I'd like to thank Charles Johnson for his excellent essay, The New Tribalism. In my book, Blowing Smoke, I found myself searching for a word to describe the vague web of race, religion, culture, and politics that the right wing has used to construct and exploit a new collective identity. I called it a new class-consciousness, but I think that Johnson's term tribalism more aptly captures the jumble of racial and social bonds that the right has used to mobilize white, Christian conservatives as a political bloc.

If you read below the fold of Johnson's article, you'll notice a number of vitriolic comments from readers. These commenters are not TPM regulars. They have been stalking Johnson around the Internet for years, literally. The one called diaryofdaedalus has tried to register at Johnson's blog under at least a dozen different aliases. He has his own blog that alternates between bashing Johnson and exposing the "myth of Serbian genocide." Apparently, he even chose the name Daedalus because Johnson used Icarus as a stage name in his former musical career.

Why such obsession? It's a bitter example of what happens when conservatives like Johnson challenge the bigoted rhetoric of the right wing. The explanation requires some back story.

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First, I want to thank Michael for inviting me to participate in this book club, and for the kind words about me in Blowing Smoke.

"Persecution politics" is an excellent way to frame what's happening in the GOP and the right wing these days, and I'd like to bring up another important factor that helps make persecution politics such an effective defense mechanism: tribalism. Not just the atavistic racist tribalism of a small section of the far right base, but a new kind of widespread mainstream tribalism enabled by modern technologies.

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The two other Michaels participating in this book club have offered two reasons for the growth of right-wing paranoia. Michael Maiello argued that economic frustration has led people to conclude that someone is stacking the decks against them, while Michael Orion Powell proposed that the decline of American international hegemony is to blame.

Maeillo is in good company. Journalists, political scientists, and even President Obama have made similar arguments. But while economic challenges may have exacerbated the paranoia, I do not believe that economics lies at the root of it. I spent a chapter in Blowing Smoke addressing the matter, which I'll briefly summarize here.

After World War II, social psychologists sought to explain the popular success of the Nazi regime by proposing that impoverished Germans had channeled their economic frustrations into anti-Semitism. The theory became known as the frustration-aggression hypothesis.

The hypothesis seemed plausible, since the Nazis arose from the ashes of economic depression, but subsequent sociological studies failed to confirm it, and the theory eventually fell out of favor. One recent statistical study found a correlation between political extremism and economic decline, but the effect was modest, and the authors concluded, "The empirical results in this paper instead show that it is unlikely that even strong recessions can change political outcomes."

Moreover while some paranoid movements in American history have coincided with economic recessions, there are also counterexamples that challenge the hypothesis that such movements are primarily driven by economic decline. For instance, the worst period of mass paranoia in recent U.S. history was the Red Scare, which took place amid the tremendous postwar economic boom of the 1940s and 1950s.

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To find out more about Michael Orion Powell and his work, check out his blog, Deschamps.

I like Michael's description of Beck as "rationalizing" bigotry.

There's a video of Beck discussing the infamous Father Charles Coughlin and dismissing comparisons between him and the two. In the video, he notes that Coughlin viewed poverty and inequality as a chief issue, which differentiates him from the Ayn Rand touting Beck. The lack of self-awareness shows as he continues to describe Coughlin, saying that Coughlin believed the Great Depression was caused by a "cabal of international bankers" who worked in tandem to usurp "American sovereignty." That that was the basic argument of his George Soros obsession seems to be lost in the midst of Beck's self-awareness deficit. Beck's alleged cabal of bankers is likewise overwhelmingly Jewish and his frequent use of Nazi imagery, and his use of screenshots of the Sinai peninsula (Go back and watch the video for yourself. It's right there in the open.) while talking about Soros is an act of blowing the fascist dog whistle louder than it's been blown in a long, long time. We'd have to be able to catch Beck in private to know if he uses derogatory terms for Jews, but from the outside it seems to rationalizes old, indeed ancient, anti-Semitic arguments by substituting "progressive" for "Jew." As his fans at the white nationalist website Stormfront have put it, Beck goes "as close as you can get to naming the Jew without actually naming the Jew."

