Tag: Congress

Imagine yourself at the Cabinet table…

Maybe I should begin with Joe Biden, sworn in as US president yesterday. But I will come to him in a moment. First, by way of contrast…

Yes, you’ve made it to the top. Johnson is presiding. Gavin Williamson, Education Secretary, rambles as he did on the BBC Today programme this morning. ‘Can we have clarity?’ barks the PM. ‘Command your brief, and your audience.’ ‘Do not make promises you can’t keep.’

Do you imagine this happens in cabinet, or privately? From the PM, or any minister? Rishi Sunak is a banker, not a natural interrogator. Gove has his own agenda, and as for the rest…

Look over the pond. Check out Biden’s appointments to his cabinet. (See below.) He’s not reliant on members of Congress, he can pick whoever’s best for the job, which includes of course members of Congress. It wouldn’t matter in this country if parliament attracted the best people. But with local party selection committees often representing hardliners, the best people don’t put themselves forward. The range of opinions among MPs has narrowed down, especially after the last election. The more moderate Tories were all but wiped out. Where now are the contrarians?

I mentioned Williamson. He has, I concede, a tough brief. So too Matt Hancock. Johnson is hopeless beyond repair. How about Robert Jenrick, as Housing and Communities Secretary?

He is a lawyer and property developer. His contribution this week has been a resort to populism to hide the shambles. He’s announced that removing statues will require planning permission once legislation has been passed by parliament. You may or may not agree. It’s his language I abhor, with references to ‘baying mobs’, ‘town hall militants’ and ‘woke worthies’. (As an aside: the Victorians had a unique ability fill town squares with statues and churchyards with gravestones: is our sense of our history such that they must remain there forever?)

This is Trump speak. Maybe now we will see less of it. Michael Gove’s ‘warm and generous friend’ has been outed and ousted. For America’s rust belt read England’s ‘red wall’ seats in the north of England. Might alarm bells now be ringing that resorting to populism doesn’t guarantee your political future?

Remember the old phrase, ‘divide et impera’, from your schooldays? Divide and rule. Time to put it to bed. Part of the strategy was to undermine the civil service. But Cummings was removed before he’d got too far with his ‘shit list’. So traditions of good advice, whether or not heeded, will at least be maintained.

The election of Joe Biden has given us hope. We’re having to pinch ourselves. The Democrats even won those two Georgia seats to give him control, by a single vice-presidential casting vote, of the Senate.  

‘We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature.’ I won’t forget Biden’s shades-of-Lincoln inauguration speech. One small detail noticed by The Times: Mike Pence, departing vice-president and his wife ‘were escorted down the steps of the Capitol by (Kamala) Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff. They paused for a minute-long conversation during which Mr Pence and Ms Harris both laughed.’ One small detail, and a week or two back, so unlikely.

I’ve had a look at Biden’s cabinet appointees, to see what their backgrounds were. We won’t, I’m confident, be getting the partisan language we got from Trump appointees. What the list tells me is that they’ve been out in the world, and earned their place in his cabinet the hard way. I’ll conclude this post with a few examples, courtesy of the US PBS Newshour:

Connecticut Public Schools commissioner and former elementary school teacher Miguel Cardona to be Secretary of the Department of Education.

Antony Blinken, deputy secretary of State during President Barack Obama’s administration and a key adviser on the administration’s response to Russian incursion into Crimea in 2014, to be Secretary of State.

Merrick Garland, currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, to be Attorney General. He was Obama’s nominee for the 2016  Supreme Court vacancy.

Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to be Secretary of the Department of Energy. Granholm served as governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011, the first woman to hold that role.

Janet Yellen to be Treasury Secretary. She served as head of the Council of Economic Advisors under Clinton and became the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank, in 2014.

William J. Burns to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Burns, currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, previously worked in government as Deputy Secretary of State.

You can check all the appointees out via PBS. It’s an impressive list.

Obama and the big wide world

I gave President Obama my endorsement in my last blog – for which he’ll no doubt be grateful.

But, at the hard end of politics, has he disappointed the ‘yes we can!’ generation? The world we have to admit isn’t a happier place after over seven years of the Obama presidency. Can he be held responsible?

There are still inmates at Guantanamo, the Middle East is in greater turmoil than ever, we have a resurgent Putin, a more autocratic, less tolerant China under Xi Jinping. The euphoria after the end of the Cold War is a distant dream. (I’m avoiding here the subject of US domestic politics, more convoluted and intriguing than ever.)

Countering the arguments that a more assertive American policy could have contained Putin and Xi Jinping, it’s abundantly clear that threats of NATO intervention wouldn’t have stopped Putin, and Han Chinese momentum cannot and will not be contained by Western stick-waving.

The Middle East. America has been much criticised in the USA and elsewhere for not being more involved, for not wielding a cudgel. The USA and the West, it’s claimed, have lost influence. And, yes, there’s the Libyan invasion aftermath, and the red line that Assad is deemed to have crossed in Syria. It was rash ever to lay down that line.

On the other hand, the Arab Spring, enthusiastically supported in the West, and its aftermath have shown how little understanding Western politicians, and indeed press and pundits, have of Middle Eastern politics on the ground – of individual countries, factions religion and otherwise, what moves and motivates individual citizens.

Obama and the rest of us were carried along by all the euphoria. But Obama had at least recognised three years before that the USA could neither continue in Iraq and Afghanistan as it had done under George Bush, nor get involved in any overtly military way in Syria. The actions of the USA, UK and France over the last century have been a main cause of the Middle East’s problems (seeking causation is I admit a risky business, but on the one word ‘oil’ hinges much of the story), and a continuing attempt to impose solutions cannot be the way forward.

Some kind of equilibrium in the Middle East will only be achieved by allowing conflicts to find their own more local resolutions. Holding back has taken much more courage than renewed military intervention would have done.

I’m well aware of the impact that Putin has had in Syria in recent months. But that cannot change the main argument. The USA, and Europe, has no choice but to work with Putin, whatever old-style neo-con and new-fangled bludgeoning interventionists might argue. IS is a different matter, a vile and inhuman organisation, with which no-one can negotiate, and which can have no place in a peace settlement in Syria – which Assad must have. And I’m not going to attempt here any appraisal of clone attacks on Taliban targets in Pakistan: that would be taking us into a whole additional area of future modes of warfare, and their morality and implications for the rest of the world.

Obama cannot claim any headline agreements or extraordinary successes in his foreign policy. But he has established in direction of traffic, and that could – should – be much more important than any short-term gains.

Given the malfunctioning Congress and the pretty vile right-wing press Obama has faced throughout he has remained remarkably cool, good-natured, level-headed. I hope the future will put up a few of like calibre. Sadly none are showing their faces just at the moment. It would be intriguing to consider if there could be candidates in any other country – the French economy minister Emmanuel Macron, for example. But that’s for another time and place.