Category: Politics

Back in 2014, I co-wrote an article, “The Rhetoric of Moderation in Deliberative Discourse: Barack Obama’s December 1, 2009 speech at West Point,” that proved difficult to place in a journal. My co-author thought it was because we were mildly critical of Obama and all our peer reviewers were leftists; I thought, rather, it was because our fine distinctions of what constituted claims and evidence in argumentation were deemed unimportant. I leave to the reader who was correct. Perhaps both.

Regardless, I think that article has held up rather well. I say this having now read the corresponding sections of Obama’s half-autobiography, A Promised Land, where he gives a fuller account of the deliberations that led up to that speech in two relevant passages: 431-439 and 442-445, as well as a later account of the Rolling Stone episode that prompted him to fire Stanley McChrystal on 577-580. These offer more evidence for our argument.

To summarize the original article, we held that Obama’s speech was a prime example of a “rhetoric of moderation,” where achieving a “middle” position and demonstrating extensive deliberation and weighing of options becomes a circular justification for that “middle” position, eliminating any need for evidence to support the position. The West Point speech appears on face value to be explaining why Obama has decided to send more troops to Afghanistan, but he never states a concrete reason for the specific number of troops. We compared Obama’s speech to LBJ’s 1968 Vietnam speech, noting that LBJ did provide a reason in his, namely that Westmoreland had indicated 100,000 troops were necessary, and we suggested that Obama did not refer to military authority as his relationship with the Pentagon was strained, and the actual troop number was far more arbitrary that Obama was willing to admit.

Before I get into the book, however, I should note something about post-presidential Obama. That he is verbose is obvious, I think, as well as the shoring up of old decisions, but what strikes me most about his style is how guarded he remains, even in 2020. Yes, his humor is showing more now – his disdain for McConnell in particular – and he does at times speak frankly about what he was feeling at moments.

But he is also still holding back a considerable amount of emotion, and not in a convincing way, any more than he was in 2008. Obama is simply unwilling, I think, to admit that some of his decisions have not been perfectly rational. Over and over in the book, all his decisions that he discusses are described as based on rigorous deliberation and careful impartiality and a seemingly 147-point ethical rubric, as if someone is going to accuse him of being human and he wants to get that notion out of the way quickly. I am not alone in such a critique, of course. Obama’s tendency toward restraint is established. He is reportedly a tight poker player, giving away as little information as possible and betting rarely, and an autobiography and his legacy is yet another game, I suppose.

In any case, Obama’s insider account confirms that the number of troops was both an operational and political compromise, where he favored a variant of a smaller plan backed by Robert Gates over a larger request by McChrystal, with Biden serving as a foil against a mission-oriented Pentagon at odds with Obama’s forest-over-trees worldview. These plans are tellingly not discussed separately from the men that championed them, and yet the rhetoric of moderation is everywhere. In the end, Obama mentions only the ceremonial occasion of the speech, not its moderating content that leaves little trace of the deliberation or power struggle, only a fait accompli. The external accounting is only a performance of nonexistent proof.

In a dictatorship, it is of course anathema for the dictator to admit other courses of action might also be justified, that there were doubts, that there are still doubts, that the people involved in constructing the decision have conflicting emotions and are not sure they made the right call. All those admissions undercut the notion of a fearless leader who decides. The ranks must be closed, even if the artificial nature of the entire enterprise can be pried apart from its protective rhetorical shell to find the softer, gushier innards of the decision-making process within. Like anyone thought it was anything else, dictatorship or democratic republic. In an autocratic state, I understand the purpose of the facade. Putin is great at it. But in America, what purpose does all this rigid posturing serve if it is regularly picked to shreds before the news cycle starts anew?

Obama still seems convinced he made the right call. But events have proved otherwise. Afghanistan remained a quagmire twelve years later, and now the man who played foil to the Pentagon then is now President and has taken the opposite view, announcing a full withdrawal. Time will tell if it sticks. But Obama’s unwillingness to show how the sausage was made at the time and his attempt to obscure the process undercut any notion of transparent deliberation. It is one thing to announce a troop increase and not provide any justification, it is another thing to announce a troop increase and provide considerable justification, but he did neither – he announced a troop increase, said he would justify it, and filled the gap with a rhetorical maneuver because he could not say then what he says implicitly now – that the decision was both logistically and politically expedient.

I suppose such a rhetoric keeps journalists and critics like myself employed, but why not skip to the end? Why wait 11 years to note that the sausage was, indeed, sausage? Is it only because we prefer to chomp down on our McNuggets without thinking about the mechanical chicken separator?

But before you, gentle reader, think I came to bury Obama, the later-yet-related firing of Stanley McChrystal, described on pages 577-580, was more justified. Obama notes McChrystal was an effective leader that he liked, but the stakes for undercutting the civilian control of the military were too high to let the insubordination he’d allowed his staff to commit pass. McChrystal made the decision easier by offering his resignation, of course.

This is not the only such incident in the book. Obama seems to have faced an unusual amount of pushback to his C-in-C role. His relative youth, lack of military experience, and his race are the obvious culprits. The question remains, then, how much of the Afghanistan troop decision was Obama pushing back against the passive undercutting of his constitutional authority, making sure that his moderate deliberation was his, not the Pentagon’s. Another open question for a future biographer and historian.

My cautionary note would be that it is the interaction between Obama, his staff, the Pentagon and the various generals, the actual “facts on the ground,” and the political situation that produced the rhetoric. It is never just about the lone rhetor who cuts through the malarkey to lead. Presidents are tempting targets for rhetorical criticism as they both have a lot of practical power and they are believed to have more power than they technically and legally have (the bully pulpit concept), but they have also considerable restraints that aren’t always appreciated. The West Point speech is prima facie evidence of this duality.