There's so many more examples of his rationalization of bigotry, as Michael has put it, and Charles Johnson and I have documented them pretty well. The rationalization threatens to cascade into the avenues that may even surprise, however. Even with significant disillusion with the right wing, stories such as the effort of House Republicans to legally redefine "rape" to "forcible rape" continue to astonish. As a female friend said, this is apparently justified because "in the whole 'I'm a poor defenseless man,' world, rape is a tool used by nubile young women to trap defenseless older men."

As Michael put it, it's no longer about proving that Beck and the Tea Party brigadiers carry bigoted resentment but explaining it. It seems as if, at least on an unconscious level, significant levels of the population have bought into the paradigm that racism and bigotry is okay now that WASPs are no longer in total control in society. This could possibly explain the adoption of terms like "ruling class" by Rush Limbaugh just as he makes crude imitations of Chinese accents.

The decline of America as a superpower plays into all of this. Americans have not felt a strong need to think about the rest of the world for a long time, and the country's untouchable hegemony seemed to vindicate that. Now Americans are losing jobs to people halfway across the world who actually speak more than one language, have a stronger work ethic and are willing to work for less. The irrationality of racism and stereotypes provides a comfort that at least you're still superior to the people you're losing out to. You can see this in clips where Glenn Beck proclaims that there are no working toilets in India.

As Michael Wolraich argues here, that some people no doubt enjoy feeling persecuted. Being downtrodden has the downside of all the trodding but the upside of moral superiority. It also allows the true believer to escape taking responsibility for personal failings or even to deal with the ugly reality of plain old bad luck.

But let's not dismiss all of this as an irrational psychological defense mechanism. After all, some people feel persecuted because, well, they're being persecuted. I think we have to separate what's legitimate from what isn't. It's not all about preserving the white, male Christian hierarchy. There's some of that. But there's also something else at work. In Blowing Smoke, Michael argues convincingly that the current iteration of right wing paranoia has far deeper roots than the Wall Street bailouts. He's convinced me. But there's still an economic angle to this.

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Thank you, Barry, for your great comment. I think your description of perplexity when facing someone arguing that unicorns lived on the on the ark eloquently captures that feelings that many of us have in response to some of the insane ideas circulating around the right wing.

I applaud and encourage efforts to positively communicate progressive ideas as rationally and articulately as possible to people across the political spectrum.

But I don't believe such arguments will sway the right wing to abandon its paranoia. That's because paranoia is ultimately irrational. As I argue in Blowing Smoke, people indulge themselves in paranoia not because it makes sense but because the beliefs provide a psychological benefit. It feels good to believe.

As a result, most people will go to great lengths to preserve their paranoia despite obvious disproofs. The case of the birthers, who continue to maintain their belief that Obama was born in Kenya no matter how many birth certificates they see, is a perfect example.

That does not mean, however, that paranoid conservatives are immune to criticism. If they were truly clinically insane, no external challenge could ever shake them from their delirium. But most of these people are not actually insane. They are fully capable of maintaining jobs and relationships and holding reasonable beliefs when not discussing politics. They are caught up in a form of social hysteria, not a cognitive disease.

Because the paranoia is ultimately social, they can be reached. On some level, they know that their crazy ideas are unfounded; this insecurity prompts that angry response they often deliver when those ideas are challenged.

But we can't effectively challenge the ideas through rational argument. The most potent mechanism is shame. Shame is what is brought down Joe McCarthy and ended the Red Scare, and it was shame that cut down the John Birch Society a decade later. We can't disprove the paranoia, but we can stigmatize it.

Unfortunately, progressives can't do it alone. It's all too easy to for the paranoid right to fold progressive criticism into its world view. Whenever Sarah Palin receives criticism from the left, for example, she tells her audience that she is being persecuted because of her beliefs, as when she claimed to be the victim of a "blood libel" when people criticized her violent rhetoric.

When the criticism comes from across the political spectrum, however, it's much more difficult for the right wing to ignore. In the early 1950s, the left had plenty of criticism for McCarthy, but the paranoia only collapsed after their voices were joined by people who were perceived as less partisan--Joseph Welch and Edward R. Murrow. Similarly, the John Birch Society went into decline after Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley blasted it.

