what this country needed... That was a huge turning point, that moment in 2008, and my own feeling is that we didn’t turn.

West: No, the thing is he posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair.... 

Another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair? That's what I hoped I might get when I voted for Obama in 2008. He never assured us he'd be a left-winger, but some people — people who wanted that — projected their hope onto him, and of course, he invited everyone to see him as the embodiment of whatever it was they hoped for.

West: And we ended up with a brown-faced Clinton. 

That's crudely stated, and I wouldn't talk like that, but that's about exactly what I hoped for. A pragmatic centrist like Bill Clinton, and as a bonus, we get the first African American President. I didn't vote merely on that hope. It was also the case that John McCain lost me. It's always only a choice between 2 (or, rarely, 3) candidates. You can't get everything you want, and you can't know everything about what you are getting.

"Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?"

The New Republic promotes its "redesign" in email that says I "signed up to get an early look at." (I did?) I'm sent to this interview with Obama, which takes so absurdly long to load that I go off and write other posts before rediscovering the open tab. I see Obama's smiling eyes peeking out over the top of the headline "Barack Obama is Not Pleased." I pause and contemplate 2 things: 1. Do the redesigners not understand the rules of capitalization? and, 2. Did they intend to allude to the famous Queen Victoria quote "We are not amused" — that is, did they intend to imply that Obama uses the royal "we"?

The subtitle is "The president on his enemies, the media, and the future of football," so I guess that's what he's "not pleased" about. I can see not being pleased by one's enemies, but how can he not be pleased by the media? The media fawn over him. What more can he want? And the future of football... I guess TNR threw that in to signal that there's going to be some fun somewhere on this page that took so long to load.

I scroll down past 6 paragraphs of introductory text to get to the actual interview, and that's the first question: "Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?" See what I mean about fawning? My first bite of the "redesign" is thoroughly cloying. It seems to be cloying even to Obama. He says:

I'm not sure it's an intellectual exercise as much as it is reminding myself of why I ran for president and tapping into what I consider to be the innate common sense of the American people.

I wish I could read what went through his head when he heard that question, before he said, in so many words, that's a stupid question. I think it was something like: These elite media guys are so in love with their idea of me as an intellectual. 

That first question was asked by Chris Hughes. It took 2 fawning elite media guys to interview Obama. The other one is Franklin Foer, and his first question is: "How do you speak to gun owners in a way that doesn't make them feel as if you're impinging upon their liberty?" Later, FF comes up with:

Sticking with the culture of violence, but on a much less dramatic scale: I'm wondering if you, as a fan, take less pleasure in watching football, knowing the impact that the game takes on its players.

Wait. We were talking about the "culture of violence" when we talked about gun rights and we're continuing to talk about "the culture of violence" when we talk about football?! Noted.

By the way, credit to FF for extracting from Obama that he shoots guns "all the time," "up at Camp David," where "we do skeet shooting." I never hear about Obama going to Camp David. Where are the photos of Obama skeet shooting at Camp David?

There's some mystery within that pronoun "we."

On "Meet the Press" today, Obama mostly came across as the moderate, pragmatic politician I like.

Now, I'm not a sucker for mere posing, and in fact, I get suspicious when I hear what are simply assertions of pragmatism:

But generally if you look at how I've tried to govern over the last four years and how I'll continue to try to govern, I'm not driven by some ideological agenda. I am a pretty practical guy. And I just want to make sure that things work. And one of the nice things about never having another election again, I will never campaign again, is I think you can rest assured that all I care about is making sure that I leave behind an America that is stronger, more prosperous, more stable, more secure than it was when I came into office.

Well, no, I'm not going to rest assured. Much as I would love these statements to be true, they make me nervous. And that assurance came right after the most partisan thing he said in the whole interview. The moderator, David Gregory, had asked Obama how "frustrated" he was about the difficulty of getting things done with Congress. Gregory asserted that people were constantly coming up to him saying "Don't they realize, all of them, the president, Republicans and Democrats, how frustrated we all are?" And President Obama showed a little irritation:

Well, I think we're all frustrated. The only thing I would caution against, David, is I think this notion of, "Well, both sides are just kind of unwilling to cooperate." And that's just not true. I mean if you look at the facts, what you have is a situation here where the Democratic party, warts and all, and certainly me, warts and all, have consistently done our best to try to put country first.

Country first. Where'd he come up with that slogan?

Then Obama started inching away from this assertion that the Democrats are better. He shifts to more neutral boilerplate about trying "to work with everybody involved to make sure that we've got an economy grows" and "Make sure that it works for everybody. Make sure that we're keeping the country safe." Then he retreats again, making abstract concessions (in question form):

And does the Democratic party still have some knee jerk ideological positions and are there some folks in the Democratic party who sometimes aren't reasonable? Of course. That's true of every political party.

