“Your first time in a political campaign?” the Senator said. “You poor bastard.” He had his sympathy, however, firmly under control. And properly so, since professors of politics – Woodrow Wilson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan aside – rarely take the knocks associated with the subject they study. The Senator probably considered, and rightly, some bruises, welts and scars a salutary experience for an academic.
The Romney campaign was indeed the first time I had thrown myself into a political campaign. Having voted for Democrats as well as Republicans in the past, and suffering the pangs of buyer’s remorse almost every time, I had held myself aloof. For years, even while serving in the Bush Administration, I had been an independent, proudly disenfranchising myself from the primaries of the blue state in which I live.
Being an independent reflected partly my political beliefs, which recoil from orthodoxies on both sides; partly my profession as a teacher (I would rather keep students guessing, and loathe professors who confuse instruction with indoctrination); partly an orneriness that, studied or not, one is entitled to in late middle age. Having concluded, however, that the irritating or ridiculous orthodoxies on the Democratic side outweigh those on the Republican side; realizing that having served in George W. Bush’s State Department my students would tag me as a Republican no matter what; and recognizing that the balance of enlightened opinion has declared the Party of Lincoln isolated, out-of-touch, nutty and probably doomed – I took the plunge.
When Governor Romney’s team called and asked me to sign up as one of more than a score of special advisers, I did so happily. I had met him, and liked him. Of all the candidates he struck me as the ablest and most likely to win. I continue to believe that he would have made a very good President. Moreover, although my expertise lies in foreign policy and defense, my deepest fear for some time has been that our government’s economic fecklessness – its inability to put the national finances on a sound footing – augurs a constricted future for my children and grandchildren, and I believed Romney would do something about it. Or as one twenty-something of my acquaintance put it: “If Romney is elected my generation may still be screwed. If the President is re-elected, I’m afraid we’re almost certainly screwed.”
I will leave it to others to describe how the boomers (to which group, technically, I belong) have clung fast to their unsustainable entitlements, how public unions have driven local governments to bankruptcy, or how improbable it is to think that beyond a reasonable investment in infrastructure government can drive economic growth. Many, no doubt, would disagree with me on all those points. But believe them I do. And thinking, moreover, that whatever his other gifts President Obama lacked the political skills essential to cut the kinds of deals that Ronald Reagan could make with Tip O’Neill or Bill Clinton with Newt Gingrich, and the ability to reach across the lines of partisan division that made a John F. Kennedy or an Eisenhower figures who transcended party – I dove in.
Nor was the Obama administration’s foreign policy much to my liking. The only time in my career when I wished I had a job somewhere other than in Washington was in 2009. It began with the perfunctory exit interviews conducted by the Obama transition team, during which I imagined reading the unflattering thought bubbles coming out of my interrogators’ heads (“Knave…or fool? Give him the benefit of the doubt…fool”), and continuing with a stream of official sneers and on occasion, lies about their predecessors, I confess to a too-human resentment of my successors.
Initially, however, I conceded that Obama had built a pretty good team – Hilary Clinton would not be a bad diplomat, and has been that; Bob Gates was a great Secretary of Defense, and would continue to be so; Jim Jones had the gravitas and high level experience to give ballast to a President whose national security credentials were based chiefly on an assertion of prescience in denouncing the Iraq war and little else.
I could even forgive the rookie mistakes – thinking that it was possible to close the Guantanamo prison for terrorists by presidential fiat; going to Copenhagen to beg that the Olympics be hosted in Chicago (a President should never make a request that he cannot be certain will be acceded to); even dangling before giddy Norwegian Nobel prize committees the prospect of the abolition of nuclear weapons and the reversal of climate change by international agreement.
But as time went on I learned – as Clinton, Gates and Jones swiftly did – that in this White House the President and a band of close aides and Chicago friends did all the thinking. One seriously bad decision followed another. A public commitment to withdraw from Afghanistan convinced everyone in that part of the world – from goatherds outside Kandahar to the gimlet-eyed covert warriors of Pakistani intelligence – that we would thenceforth be a negligible factor there. A victory fairly won in Iraq (admittedly at too high a cost), thrown away when the President failed to intervene in the negotiations for a residual American presence. A self-deluded rapprochement with a Russia that got a good deal on nuclear weapons (its thousands of tactical weapons excluded from the Obama Administration’s treaty), and that has thwarted the United States repeatedly in Syria and elsewhere. An unnecessary and counterproductive standoff with Israel. A war in Libya for which the Administration managed the trick of ignoring the need for Congressional authorization, while upholding in theory the dubiously constitutional War Powers Act. A campaign of assassination (if the Administration replaces the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” with “torture”, surely it is fair to replace “targeted killing” with “assassination”) that on occasion includes American citizens – never explained to the American public, and defended with the staggering claim that no resulting collateral damage has occured. Repeated assertions that al-Qaeda is on the verge of strategic defeat, even as a new and no less sinister version of that organization metastasizes throughout the Middle East and North Africa, killing at least one U.S. ambassador so far. Iran’s steady creep toward nuclear weapons status, and appalling leaks of the measures, including covert actions, that have delayed but not stopped it. A non-policy on Syria that contents itself with creating imaginary transitional governments while tens of thousands are tortured, starved or killed as that ghastly war threatens to spread. A non-existent trade agenda (“Its quiet here. Too quiet”, a former State Department colleague, now at the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office remarked to me early on). A defense budget intended, as the Undersecretary of the Navy recently put it with commendable honesty, to “do less with less.”