That's why I felt that it was important to invite conservatives like Charles Johnson and Michael Orion Powell to participate in this discussion as well as for their expertise on the topic. If more contemporary conservatives had the courage to challenge the right wing, the paranoia would limp back to the political fringe where it belongs.

I'd like to thank Michael, Michael, and Michelle for their excellent articles. We actually had a fourth Michael slated for the book club, but he had to cancel due to personal circumstances.

In the meantime, I'd like to use these two articles to further clarify the nature of what I've called persecution politics in my book, Blowing Smoke. Michael Maiello wrote about the tendency of Tea Party followers to object to what they see as intrusive government regulation. One of most vociferous champions of this notion is Erick Erickson, founder of RedState.com and a regular commentator on CNN. My favorite Erickson rant is his complaint about a Washington State law banning dishwasher detergents made with phosphates:

Were I in Washington State, I'd be cleaning my gun right about now waiting to protect my property from the coming riots or the government apparatchiks coming to enforce nonsensical legislation.

Not that Erickson condones violence.

That said, while Maiello's analysis of the phenomenon is spot on, this type of rhetoric is not really an example of persecution politics. Allegedly burdensome laws affect everyone equally. While people may be upset by the loss of their favorite detergents, it's not as potent an issue as the idea that they're being persecuted because of their race, religion, lifestyle, or politics.

Michelle Goldberg's point about who gets to tell people what to do is thus critically important. Persecution politics presents a zero-sum game between us and them, where the us are the white Christian gun-owning tradition-minded conservatives, and the them includes blacks, Latinos, gays, and liberal elitists. The narrative presents a power struggle between opposing classes, and it's this conception of an epic race/class/religion conflict that has most effectively mobilized the right wing. (I highly recommend Goldberg's excellent book, Kingdom Coming, for those who want to understand critical role of religion in modern conservative politics.)

Glenn Beck's race-baiting, which Michael Orion Powell discusses, offers a perfect example of persecution politics at work. What distinguishes Beck's version of race politics from old school American racism is his reversal of the equation. Beck presents himself as a staunch anti-racist and defender of civil liberties. According to Beck, it is people like President Obama and Justice Sotomayor who are the real racists.

By projecting bigotry onto people of color and making white people into victims, Beck rationalizes his own bigotry and that of his audience. He has nothing against blacks or Latinos, see; he only hates them because they're racist.

To get a sense of how Beck has brilliantly exploited racial animosity to become one of the most popular pundits on television, you can read my chapter on Beck, which has been reprinted at Alternet.com. The chapter relates a particular program in which Beck presents President Obama, former White House adviser Van Jones, and Obama's former pastor Reverend Wright as angry black men who hate white people and seek to redistribute their wealth to black people. It's the most striking example of Beck's racism that I've seen, and I've seen way too much Beck for my own good.

Update: I've just read Barry Lynn's article, which I'll respond to in a separate post

I think Michael is absolutely correct in connecting the Tea Party to a raft of unpleasant political movements of the past. This is not to say that everybody in the somewhat diffuse movement is identical; for example, about a third of them don't have an interest in having government promoting fundamentalist Christianity. They are certainly not all racists. However, with that nod to sanity, there are a dizzingly level of malcontents associated with the Tea Party who dislike anything new, anything different, anybody new or anybody different.

In my more negative moments I think: maybe America gets just about what she wants. A majority of voters seem convinced we can cut enough spending so that we don't need tax increases. Unless we are cutting defense or means-testing entitlement programs, that is an impossibility. Most Americans think they have a great private healthcare system--at least until they get sick, so any tiny incremental change (read "Obamacare") is fixing something that isn't broken. Most Americans really like their guns and refuse to accept the inevitability of really bad people getting ahold of those near-sacred icons and doing terrible things with them.

Ultimately, if progressive, or at least open-minded, people want to prevail we've got to spend far more time making our case than criticizing the people and movements that we disagree with. I was on "Anderson Cooper 360" last night with a fellow who believes that dinosaurs and unicorns were on Noah's Ark- a replica of which he is hoping Kentucky taxpayers will help subsidize. To me, this is right out of some alternative universe. However, I also need to spend time in other venues explaining why I--as a Christian--believe that using the Bible as either a history or science text is, well, bad theology.