So are the Democrats better or not? He's melted into squishy blandness. And it's exactly here that he does the not-an-ideologue/practical-guy riff that appears at the beginning of this post.

Gun control and the "common sense" meme.

I got 19,300 results from a Google news search for "common sense" and "Sandy Hook."

To be fair, not all of the "common sense" is a characterization of gun regulation proposals. Here's "Parenting common sense and solace," for example. And here's one referring to "the common-sense procedures" that schools can put in place — and that in fact were in place at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But most of them seem to be about "common sense" gun control.

Why is "common sense" the meme of choice?

1. The massacre itself feels senseless, and we want things to make sense. Our fervent desire for sense about what happened in the past makes us amenable to related ideas for making sense. Politicians and policymakers step forward to fulfill/manipulate this need for meaning.

2. To say that this "sense" is "common" is to say: a. It's easy, relax, and see what is right in front of your eyes, and b. This conversation is over, and only weird/bad people are cluttering it with other ideas. "Common sense," by offering closure and comfort, seems well-meaning and helpful, but it is also manipulative and power-enhancing.

3. "Common sense" says: I'm moderate. I'm not about banning and confiscating guns, but doing a few modest things that will constrain the bad people of this world without burdening the good people (like you). In that, it's similar to "balanced approach," which is getting a workout in connection with the "fiscal cliff" negotiations. Those who want more taxes — only for the bad guys, not for you! — want to look sensible and moderate. It's those other people who are unbalanced.

4. "Common sense" is a quintessentially American frame of mind. It was the title of the pamphlet Thomas Paine wrote in 1775, stirring up revolutionary fervor. It was completely incendiary and treasonous. And it led to quite a bit of gun violence.

There were those in high places who, while in agreement with Paine's sentiments, voiced criticism of his method. John Adams, ... in his Thoughts on Government wrote that Paine's ideal sketched in Common Sense was "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work."

Ah! So balanced approach has deep roots too. We are a pragmatic people, and we like practical proposals. We're amenable to arguments framed as balanced and common sense. But if we are indeed practical, we know these are propaganda words, and we look on them with suspicion.

President Obama, may I give you some campaign advice?

I'm independent, moderate, and pragmatic, and I voted for you in 2008 because I thought I saw those qualities in you. I still see those qualities in you, but the you that has those qualities is one of two Obamas, and the other Obama — Radical Lefty Obama — is a person I will not vote for.

I think you alternate between these 2 personas, and I sense that you've done it for so long that it feels normal and comfortable to you, but I want to urge you to pack up Radical Lefty Obama and stow him away with the rest of your Harvard Law School memorabilia. I know you — the Moderate Obama — have impressed some very useful people over the years by parading about as Radical Lefty Obama.

Like yesterday, you gave that Republicans-are-extremists speech, and the New York Times loved it:

Mr. Obama provided a powerful signal on Tuesday that he intends to make this election about the Republican Party’s failure to confront, what he called, “the defining issue of our time”: restoring a sense of economic security while giving everyone a fair shot, rather than enabling only a shrinking number of people to do exceedingly well. His remarks promise a tough-minded campaign that will call extremism and dishonesty by name.

Notice how, in expressing its love, the NYT portrayed Radical Lefty Obama as Moderate Obama. It's Moderate Obama that American voters find so appealing. You don't need all that left-wing economics and race-and-gender demagoguery. I think what people like about you — you, who are famously, sublimely likeable — is the normal person who seems to be in harmony with everyone. We — many of us — voted for you because you seemed to offer to bring us together, to end the rancor.

Be that Obama.

Note to Mitt Romney: If Obama doesn't want to be that Obama, you can be that guy.

"What the academy is doing, as far as I can tell... is largely of no use or interest to people who actually practice law."

Said Chief Justice John Roberts, in a quote that sprang to mind when I read this from Gordon Smith (via Instapundit):

[Some old lawprof once said:] "To become a great law professor, one must write a casebook, a treatise, and a Restatement ... Seavey never wrote a treatise."

... It is impossible to imagine anyone giving Scott's advice to a young professor today. The sort of doctrinal synthesis that lies at the heart of casebooks, treatises, and Restatements is not highly valued among today's law professors, even though it has real-world value.

What is the measure of a great law professor today? The highest achievement of a law professor today is creating a new concept or theory that is used widely by other academics in the field....

Lawprofs injecting other lawprofs with theories. It sounds unsanitary, but it's a closed system, so what could go wrong? It's not as if a law professor is going to break out and grasp massive power in the actual real world. Imagine a lawprof as President! It's absurd!

Aw, come on. Seriously. Barack Obama wasn't a law professor law professor. Did he ever try to create a new concept or theory for other lawprofs to use in the sickly circulatory system of academia? Absolutely not. He was always organizing and operating in the political world.

