John Podhoretz

John Podhoretz

Health Care

What the right shares with Obama

President Obama’s behavior toward Syria has something in common with the Republicans and conservatives who are eager to force another budget showdown with him next month: an almost complete lack of strategic vision.

A man who rose to the presidency as a face on a multimillion-selling “Hope” poster and the subject of a Will.I.Am anthem before delivering a convention speech in a stadium on stage in front of papier-mache Greek columns now speaks contemptuously of those who would grade him on “style points.”

Style points are his strong suit. But, see, he’s not interested in them. All he wants, Barack Obama says of Syria, is “to get the policy right.”

Yes, that would indeed be a good thing. Here’s the necessary first step: Have a policy.

Is the Syria policy to remove the regime of Bashar al-Assad from power? You might think it was, since the president called for Assad “to go” two years ago.

But it isn’t, really.

Is the policy to punish Assad for his barbaric use of chemical weapons? You might think so, since Obama actually said that this was the policy of the United States, and, moreover, that he’d decided he was going to do so through a military strike.

But, hey, that was just so three weeks ago.

Is the policy now to take Assad’s chemical weapons away? Well, that would appear to be the policy. Just as the president said he was going to strike Syria, his secretary of state now says Russia is going to take the lead in destroying those weapons by the middle of next year.

Ah, but there isn’t an expert on earth who thinks that is remotely feasible in technological terms; after all, the United States has spent 28 years and $35 billion and still hasn’t completely destroyed its own stockpile.

And given that these weapons are now reportedly dispersed among 50 different Syrian units, making sure they’re all confiscated will be utterly impossible without the complete cooperation of the Assad regime, which we won’t get.

So the policy he’s “trying to get right” has gone from ousting the regime to punishing the regime to taking away the regime’s toys. And he’s still pretending we may strike militarily, just as Russia and Syria are going to pretend they’re playing along with the destruction of the weapons.

This is another fascinating aspect of trying to get the policy right: No revision supercedes the previous policy. They’re all still the policy, even if they contradict one another.

The president looks foolish, to put it mildly, and the significant polling declines he’s seeing are an indication of that. Lucky for him that some of those who might benefit from those declines are pursuing incredibly foolish tactics of their own.

The aim of conservatives — all conservatives — is the repeal and replacement of ObamaCare. Everyone is on the same page here. But there are differences in strategy when it comes to this aim.

One approach is not a strategy or a tactic but rather a kind of howl of rage: It’s the one that counsels confrontation without any sense of what will happen afterward.

The idea among some conservatives and conservative groups raising millions off the idea is that House Republicans should refuse to raise the debt ceiling, or refuse to agree to a spending measure to fund the government, unless the president agrees to a withdrawal of funding from ObamaCare.

Those who want this know the president will refuse any such deal, and his refusal will lead to either a crisis involving the nation’s debt servicing or a government shutdown. The question they never answer is: What happens then?

They believe that because ObamaCare is unpopular and the people they know hate the government, the public will somehow rally to the Right, support the repeal and force Obama to capitulate.

Or something.

The truth is that they want to confront Obama and make him defend his unpopular policy. That’s a good idea. But doing so in this way is not, because it won’t work.

Conservatives want to show they have fight in them. But while “fight” may be a good fund-raising cry, and may be a good word to yell at rallies and on chat shows and on the radio, it’s not a strategy.
Fighting gets you nowhere unless the aim for which you are fighting is achievable. Otherwise it’s just fighting for the sake of fighting.

It doesn’t say anything good about President Obama that he’s more willing to capitulate to Vladimir Putin than he is to negotiate with conservatives in Congress. But it doesn’t say much good about conservatives in Congress that they have no idea how the crisis they want to engender is going to be resolved.