My bottom line is this: we need to criticize with specificity what is wrong with the promoters of the ideologies we disagree with, but we also need to spend even more time developing sound reasons for seeing the world in a different way. Many in the Tea Party oppose "critical thinking". We need to play that card all the time.

To find out more about Michael Orion Powell and his work, check out his blog, Deschamps.

Allow me to introduce myself, as I am not as well known as my compatriots in this TPMCafe Book Club. My name is Michael Orion Powell. I've been writing professionally for several years and am currently finishing up my first book, a sociological look at Asperger's syndrome and alienation within modern society. For many years, my writing has been right-leaning. Growing up in Seattle, one of the most liberal cities in the country, I'm often seen by natives as an "old-fashioned" guy and was attracted to elements of conservative politics such as education reform and the intellectual arguments of Robert Nisbet, George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens, all with a mild touch of cultural and moral reaction. By Seattle standards, I'm a conservative, but by actual conservative standards, I'm a raving liberal.

I became known to Michael Wolraich after I sent him a piece I did for Little Green Footballs on Glenn Beck, which Michael invited me to reprint at Dagblog. My conservatism had led me to Townhall.com and later on the Heritage Foundation. An increasingly disturbing tone seemed to reverberate conservative corners, which often brought up race as a persecutory issue (often out of nowhere). I attended CPAC in 2010 (in which the John Birch Society, with William F. Buckley long gone, had a commanding presence), and at that time felt increasingly uncomfortable with reports of ethnic slurs yelled by Tea Partiers, a claim I was finding too believable, while present in a city that has some of the worst ghettoes in the country. In the wake of Arizona's legalized racial profiling in the form of SB 1070 and having specialized in Latin America, I decided upon leaving to create the website Voice of the Migrant in order to create a center point on the internet for blogging on immigrants' rights. The fevered rants of Glenn Beck and the increasingly toxic political tone in middle America has made the need for the website all the more appropriate.

I agree with Michael Wolraich's analogy of the 1990s era of Bill Clinton and the Republican Contract with America. However, the situation seems far more precarious than those days. The Oklahoma City bombings were apparently retaliation for the disaster that occurred in Waco, Texas. While Rush Limbaugh played a political version of the loud shock jock that was rising in popularity at the time, he did not have much intellectual firepower and was not reaching as deep into middle America's conscious as Glenn Beck is managing to. Most importantly, the long and tortured element of American racial politics was not there for the like of Limbaugh to play on with a white Arkansas boy in office as it is now, with paranoid elements of white America alarmed by a rapidly growing and politically active Hispanic population and the election of the nation's first African American president. These changes are making white America uneasy and less in control than they ever have been before. This anxiety is easy to play on.

And play on it Beck and Limbaugh have. While Limbaugh has crudely called Obamacare "Yo mamma care" and lambasted Barack Obama for recognizing the contributions of Native Americans, his inflammatory rhetoric seems to match his Clinton era schtick with a few variations. The more alarming moves have been made by Glenn Beck, who with both a nationally syndicated radio and television show reaches more people that Limbaugh has ever been able to.

As Christopher Hitchens put in a scathing column for Vanity Fair about the Tea Party Movement, Beck is in the midst of "canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again." On air Beck has promoted authors from the past that have been rightfully forgotten, such as the anti-Semite Elizabeth Drilling (known for her lovely term of endearment for President Dwight Eisenhower, "Ike the Kike") and Ezra Taft Benson, a white supremacist leader Mormon leader who wrote the introduction for a book called The Black Hammer: A Study of Black Power, Red Influence and White Alternatives, which literally had on its cover the bloody, severed head of an African American male.

Beck's rhetorical race baiting has not gone unheeded. Despite a moratorium from the top on bringing signs to the August 28 Restoring Honor rally, a few managed to make their way in by attendees, including one that said "The Bold Truth: MLK Was Pro-Communist." Beck's strongest fans can be found in the netherworld of the internet at websites like the white supremacist Stormfront. In the wake of the shooting of Rep. Giffords and several others in Arizona, an attempted bombing occurred in Spokane, Washington of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally. Far from an amateur stunt, federal investigators were quoted as saying, "They haven't seen anything like this in this country," the official said. "This was the worst device, and most intentional device, I've ever seen."

