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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 diplomacy. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

If September 11 reset the George W. Bush presidency, the passage of health-care legislation has reset the Barack Obama presidency. After an entire year in which health-care reform dominated the agenda of the Obama White House, the President has now been presented – now that perhaps the most divisive issue on the Obama agenda has been temporarily settled – with an opportunity to reset the emerging narrative and priorities of his administration, and the tone of political debate in Washington.

Obama’s emerging blueprint for the next couple of months indicates a chastened president aware that he spent more political capital than he had expected to spend on an issue that was never at the top of his list of campaign promises of 2008, only to end up with a compromise health-care bill that repulsed Republicans and failed to amuse not a few liberal Democrats.

Obama now intends to find compromise between issues, not within them. The game plan now is to give some to the Republicans on some issues, like off-shore drilling, and some to the Democratic base on some issues, like nuclear disarmament. But to give to both sides on the same issue, Obama will likely no longer do. One thing the President has learned is that compromise on the same issue leaves a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth; patronage is most rewarding when it is distributed at different times to all parties, not simultaneously shared.

So this Thursday, the President meets with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Prague to sign a nuclear arms control agreement for both countries to reduce their arsenals by 30 percent. Later this month, Obama will host a Summit for world leaders on nuclear security. And Obama has installed union counsel Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board, much to the chagrin of business leaders.

Similarly, Obama is making overtures to the Republicans, though in smaller quantities. He has thrown in his support for oil drilling in parts of the Atlantic and Alaskan coasts as part of his “comprehensive energy policy.” And the administration looks set to reverse its position that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his henchmen be tried by a civilian court in New York and not in a military tribunal.

Whether or not Republicans appreciate the bone Obama has thrown to them, Obama appears to have learned a deeper lesson about politics and bipartisanship in Washington. American presidents typically do not thrive on single-issue politics, in part because bipartisanship is very difficult to achieve on the same issue because the best outcome that could be achieved is that no one gets what they want. When presidents put all their eggs in one basket, they appear parochial are unable to dodge blame when they fail to deliver on their signature issues, or

photo by The U.S. Army www.flickr.com

When I was a fifth grade classroom teacher, I remember struggling with teaching current events. I looked around for teaching strategies for current events and pop culture, but then I realized I just had to go with my gut. The biggest challenge was, of course, September 12, 2001 when I was scared to death to walk into that fifth grade classroom with my students’ huge eyes, scared faces, and confused minds. Our school counselor helped with teaching strategies, and I decided to tackle it head on with a journal prompt on the board that said, “Open your journals and write about anything you want, including what happened yesterday. If you don’t feel like writing a paragraph, you can draw, make a list, or even write some questions.” Students actually looked relieved when they saw this on the board–almost like, “Oh, thank goodness,she is going to talk about the terrorists’ attacks with us today because it is on our minds.”

I’ve been thinking about this subject a bit more now that I am out of the classroom on a regular basis and aware of several issues that everybody is talking about. Using teaching strategies for current events about the war in Afghanistan or the health care debate can range from journal entries to high school classroom debates to Powerpoint presentations or bulletin boards full of newspaper clippings. Talking about these issues in a history, social studies, or government class is appropriate, important, and probably satisfies part of the curriculum.

photo by R’Eyes www.flickr.com

But what do you do as a teacher at any level when current events such as the Tiger Woods scandal, Jon and Kate divorce, or even David Letterman confession are on everyone’s minds and your students’ lips? Do you do what I did on September 12th and just let them write about their thoughts and opinions and then discuss them in class? Do you tell them that it’s inappropriate for class? What do you do when these subjects come up? What do you do when you homeschool, turn on the computer, and the news headlines stare your children in the face? Do they want to talk about them?

I’m under the belief that it’s important to address issues head on, but you also have to be aware of the fact that some kids lead very sheltered lives, and they may not even know about the hot topic that most of the other kids are talking about. That’s why I think giving students open journal writing prompts at least once a week is the best. Kids and teens can write about their feelings about the current events, you can read them, and then you can decide what to discuss in class and what is good enough for just a journal entry. If kids really want to talk about these issues, then maybe you can eat lunch with them one day; or in elementary schools, you can talk with them at recess.

What do you do about teaching strategies for current events? How do you handle it when pop culture works its way into your classroom or even into your home and your kids want to discuss these news stories? Share with us, and let us learn from you!

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 Holder’s decision to conduct investigations on the CIA. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to conduct investigations on the CIA presents a serious dilemma for the Obama White House, which was at pains to point out that Holder’s decision was independently made. I think the White House is being honest here, because these investigations will only be a distraction from health-care reform. The bigger problem thrown into sharp relief here, however, is that democracies’ commitments to justice and the politics necessary to deliver electoral and governing solutions do not always sit happily together.

The pursuit of justice (which is state-sanctioned retribution) is inherently a backward looking process. It most look to the past in order to establish that a wrong was committed. And to put things bluntly, even when properly meted out, justice often offers only cold comfort to whom injury was inflicted. Especially in politics, such returns are slow in the coming, if they come at all.

If the pursuit of justice pulls us back in time, the conduct of politics pulls us into the future. Power today is a derivative of the anticipated store of power tomorrow, which is itself a function of whether today’s promises are fulfilled tomorrow. Politicians (in active service) don’t have time for the past, for they must protect their future. President Obama is looking ahead to the health-care battles to come in the Fall, and he does not want (nor does he need) to be pulled back to rehash a contest with the last administration in which voters already declared him a winner in 2008. Justice and Politics do not go well in this moment, and Obama knows full well that he has more to lose than he has to gain in Holder’s investigation. To stay in office, he must offer a politics of solutions, and not the politics of redemption that his liberal base wants.

Strangely enough, Dick Cheney is on the side of liberal Democrats on this one, at least in the sense that he understands that democratic countries are bad war-makers. The difference of course, is that Cheney believes that democratic ends can be met with undemocratic means (while some liberals believe that war is sport of kings, not democracies). In Cheney’s own words on Meet the Press in 2001: “We have to work the dark side, if you will. Spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world.” Cheney’s thorough-going ends-justifies-means philosophy is revealed in his interview with Chris Wallace. “They looked at this question of whether or not somebody had an electric drill in an interrogation session — it was never used on the individual,” Cheney said of the inspector general’s report. “Or that they had brought in a weapon — never used on the individual.” This cavalier attitude towards undemocratic means stems largely from a very sharp line differentiating “us” and “them” in the neoconservative world-view, a line that takes off from a commitment to protecting the demos in a democracy and a characterization of all others as outsiders to our social contract. This line is imperceptible to the liberal eye fixated on universal justice, which presumes the basic humanity of even a terrorist suspect.

Democrats really want to go for Cheney, but they will have to settle for the CIA; Cheney wants to protect his legacy, but he will have to settle for a proxy war. The politicization of justice and the justiciation of politics are reifiying the turf battles between CIA and FBI, the very cause of the intelligence failures that led to September 11 in the first place. The mere fact that we are airing our dirty laundry in public is already having a “chilling” effect on CIA agents and both Cheney and Holder are complicit in this. Justice and Politics are friends to democracy individually, but we are better off without one of them in this case.