Why a Duck?

Now that he's lame, Obama sells himself at an exorbitant price.

By JAMES TARANTO

What's a duck worth?

We last contemplated that question last summer, in connection with the election for Illinois's Eighth Congressional District. Our answer at the time, "about $20," is what we pay for a whole Long Island duckling, at $3.99 a pound. But it turns out that a lame duck is more expensive than a dead one, and by several orders of magnitude.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Barack Obama has converted his campaign--originally known as Obama for America, then (in its incarnation as the 2012 campaign) as Organizing for America--into "a tax-exempt 'social welfare group,' " now styled Organizing for Action. The new OFA is a corporation whose operations (though not its contributions) are exempt from taxation under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Here's the Times's most eyebrow-raising revelation:

Giving or raising $500,000 or more puts donors on a national advisory board for Mr. Obama's group and the privilege of attending quarterly meetings with the president, along with other meetings at the White House. Moreover, the new cash demands on Mr. Obama's top donors and bundlers come as many of them are angling for appointments to administration jobs or ambassadorships.

Half a mil for this lame duck works out to a bit less than $3,000 a pound. When asked at yesterday's White House daily briefing if the report was true, White House press secretary Jay Carney "was vague," the Washington Post reports. Thus it's reasonable to surmise that OFA will indeed be selling access to the president for $500,000.

Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto on Organizing for America's charging $500,000 for the opportunity to meet President Obama. Photos: Getty Images

Our immediate reaction is that if this isn't illegal, it ought to be. But on further consideration, it seems to us it's no different in principle from a candidate's inducing people to donate money by appearing at a fund-raising dinner, with perhaps a private photo-op for the top donors.

The difference is that because Obama is a lame duck, the amount of money involved is a lot bigger. (To adapt an old punch line: We've already established what you are, Mr. President. Now we're just haggling over the price.) Federal law prohibits any donor from giving more than $5,200 to a candidate in a given election cycle. The limit for contributions to political parties is an order of magnitude higher, at $32,400. But there's no limit on contributions to a 501(c)(4) corporation. OFA could charge $5 million for access to the president if the market would bear it.

One may think of the limits on campaign contributions as price controls on access to politicians. But they apply only to candidates for federal office. A 501(c)(4) couldn't have sold access to the president before his re-election, because that would have constituted "coordination" with the campaign, which is illegal.

Republican election lawyer Robert Kelner tells the Times that Obama has found "a rather simple loophole in the otherwise incredibly complex web of government ethics regulations that are intended to insulate government officials from outside influence." It's a loophole that applies only to lame-duck officeholders, and probably only to lame-duck presidents, since members of Congress are subject to a host of internal ethics restrictions.

C-Span/BuzzFeed.com

Obama in 2008

BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski unearths a clip of then-Sen. Obama in 2008 railing against " 'the cynics, and the lobbyists, and the special interests' who 'write the checks' and 'get the access while you' "--the poor suckers in the audience--" 'get to write a letter.' " Quoth candidate Obama: "They think they own this government, but we're here today to take it back." They've taken it back, all right, and they're milking it for all it's worth.

Common Cause--which describes itself as "nonpartisan, grassroots organization dedicated to restoring the core values of American democracy, reinventing an open, honest, and accountable government that works for the public interest, and empowering ordinary people to make their voices heard" and is in fact a 501(c)(4) corporation itself--put out a statement today demanding that Obama close OFA down. Good luck with that.

In his State of the Union address three years ago, Obama notoriously dressed down the Supreme Court for having decided, in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that the First Amendment protects the political speech of corporations, including 501(c)(4)s. Which raises an interesting question: To what extent is the re-formed OFA meant to capitalize on Citizens United?

The ruling applied only to federal regulation of speech. It would have been just as legal for a 501(c)(4) to sell access to a lame-duck president in this manner if Citizens United had gone the other way. But it seems unlikely Obama would have gone the 501(c)(4) route absent Citizens United, which frees the organization from FEC scrutiny of its speech.

In yesterday's press briefing, Carney said that OFA "will not be engaged in political campaign-related activities." That's an ambiguous statement, but we suspect he means simply that it will not coordinate with any campaign for federal office--which, as noted above, it is legally prohibited from doing anyway.

But what if, in 2016, OFA emerges as an independent voice running ads urging a vote for whoever is the Democratic nominee for president? In that case, that nominee will have a huge advantage over his Republican opponent: support from an organization that can collect unlimited donations and has the clout of the White House behind it.