One could only imagine the potential reverberations of a powerful terrorist attack on an MLK Day Parade. The attack could set off long quieted ethnic tensions within the United States, instigate retaliation and leave the country looking more like the strife-laden countries in the Middle East that the US military has been occupying than that "shining city on the hill" or "beacon of democracy" that we have allegedly been at our best.

Charles Johnson, another contributor to this week's book club, has accused Glenn Beck and the new squad of right-wingers of appealing to the "basest elements" of the Right in this country. That's an accurate portrayal. Ethnic hatred is still a base element for much of this country and political figures who find career advancement in playing on it have been recurring villains in America's long struggle for decency.

Michael M., I disagree. These debates are not over whether anyone can tell anyone else what to do. They're about who gets to tell people what to do. Often, when I speak about abortion rights, old-school Republican women come up to me truly baffled about the turn in their party. How, they ask, can a party so devoted to individual property, so horrified about government interference, support such massive intrusion into women's lives? How can a party that sees income tax as theft support eminent domain seizure of women's reproductive organs? Why doesn't the right see the inconsistency?

The answer, I think, is that there is no inconsistency. The right supports the power of men to rule their families and communities. Efforts to empower individuals to resist or circumvent that rule regularly result in spasms of incredible rage. This is why the gay rights movement is seen as an intolerable tyranny - not because it's telling anyone what to do, but because it's preventing traditional authorities from telling people what to do. The movement Michael W. describes in Blowing Smoke - and the movement I wrote about in "Kingdom Coming" - is animated by fury over lost privilege. It believes it's entitled to exercise power, and thus the power of the opposition is by definition illegitimate.

Michael, thanks for asking me to do this and for kick starting what should be an interesting discussion about the origins and power of what you've termed "persecution politics" as practiced by the contemporary right in America.

Something that really stuck with me from Blowing Smoke was the tale of the "Segregation Academies" in the South. After "separate but equal" failed and integration became the national law of the land, people with strong views on the subject continued to resist. They formed private schools to provide the segregation that the government would no longer fund. They also claimed non-profit, tax-exempt status on either religious or charitable purpose grounds. In some communities this allowed for white flight from the public schools and a new segregation. Integrationists attacked the tax-exempt status of these schools. Taxpayers essentially subsidize all tax-exempt institutions, after all and taxpayer money was no longer to be used to further the cause of segregation.

While I'm sure that logic plays fine with this crowd, segregationists saw it differently.

One thing every progressive has to admit, sooner or later, is that we're kind of telling people what they can and can't do and we're often crashing headlong into deeply held beliefs. Financial reality being what it is, a lot of the Segregation Academies needed their preferred tax treatment in order to survive. Sometimes when you want something, society says "no."

This, I think, is at the root of Michael's "persecution politics." Some very influential people, mostly on the right, have decided that being told what to do is a form of assault. The derisive term "social engineering" evokes the dehumanization of the individual. Nobody cares what you want, you're just a pawn in a much larger game of Civilization. It flies in the face of the "individual as hero" stories we tell ourselves (sometimes these stories are true, but they're still stories).

In the case of the Segregation Academies, I'd like to say we're over it and that nobody on the right wants to re-litigate integration. To say that, I have to ignore Rand Paul's first gaffe on the national stage, though. Right out of the gate he questioned the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act. His was the perfect "don't tell me what to do" response. If a person wants to open a restaurant that serves only white people or only Greek people, why bother them? The answer is that we all have to live together and such businesses make it more difficult to do. But make no mistake, we are telling people what to do. We're telling them to do good things. But that doesn't mean they like it.

When we get away from the race issue, even I tend to sympathize. We're a big country and the government can be incredibly impersonal. Those who make policy can't and often don't think much about our individual circumstances, needs and desires. There are plenty of laws on the books that I find intrusive and improper. We all have our "don't tell me what to do" moments.