Bill Maher about Barack Obama: "I think he's a centrist the way he's a Christian... not really."

Via Instapundit:



And Cornel West says "being a Christian is not a political orientation for the President." Oh, thanks for putting it that way. An apt turn of words, Cornel. Because that's exactly what I think Obama's Christianity is: a political orientation.

My source? I said it before:

My source is "Dreams from My Father," chapter 14. While working as a community organizer, Obama was told that it would "help [his] mission if [he] had a church home" and that Jeremiah Wright "might be worth talking to" because "his message seemed to appeal to young people like [him]." Obama wrote that "not all of what these people [who went to Trinity] sought was strictly religious... it wasn't just Jesus they were coming home to." He was told that "if you joined the church you could help us start a community program," and he didn't want to "confess that [he] could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." He was, he writes, "a reluctant skeptic." Thereafter, he attends a church service and hears Wright give a sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope" (which would, of course, be the title of Obama's second book). He describes how moved he was by the service, but what moves him is the others around him as they respond to a sermon about black culture and history. He never says he felt the presence of God or accepted Jesus as his savior or anything that suggests he let go of his skepticism. Obama's own book makes him look like an agnostic (or an atheist). He respects religion because he responds to the people who believe, and he seems oriented toward leveraging the religious beliefs of the people for worldly, political ends.

Why won't the Obama say that polar bears are endangered and thus make it possible to use the Endangered Species Act to deal with global warming?

"U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan sent the [Bush administration's] controversial listing decision back to the Obama administration in October, asking officials to clarify the language the agency used when it determined that polar bears aren’t 'endangered' under federal law. Environmentalists ... had hoped that Obama administration officials would ... protections to the species."

I'm guessing that wasn't changed because polar bears aren't endangered and because using the Endangered Species Act to fight global warming is a bad idea.

Why is Obama's plan to close Guantanamo "in shambles"?

David Remes, lawyer for 14 detainees, says:

“From the outside it appears to be in shambles because he was never sufficiently committed to the success of his own plan and, as a result, Republicans were able to mobilize to turn the issue against him and he provided the Congressional Democrats no leadership.”

I'm guessing it's in shambles because Obama faced the reality that closing Guantanamo is a bad idea.

"Defying President Obama, House Democrats vote not to bring up tax deal he negotiated with GOP in its current form."

CNN Breaking News.

Meade, immediately: "Oh, man! That's going to make bleeding-heart moderates like you like him even more."

Immediate Althouse: "Obama is being thrust into the arms of the onrushing GOP!"

Meade: "In the same way that H.W. befriended Bill Clinton, W is going to befriend Obama. You'll see them playing golf together. Maybe even mountain biking."

It's the Obama I voted for: Obama the Pragmatist.

Now, Rush Limbaugh was talking about how "the media is just beside itself over how pathetic [Obama's] performance was yesterday" in the news conference about the tax compromise. And Rush is saying that Obama "knows full well that he had a meltdown yesterday."

Here's the video:



Rush says he can tell that Obama...

... has been festering, this has been effervescing inside him, that he's unappreciated, that he did something nobody else has done, and they wanted it for a hundred years, and by golly he got it.  He didn't get everything he wanted, he got 99%, and they don't appreciate me,...

So he's essentially telling them, look, I gotta back off on some of this stuff if we're to get anything done.  And that infuriated 'em even more because the question was, "Where you gonna go to the mat, what are your core values?" And he withered.  He caved.  And that made them even angrier.  I know it's hard to comprehend.  But these people on the left, they are truly enraged.  It is a lifestyle.  They are never happy.  I looked at the comments on the Daily Kos website, they are hilarious.  But they're real.  And it went on for ten pages.  I mean they are just fit to be tied because Obama is not what they thought he was....

I must say... I watched that video clip earlier today, and I liked the Obama I saw there. You could say he's beaten down, but there's fire there. It's the fire of pragmatism. I see a sensible and strong man. I never believed in Obama the Messiah, and I fretted about the signs that he was a left-wing ideologue. But when it came down to a decision between Obama and McCain, in the midst of a terrible economic crisis, I put my trust in Obama. I said:

I worry about what awful innovations the new President will concoct in league with the Democratic Congress, but at this point, I'm more worried about McCain than Obama. 

I thought that Obama would have some independence from the Democrats in Congress and that he'd use his common sense and pragmatism to work out some solutions. The more he departs from left-wing ideology and struggles to get to good solutions, the more I like him.

When I watch that video, I don't see a melt-down at all. I see Obama coming into his own at last. I see the Obama I voted for.

“Neither Steve Breyer nor Ruth Ginsburg has much of a purchase on Tony Kennedy’s mind.”

That's actually the most embarrassing sentence in Larry Tribe's letter to Obama about who to nominate to the Supreme Court.

