RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s a good bet that by now the entire foreign policy cosmos — from “the Blob” to the 27-year-old reporters — has read the New York Times magazine profile of Deputy National Security Advisor Benjamin Rhodes, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” The reporter, David Samuels, had extraordinary access to the White House, multiple well-placed sources and in his 9,500 word piece he provides plenty of attribution, including quotes from Rhodes himself. We get a detailed look, behind the White House facade, at Rhodes, “master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign policy narratives,” complete with his contempt for Congress, the press and the public; his manipulation of the media; and a case study of his “narrative” of lies concocted to grease a path for Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement — the unpopular, murky, amorphous and deeply dangerous Iran nuclear deal.

Freighted with the far-reaching effects of a major treaty, the Iran deal was never submitted by Obama to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Framed as an agreement with Iran, it was never signed by Iran. Sold by the administration as a transparent deal, it is turning out to be a slush heap of secrets. The real blob in this drama is the rolling sludge of presidential over-reach, White House fictions and raw abuse of public trust that has brought us everything from the indigestible “Affordable Care Act” to the Benghazi “video” narrative, to the Iran deal.

As the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports, leading members of Congress are calling on President Obama to fire Rhodes “over accusations the White House intentionally misled lawmakers and the American public about the contents of last summer’s comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran.”

In a letter to Obama, Senators Mark Kirk, John Cornyn and John Barrasso cite Rhodes’s statement to the New York Times that the White House peddled a phony narrative to sell the Iran deal because he considered it “impossible” for elected lawmakers to have “a sober, reasoned public debate, after which the members of Congress reflect and take a vote.” They note, if Rhodes “had conducted himself this way in a typical place of business outside Washington, where American taxpayers work, he surely would have been already fired or asked to resign.”

So, why does Ben Rhodes still have his job?

The broad answer involves the moral vertigo of modern Washington, the Instagram attention span of too many members of a Twitter-driven press corps, and the self-abasements of a culture in which the old American spirit of individual responsibility and free enterprise has been devolving — with many a prompt from President You-Didn’t-Build-That — into a selfie-snapping contest for “safe spaces” and “free stuff.”

In that context, dude, what difference does it make if Boy Wonder Ben Rhodes, speechwriter and “strategic communicator,” mind-melded with the President, carries on manufacturing and marketing the “narrative” that passes these days for foreign policy? Once you dispense with the baggage of reality, and its knock-on effects for those multitudes of lesser mortals who have never flown on Air Force One, what’s left is former White House staffer Tommy Vietor (“Dude, this was like two years ago”), buddy of Ben Rhodes, techno-chatting to one of Washington’s best reporters, Eli Lake, (who knows plenty) that he’s sure most folks outside of Washington think the Rhodes profile was just a “fascinating profile of a brilliant guy with a really cool job.” CONTINUE AT SITE

“Cleverness is not wisdom.”
— Euripides, Bacchae

What exactly has birthed the Pajama Boy aristocracy — our overclass of pretentious, inexperienced, and smug 30-something masters of the universe?

Prolonged adolescence? Affluence? The disappearance of physical chores and muscular labor? The collapse of traditional liberal education and the triumph of the therapeutic mindset? Disdain for or ignorance of life outside the Boston–New York–Washington corridor? Political correctness as a sort of careerist indemnity that allows one to live a sheltered and apartheid existence? The shift in collective values and status from production, agriculture, and manufacturing to government, law, finance, and media? The reinvention of the university as a social-awareness retreat rather than a place to learn?

During the showdown over Obamacare, the pro-Obama PAC Organizing for Action put out an ad now known as “Pajama Boy.” It showcased a young fellow in thick retro-rimmed glasses, wearing black-and-red plaid children’s-style pajamas, and sipping from a mug, with a sort of all-knowing expression on his face. The text urged: “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”

Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl Harbor.

In a case of life imitating art, Ethan Krupp, the Organizing for Action employee who posed for the ad, offered a self-portrait of himself that confirmed the photo image. He is a self-described “liberal f***.” “A liberal f*** is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views, and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he explains. “I won every argument but one.” I suspect that when Krupp boasts about “making opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he is referring to people of his own kind rather than trying such verbal intimidation on the local mechanic or electrician.

The most enduring and destructive superstition about American politics is that the president is “in charge of” the economy, and so it was no surprise to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday say that she’d put her husband “in charge of revitalizing the economy.” As my colleague Charles C. W. Cooke points out, this is an example of “talismanic” thinking, that what makes the world go ’round is having the tribal chieftain do that voodoo that he does so well.

There are some obvious problems with this line of thinking, the main one being that it is complete and utter undiluted poppycock.

It is true that the U.S. economy performed to general satisfaction during Bill Clinton’s presidency. But most of the big economic news of the 1990s had little or nothing to do with Bill Clinton, with government policies that were uniquely or mainly the work of Bill Clinton, or with the day-to-day management of public resources by the Clinton administration.

The Clinton-era boom was in no small part a continuation of the Reagan-era boom, which was, like the performance of the economy under previous and subsequent presidents, only partly a product of the president’s economic philosophy and policies. Two of the great economic-policy successes of the Reagan era — the taming of inflation and the bundle of reforms generally described as “deregulation” — were rooted in Carter-era policies. Ronald Reagan knew enough to understand that enduring the recession engineered by Paul Volcker and the Fed was necessary to wring inflation out of the economy, but he wasn’t terribly happy about it, and neither were voters: Reagan’s approval ratings were at 41 percent at the end of 1982, and his unpopularity cost Republicans a couple seats in the House. At the beginning of 1983, Reagan’s job-approval number was down to 35 percent. But in May of 1980, inflation had been 14.4 percent; in May of 1986, it was 1.5 percent, and Reagan’s approval number roughly doubled.

Was taming inflation Reagan’s doing? Volcker’s doing? Do we give Carter credit for choosing Volcker, or do we penalize him, knowing that he hadn’t wanted to do so but was pressured into it? Robert J. Samuelson and Paul Krugman have argued that out at some length, and the answer is inconclusive.

“Inconclusive” is the conclusion more often than not in these kinds of debates. The federal budget was in surplus (“primary surplus”) toward the end of the Clinton administration, as Mrs. Clinton points out. Why? Partly because of tax increases that Republicans fought vigorously against; partly because of spending controls that Democrats fought vigorously against; partly because of a stock-market bubble that liberated both the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans from making some really tough decisions.