But conservatives have made a politics of it. When you tell me that my kid has to learn about evolution with or without my consent, I am a victim. When you go on about climate change, you're really telling me what kind of car I can drive and where I should live and how I should get to work. Don't use your regulations to tell me what kind of light bulb to buy! Why can't I own a gun, when I haven't done anything wrong?

We can't forget that there are powerful, moneyed interests willing to support these individual impulses, and this is another reason why they work. The oil company doesn't want the government to tell you what kind of car you can drive either, particularly if you choose a heavy, low-efficiency pick-up truck. The NRA would also like to know who is telling you what you can and can't have, law abiding citizen. I know some wealthy and prominent conservatives who will be quick to tell you that they want to get the IRS out of your wallet so that you can be free to keep what you earn. If you believe taxation is a form of theft, they want your voice to be heard. If the taxes you pay represent a theft, then the taxes a Connecticut hedge fund manager pays must have been stolen too.

Ultimately I think the success of this line of argument lies in our basic impulse not to want to be told what to do and how convenient that is to some very powerful business interests. While we don't tread on them, they're running right over us.

First, I'd like to thank Josh Marshall for inviting me to participate in TPM's Book Club and Versha Sharma for setting everything up. I've been a devoted reader of Talking Points Memo ever since the 2004 elections. Then in 2008, during the epic primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I hesitantly wrote my first blog post at TPM Cafe under the screen name Genghis. The passionate and intelligent user community that Josh had fostered welcomed me enthusiastically. Encouraged by their response, I've been writing ever since. I co-founded my own blog, dagblog.com, and have now published my first book, Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual.

When I began the book proposal in the summer of 2009, the Tea Parties had yet to receive serious attention from the mainstream media, and Glenn Beck's name was still unfamiliar to most Americans. I expected a challenge to persuade readers that political paranoia was sweeping the countryside. But by September, the Tea Parties had burst into newspaper headlines, and Beck's protruding tongue graced the cover of Time magazine. The challenge was no longer to document right-wing paranoia but to explain it.

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The book club returns to TPMCafe this week with a special edition featuring the work of longtime blogger (and TPM reader) Michael Wolraich, Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual.

Joining Wolraich for the discussion are

Michael Maiello, a weekly columnist for The Daily, the new tablet publication about to debut from News Corp.;

Michael Orion Powell, who has written for the SF Examiner, the Heritage Foundation, and Townhall.com;

Rev. Barry Lynn, host of CultureShocks radio show, executive director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State;

Michelle Goldberg, journalist and author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World;

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs;

and Jamelle Bouie, Writing Fellow at The American Prospect.

It's a good roster that includes some who have contributed to book clubs before and some who haven't, so let's give a warm Cafe welcome to our first discussion group of 2011.

Everybody should vote for all the Democrats this fall, every lyin', weaselly, low-down, cowardly, corrupt, four-flushing double-dealing asshole. If that's all you care about, you can leave now and reread the Clintons' autobiographies.

My interest is in restoring the meaning of progressivism. The Democratic Party has been making war on the concept, as well as on the people espousing it. The form of this war is not frontal assault, but subversion. First they embrace, then they adulterate, then they turn it upside-down, then they excoriate the advocates of progressivism as petty, purist, and extremist -- as enemies of progressivism. President Barack Hussein Obama is perhaps the most effective foe of leftism of any Democrat in history. That was the meaning of his riff about transcending the ancient, boring disputes between left and right. Instead of the unstable back and forth along class lines, we are better off relaxing under a corporatist regime. (Did I mention you should all go and vote for these dudes. 'Kay.)

The punchline here is that the recent suggestions about the destructive role of the "professional left" are not about combating voter apathy. After all, those in the left who are professional have the profession of supporting the Democratic Party in all its works. There is virtually no money supporting professionals not dedicated to that thankless task. The Democrats' problems are not with the left, but with the center. The left, what passes for it, always votes Democrat. It's the center support for the party that has eroded. The attacks on the left serve two purposes: a) they uphold the centrist bona fides of Democrats; and b) they prepare the ground for blaming any performance lapses on the left. This is what the Democratic establishment always does. Obama, like Clinton before him, is a DLC president. It's their world; we just vote for them.