I love the use of the noun "purchase," meaning, not something you buy, but "A means of increasing power or influence" or "An advantage that is used in exerting one's power." That's the 5th definition of the noun in the 3d edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. Here are some other, related definitions:

2. A grip applied manually or mechanically to move something or prevent it from slipping.

3. A device, such as a tackle or lever, used to obtain mechanical advantage.

4. A position, as of a lever or one's feet, affording a means to move or secure a weight.

You get the idea of the image Tribe had of Kennedy's brain? If you read the whole letter — PDF — you'll see that Tribe thought Justice Souter had "purchase," and he was worried that without Souter, Kennedy would roll toward the "Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomos wing of the Court." He thought Elena Kagan — and not Sonia Sotomayor — would operate — as a tackle or lever? — to move "Tony Kennedy's mind."

Kagan, Tribe said, had a way of "gently but firmly persuading a bunch of prima donnas to see things her way in case after case." Of course, he was referring to the prima donna professors at Harvard Law School, and mainly talking about new faculty appointments, which is quite different from persuading Supreme Court Justices about interpretations of law. It's one thing to build a law school community where professors can spout diverse ideologies and still feel like it's a happy, functioning institution. It's quite another to amass votes for a legal proposition that produces an outcome in a case and binds all the courts in the United States.

And if the target of a light touch knows that the most powerful man in the world has selected that approach to prying his brain into a particular political direction, that target ought to become highly vigilant and not get played.

... I think it's clear that a Justice Kagan would be a much more formidable match for Justice Scalia than Justice Breyer has been... in the kinds of public settings in which it has been all to easy for Scalia to make his rigid and unrealistic formalism seem synonymous with the rule of law and to make Breyer's pragmatism seem mushy and unconstrained by comparison.

Tribe says Kagan will be "simultaneously progressive yet principled, pragmatic and yet constrained." That sounds like pragmatism. How does it not "seem mushy" like Breyer's pragmatism? Because it's asserted to be "constrained," while Breyer's pragmatism "seem[s]... unconstrained"? Because it's progressive — steadily aimed in one direction and not more subtly varied?

I'm sure Justice Kennedy doesn't need to be tipped off to this political scheme to clamber over the crusty crags of the convolutions of his brain. But Tribe's letter is amusing reading nonetheless.

The NYT trumpets that an academic has read all Obama's writings and "unearthed" a "philosophy"...

... but the philosophy is pragmatism.

To [Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg] the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism...

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said.

It's one thing for a philosopher to explain and promote pragmatism as a philosophy, but it's quite another to perceive that a given political character behaves and speaks in a pragmatic matter. Nearly all politics is pragmatic, but these politicians are not philosophers, unless you define "philosopher" down to a meaningless level. Touting Obama as a philosopher on this thin ground is the sort of inane idolatry of the President that I thought went out of style over a year ago.

Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”

All right, now I'm genuinely annoyed. Scalia's "good, old dead Constitution" sets up a system of government that allows us to go on, indefinitely, engaged in a conversation about what we want to do as a polity. Does the author of this NYT article, Patricia Cohen, not know the difference between legislation and the work of courts using the Constitution to limit what legislators can do? The notion of a living Constitution is about the scope of the courts' role restricting what democratic majorities can enact. Justice Scalia doesn't oppose the results of that democratic "conversation" that plays out in legislatures!

If you bother to read to the end of this article, you'll see that Cohen eventually gets around to my first point. But check out the weird introductory clause she uses:

As for liberal critics, Mr. Kloppenberg took pains to differentiate the president’s philosophical pragmatism, which assumes that change emerges over decades, from the kind of “vulgar pragmatism” practiced by politicians looking only for expedient compromise. (He gave former President Bill Clinton’s strategy of “triangulation” as an example.)

There's no detail about these "pains," so I have no idea what Kloppenberg did other than to acknowledge the weakness of his assertion that Obama's pragmatism deserves to be called a "philosophy." But why does this sentence begin "As for liberal critics"? It seems to have to do with the fact that Kloppenberg was giving a lecture in NYC and he had some critics in the audience. I can only guess that "liberals" is an appropriate way to refer to the human beings that show up for a lecture in New York City.

Not all of the disappointed liberals who attended the lecture....

Were there no disappointed conservatives?

...in New York were convinced that that distinction can be made so easily. T. J. Jackson Lears, a historian at Rutgers University, wrote in an e-mail that by “showing that Obama comes out of a tradition of philosophical pragmatism, he actually provided a basis for criticizing Obama’s slide into vulgar pragmatism.”

Ah! The liberals are sad that Obama lacks a crisper ideology.

And despite Mr. Kloppenberg’s focus on the president’s intellectual evolution, most listeners wanted to talk about his political record.

Sounds like Kloppenberg's lecture was not well-received. It all comes down to politics. Does that make the audience members pragmatists? Does that make them philosophers?