Barack Obama's exorbitant new price tag is evidence of the futility of trying to keep money out of politics. Money will find a way in, and a complex system of regulations only gives an advantage to politicians who are devious enough to find means of circumventing them. Better to repeal all campaign-finance restrictions, possibly excluding those requiring public disclosure of contributions, to even the field for relatively artless candidates.

September 4, 2012 (But worth reading at anytime)

By George Friedman

The end of Labor Day weekend in the United States traditionally has represented the beginning of U.S. presidential campaigns, though these days the campaign appears to be perpetual. In any case, Americans will be called on to vote for president in about two months, and the question is on what basis they ought to choose.

Many observers want to see intense debate over the issues, with matters of personality pushed to the background. But personality can also be viewed as character, and in some ways character is more important than policy in choosing a country's leadership.

Policy and Personality

A candidate for office naturally lays out his plans should he win the election. Those plans, which may derive from an ideology or from personal values, represent his public presentation of what he would do if he won office. An ideology is a broadly held system of beliefs -- an identifiable intellectual movement with specific positions on a range of topics. Personal values are more idiosyncratic than those derived from an ideology, but both represent a desire to govern from principle and policy.

As we all know, in many cases the presentation of intentions has less to do with what the candidate would actually do than it does with what he thinks will persuade the voters to vote for him. But such a candidate, possessing personal ambition more than principle, would not be opposed to doing what he said, since it suited the public. He has no plans himself beyond remaining in office.

Then there are those who profoundly believe in their policies. They sincerely intend to govern based on what they have said. This is what many think elections ought to be about: ideas, policies, ideologies and beliefs. Thus, in the case of the current American election, many are searching for what the candidates believe and asking whether they actually mean what they say.

In the United States and other countries, policy experts decry the fact that the public frequently appears ignorant of and indifferent to the policies the candidates stand for. Voters can be driven by fatuous slogans or simply by their perception of the kind of person the candidate is. The "beauty pageant" approach to presidential elections infuriates ideologues and policy experts who believe that the election should not turn on matters as trivial as personality. They recognize the personal dimension of the campaign but deplore it as being a diversion from the real issues of the day.

But consider the relationships between intentions and outcomes in American presidencies. During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush made the case that the American war in Kosovo, undertaken by President Bill Clinton, was a mistake because it forced the United States into nation-building, a difficult policy usually ending in failure. There is every reason to believe that at the time he articulated this policy, he both meant it and intended to follow it. What he believed and intended turned out to mean very little. His presidency was determined not by what he intended to do but by something he did not expect nor plan for: Sept. 11, 2001.

This is not unique to Bush. John F. Kennedy's presidency, in terms of foreign policy, was defined by the Cuban missile crisis, Lyndon Johnson's by Vietnam. Jimmy Carter's presidency was about the Iranian hostage crisis. None of these presidents expected their presidency to be focused on these things, although perhaps they should have. And these were only the major themes. They had no policies, plans or ideological guidelines for the hundreds of lesser issues and decisions that constitute the fabric of a presidency.

Consider Barack Obama. When he started his campaign, his major theme was the need to end the Iraq war, but soon after Labor Day in 2008, the Iraq issue had become secondary to the global financial crisis. It was not clear that Obama had any better idea than anyone else as to how to handle it, and by the time he took office, the pattern of dealing with it had been established by the Bush administration. The plan was to prevent the market from inflicting punishment on major financial institutions because of the broader consequences and to redefine the market by flooding it with money designed to stabilize these institutions. Obama continued and intensified this policy.

Frequently, a campaign's policy papers seem to imply that the leader is simply in control of events. All too often, events control the leader, defining his agenda and limiting his choices. Sometimes, as with the Sept. 11 attacks, it is a matter of the unexpected redefining the presidency. In other cases, it is the unintended and unexpected consequences of a policy that redefine what the presidency is about. Johnson's presidency is perhaps the best case study for this: His policy in Vietnam grew far beyond what he anticipated and overwhelmed his intentions for his time in office. No president has had a clearer set of policy intentions, none was more initially successful in adhering to those intentions and few have so quickly lost control of the presidency when unintended consequences took over.

Fortune and Virtue

Machiavelli argues in The Prince that political life is divided between fortuna, the unexpected event that must be dealt with, and virtu, not the virtue of the religious -- the virtue of abstinence from sin -- but rather the virtue of the cunning man who knows how to deal with the unexpected. None can deal with fortuna completely, but some can control, shape and mitigate it. These are the best princes. The worst are simply overwhelmed by the unexpected.