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There's an old saying that where you stand depends on where you sit. Perhaps a corollary for journalists should be that what you report depends on where you report. Jonathan Alter has written a great account of the successes and failures of Obama's first year in office, but I wonder what his account might look like if he had spent the year around Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. Given Obama's general deference to Congress on most important legislation, one could argue that the really important story of 2009 was at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, especially when it comes to healthcare reform. Obama, of course, played a key role in setting general priorities, but actually turning these into actual legislation fell on Pelosi's and Reid's shoulders. To use a historical analogy, FDR obviously played a key role in World War II, but if you really want to understand how the Allies won in Western Europe, you would be better served by focusing on Ike.

This post is part of TPM's book club discussion of Jonathan Alter's new book, The Promise.

Hi Jonathan,

The Promise is a thorough book with many topics that are probably familiar (and interesting) to TPM readers. I want to hone in on the foreign policy sections, partly because it's an element of Obama's record that is often covered inadequately -- as you point out in the book.

Put aside rhetoric, and Obama literally prioritized international engagement on his first year schedule more than any President in history:

"In 2009 he made ten foreign trips to twenty one nations (four of them twice). The next most frequent foreign traveler was George H.W. Bush, who visited fourteen countries in 1989."

This high-level engagement, the book reports, was key to Obama's top "foreign policy priorities" of mending relations with the Muslim world and securing nuclear warheads. (I took this description to connote new, proactive priorities, beyond the ongoing tasks of counterterror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

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Jonathan Alter's book is fascinating to read and raises lots of questions. One that I have stems from his prelude of sorts, where he looks at how Obama responded to the market collapse of September 2008 and suggests that Obama's coolness and gravitas during the crisis assured his election. In fact, Alter creates an air of inevitability around Obama's election, writing:

"The Obama administration wouldn't occupy the White House for another four months. But what the Chinese for centuries have called the 'mandate of heaven'--the legitimacy mysteriously but unmistakably bestowed upon a leader--had shifted. Barack Obama's first year in power had already begun."

The rest of the book pivots off this moment, explaining the difficulty Obama has faced in living up to this mandate, so I think it's important to question this a bit further. Was there really a mandate, heavenly or otherwise? Alter supports his claim by pointing out that Obama won the election "by the widest margin of any Democrat in nearly a half century." Actually, Obama won by a margin of just under 7 points (53-46), but Bill Clinton won by nearly 9 points in 1996.

Even if Obama's margin had been larger than Clinton's, his victory was not overwhelming. Various analyses of the election results suggest that given the state of the economy and the widespread unpopularity of George W. Bush, Obama may have in fact underperformed, perhaps because of his race. Indeed, among white voters, Obama lost in a landslide, 43 to 57. Additionally, large numbers of white Americans not only didn't vote for Obama, but questioned the legitimacy of his policies, his election, and even his qualification as a citizen to hold the office of president.

Given these facts, perhaps the only inevitable thing about Obama's first year is not some heavenly mandate, but that any successes would be difficult and costly.

In response to Jonathan Alter's first query: "What did you learn about his (Obama's) approach to the economy, health care, Afghanistan or the media in 2009 that informs how we might view his performance in 2010 and beyond?"

I would say that if the President is smart, he will change his approach of 2009 rather dramatically, especially in the areas of the economy and Afghanistan. It is perhaps understandable that a young President might defer to the expertise of the Democratic establishment in his first days in office. Clearly the views of Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Richard Holbrooke carried a lot of weight in early 2009 when critical decisions were being made about the economy and Afghanistan. But this was not the "Change" candidate we voted for in November of 2008. It is now clear that the Establishment wisdom was wrong on both the economy and Afghanistan. The Big Banks continue to pay out obscene bonuses despite the government bailout and the Afghanistan surge shows no signs of progress.

If Obama has shown us anything, it is that he remains a pragmatist. He already seems to have decided that Paul Volker's advice is more sound in the economic arena and if he sticks to his promise of withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011, he should be able to go into the 2012 election reclaiming the mantle of change you can believe in.