These indictments of Obama national security policy I shared with others on the roster of experts associated with the campaign. We swiftly learned, however, that foreign policy was not to play much of a role in it. Not pretending to understand the arcane arts of campaigning, I cannot tell whether it was unwise to minimize limit the foreign policy side of the campaign. Because of its commitment to “end the wars” (they are not over, by the way, just entering different phases) the Obama Administration had a built-in foreign policy advantage, compounded by the incumbent’s natural strength of having a vast bureaucracy to draw on, and the knowledge that comes from daily immersion in policymaking. But the military historian in me says that we should have made them pay for every bit of ground they held.
Governing can be chaotic, but a campaign is more so. Start-and-stop op-eds, rushed preparation for press conferences suddenly called off, last minute requests for interviews or talking points, were taken to a different level than I had seen at the State Department working for Condoleezza Rice. Necessarily so, because even though a Presidential campaign has a full-time staff of hundreds, the foreign policy component is necessarily small, and overworked. There is a natural tension between the hometown operation (in this case, in Boston) and the expert community (largely in Washington). There is, similarly, a disjunction between the full-timers (usually in their early to mid-thirties, or younger) who make the wheels spin, and the more experienced part-timers who end up, uncomfortably, responding to them.
These phenomena were not unique to the Romney campaign. Every campaign, moreover, has its own set of unforced errors: a slip of the candidate’s (or the surrogate’s) tongue, most usually. In our case it was the Governor’s trip abroad, which although it included important speeches in Poland and Israel, was panned in the UK and here. It was a lesson in the importance of distinguishing between domestic political purposes and the mission investing a candidate with foreign policy stature. It was a lesson, too, in the importance of surrounding a candidate in such settings with a senior team. King Arthur, no matter how experienced in traveling abroad, should not venture forth without a clutch of Knights of the Round Table to warn of man traps (in this case, British tenderness about the collapse of the company handling security at the Olympics), schmooze the press, and look gravely ornamental on stage.
Most of my last month on the campaign was spent in a non-descript Federal office building, working on transition planning. A good law, that which provides for basic support (offices, security clearances, communications gear) in advance of the election, because two and a half months is not nearly enough time to create an Administration. The Romney transition project was very good indeed: thorough, well-staffed and thoughtful. I came out of it knowing a great deal more about some subjects (the history and organization of the National Security Council staff, in particular) than I did when I went in, and with new friendships and deepened old ones.
But, alas, in politics the balm is often followed by the wound. Influenced by experts whom I knew to be experienced, and still believe to be shrewd, I thought Romney would win. Not hugely confident, mind you, but likely to become President. Subconsciously, the work on transition planning no doubt reinforced this belief. It was too hard for this professor to engage in the doublethink required to take on, with deadly seriousness, the task of preparing to help stand up the White House on inauguration day, plot out the first few months of foreign policy moves and brace for surprises and calamities, while conceding that this might all end up as play acting. So I was surprised.
It hurt, that’s for sure; it was almost like losing a friend. No number of readings of Theodore Roosevelt’s speech about the “Man in the Arena” (“who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat”) could make it not hurt. Months later, though, consolation has stood up as my shelter: The experiences, the knowledge acquired, most of all the friendships, and the prospects for a (personally, though not nationally) quieter and more prosperous four years ahead than if we had won.
But at the same time, I will not simply slink back to my library. The Party of Lincoln (I like that tag) needs a bank of foreign and defense policy experts who can support and advise it. We need legislators and candidates who are well enough informed to understand the choices they must make. Within the bounds of courtesy and reason, we can keep the second Obama Administration accountable, and while acknowledging its successes, shine a klieg light on its failures. For better or for worse, having mopped up the blood and put on the bandages, I plan on staying in the arena for a few more bouts.