People who are concerned with policies assume two things. The first is that the political landscape is benign and will allow the leader the time to do what he wishes. The second is that should the terrain shift the leader will have time to plan, to think through what ought to be done. Ideally, that would be the case, but frequently the unexpected must be dealt with in its own time frame. Crises frequently force a leader to go in directions other than he planned to or even opposite to what he wanted.

Policies -- and ideology -- are testaments to what leaders wish to do. Fortune determines the degree to which they will get to do it. If they want to pursue their policies, their political virtue -- understood as cunning, will, and the ability to cope with the unexpected -- are far better indicators of what will happen under a leader than his intentions.

Policies and ideology are, in my view, the wrong place to evaluate a candidate. First, the cunning candidate is the one least likely to take his policy statements and ideology seriously. He is saying what he thinks he needs to say in order to be elected. Second, the likelihood that he will get the opportunity to pursue his policies -- that they are anything more than a wish list casually attached to reality -- is low. Whether or not a voter agrees with the candidate's ideology and policies, it is unlikely that the candidate-turned-leader will have the opportunity to pursue them.

Bush wanted to focus on domestic, not foreign policy. Fortune told him that he was not going to get that choice, and the beliefs he had about foreign policy -- such as nation-building -- were irrelevant. Obama thought he was going to rebuild the close relationship with the Europeans and build trust with the Arab world. The Europeans had many greater problems than their relationship with the United States, and the Islamic world's objection to the United States was not amenable to Obama's intentions. In the end, both of their presidencies resembled their campaign policies only incidentally. There was a connection, but for neither did the world go as expected.

The Question of Character

When Hillary Clinton was competing with Obama for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination, she ran a television commercial depicting a 3 a.m. phone call to the White House about an unexpected foreign crisis. The claim Clinton was making was that Obama did not have the experience to answer the phone. Whether the charge was valid or not is the voter's responsibility to answer. However, implicit in the ad was an important point, which was that the character of a candidate was more important than his policy position. When woken in the middle of the night by a crisis, policies are irrelevant. Character is everything.

I will make no serious effort to define character, but to me it comprises the ability to dissect a problem with extreme speed, to make a decision and live with it and to have principles (as opposed to policies) that cannot be violated but a cold-blooded will to do his duty in the face of those principles. For me, character is the competition within a leader who both wants power and wants something more. His precise position on the International Monetary Fund is not really relevant. His underlying sense of decency is, along with an understanding of how to use the power he achieved.

If this is vague and contradictory, it is not because I haven't thought about it. Rather, of all of the political issues there are, the nature of character and how to recognize it is least clear. It is like love: inescapable when you encounter it, fragile over time, indispensable for a fully human life. Recognizing character in a leader would appear to me the fundamental responsibility of a voter.

The idea that you should vote for a leader based on his policy intentions is, I think, inherently flawed. Fortune moots the most deeply held policies and the finest leader may not reveal his intentions. Lincoln hid his intentions on slavery during the 1860 campaign. German Chancellor Angela Merkel never imagined the crisis she is facing when she ran for office. Intentions are hard to discern and rarely determine what will happen.

The issues that George W. Bush and Barack Obama had to deal with were not the ones they expected. Therefore, paying attention to their intentions told us little about what either would do. That was a matter of character, of facing the unexpected by reaching into his soul to find the strength and wisdom to do what must be done and abandon what he thought he would be doing. The grace and resolution with which a leader does this defines him.

I think that those who obsess over policies and ideologies are not wrong, but they will always be disappointed. They will always be let down by the candidate they supported -- and the greater their initial excitement, the deeper their inevitable disappointment. It is necessary to realize that a leader of any sort cannot win through policy and ideology, and certainly not govern through them unless he is extraordinarily fortunate. Few are. Most leaders govern as they must, and identifying leaders who know what they must do is essential.

We study geopolitics, and geopolitics teaches that reality is frequently intractable, not only because of geography but because of the human condition, which is filled with fortune and misfortune, and rarely allows our lives to play out as we expect. The subjective expectation of what will happen and the objective reality in which we live are constantly at odds. Therefore, the tendency to vote for the candidate who appears to have deeper character, in the broadest sense of the term, would appear to me less frivolous than voting on the basis of ideology and policy. Both of those will and always do disappoint.

As to the question of who has the greatest character in this election, I have no greater expertise than any of my readers. There is no major in character at any university, nor a section on character in newspapers. The truth of democracy is that on this matter, none of us is wiser than any other.

Reprinting or republication of this report on websites is authorized by prominently displaying the following sentence, including the hyperlink to Stratfor, at the beginning or end of the report.

Bedford Matters

Thursday, February 28, 2013

What's A Duck Worth?