I'm intrigued that Jonathan Alter expected Obama to ace communications and struggle in executive leadership. After observing Obama and his team during the 2008 campaign, I would have expected the opposite. Obama can be a gifted orator (though to be truthful, his speeches since early 2008 have been underwhelming) but my overriding impression of his 2008 campaign was its organizational consistency and efficiency--No Drama Obama, if you will. Obama and his campaign team displayed three important aspects of executive leadership:

1. Have a plan and stick to it.
2. Keep focused on long term goals.
3. Be ready to adjust your plans and goals as conditions require.

Given this, Obama's first year in office has worked out pretty much as I would have expected, light on the internal drama but big on actual accomplishments. As for 2010, my guess is that we'll see more of the same. In part because this pattern is pretty well established by the President and his closest advisors, but also because the Obama people probably know that their ability to manipulate short term political factors is extremely limited and that doing so might come at the cost of their long term political goals and fortunes.

In THE PROMISE, I tried to report the back story of the historic events of 2009, but I was also deeply interested in questions of temperament and political character. I aimed to give readers enough information about Obama the man and how he makes decisions for them to assess in a more sophisticated way how he handles events like the oil spill that arose after my book was completed.

So my first question for those of you kind enough to join this discussion is a simply one: What did you learn about his approach to the economy, health care, Afghanistan or the media in 2009 that informs how we might view his performance in 2010 and beyond?

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This week at Cafe, senior Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter joins us for a discussion of his book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One. Alter has chronicled Obama's first 14 months in office, and, in his own words:

I tried to report the back story of the historic events of 2009, but I was also deeply interested in questions of temperament and political character.

Given the media fixation on Obama's temparement in response to the catastrophic BP oil spill, this is bound to be an interesting discussion. Our contributors this week are The Nation columnist Ari Melber, who has a new piece out about solving Obama's press problem; Philip Klinkner, the James S. Sherman Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College; and Jon Taplin, Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and Cafe regular. More will be joining us throughout the week -- enjoy!

I'm a writer who at times likes to think of himself as an intellectual, and certainly I'm someone who's interested in intellectual history and past highbrow political arguments. And my own book about American foreign policy deals a fair amount with that sort of material. But since the time of writing, I've come to think I paid too much attention to the history of ideas and debates and too little to basic structural issues. The Icarus Syndrome, it seems to me, tilts in the other direction -- presenting the history of smart people arguing about American foreign policy as if it was the key driver of actual policy.

That seems to me to be fairly wrongheaded. Take, for example, the Carter-Reagan contrast that Peter mentions in his introductory post. It seems to me that the further we get from this period historically the more it will look like a time in which the fate of the superpowers was rocked by oil price swings beyond their control. With the United States the heaviest oil consumer in the world and the USSR a major oil producer, a high-price era like Jimmy Carter's administration makes the U.S. look weak whereas a period of falling prices such as Reagan presided over restored our confidence while shaking the Soviet economy.

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The Icarus Syndrome is an argument wrapped around three stories. The argument is that success breeds disaster. The process plays itself out this way: A group of foreign policy thinkers and actors hit upon a strategy for dealing with some immediate, finite problem. The strategy succeeds, at least in their eyes, so they grow more confident in it. Confronted by some new challenge, they reason by analogy: this strategy worked before, so it will work again. But although they think they're on a treadmill, they are actually on a ladder--broadening ideas beyond their original context, taking on more risk, becoming less sensitive to America's fallibility and their own.

The first story is about the war progressives--Woodrow Wilson, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey--who made their success in rationalizing American politics a template for rationalizing world politics. At home, they believed they were turning politics from a clash of selfish, arbitary power--industry versus labor, in particular--into a sphere of reason and law. Independent experts would investigate problems and promulgate answers that appealed to the broader, common interests that all Americans shared. Thus, reason would conquer force, and domestic conflict would give way to what Colonel House called "a scientific peace." That became their vision for the world America would help create after World War I, a world community operating by certain common, scientific rules rather than a jungle in which nations divided into rival alliances. That vision blinded Wilson to the reality that any postwar world order needed to rest on a balance of power in which the US, Britain and France joined together to restrain German power.

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