Potpuourri.... Presidents, Ebola, and ME Bedfellows...

I've started several posts in the past several weeks only to scrap them in the face of rapidly changing events. Indeed, the past several weeks have been both interesting and sobering. So, instead of a single topic here, I thought I'd mention several that have caught my attention:

1) Obama's Legacy. As most know, after November's midterm elections, President Obama will firmly enter "lame duck" territory-- if he wasn't there already. The volume of commentary on Obama's legacy can already fill bookshelves. Among the more interesting pieces is something that appeared in the Washington Post this past weekend by Arron David Miller, titled Barack Obama, the Disappointer in Chief. Among Miller's points is that absent a real national crisis it's actually very difficult to be a "great" American president. Americans want greatness from their leaders, were taken in by the soaring rhetoric of candidate Obama in 2008, but then were inevitably disappointed, in part, because there isn't a national consensus about whether sweeping change of any kind is necessary.

Miller's piece is worth reading on its own, but it reminded me of the difficult position presidential candidates are in when trying to appeal to the electorate. We are now familiar with the critiques of Obama, many of which I have tossed around in this blog; he's too deliberative, too professorial, indecisive, always seems to see every side of every issue. That's a luxury that university professors have that American presidents do not. For some, Obama is all sizzle and no steak.



At the same time, it also reminds me that we want our presidents to be some impossible combination of everything. One of the reasons President Clinton is judged to possess masterful political skills is that he could attend a black tie affair in Little Rock and three hours later be getting on about politics with locals in the most backward corner of the state. On the one hand, we expect our presidents to be a little better than us, to lead us, inspire us. George W. Bush wasn't enough of an intellectual, had skated his way through Yale, had little of his own intellectual heft to bring to the table. Contrast that with Obama and the critique of him as being too professorial, too indecisive, too deliberative and thoughtful for the exigencies of the presidency. In 1992, George H.W. Bush was making a campaign stop at a grocery store and seemed rather confused by the bar-code scanner he was using. It was a moment that to many Americans made him seem out of touch, surrounded by too much power and privilege for too long.

In early 2016, Americans will be closely observing the many caucus and primary contests in places like Iowa and New Hampshire. One reason for the importance of these two contests, in particular, is that voters there demand of presidential candidates a "retail" style of politics that brings presidential candidates down to the level of individual voters. It is a key test for any candidate because the imagery of candidates knocking on doors, having coffee with voters, or sitting down to a stack of pancakes is critical. Hillary Clinton was recently in Iowa for the Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry. In 2008, Clinton skipped events like this. In fact, she reportedly disliked Iowa, didn't like to overnight there, and was focused on bigger political fish later in the campaign. Iowa caucus voters could tell and she paid a heavy price in Iowa finishing third behind Barack Obama and John Edwards. It was a fatal set of mistakes from which the Clinton campaign never recovered.

Do we care if Hillary Clinton enjoys fried steak in Iowa? Did Americans really expect that George H.W. Bush would know the price of a gallon of milk? Not really. But we do care if Clinton's disdain for fried steak in Iowa might be masking disdain for Iowans or that George H.W. Bush can't sympathise with our pocket-book issues.

2) Ebola. The news from West Africa seems to be getting worse by the day. There are many depressing elements to this story; the human toll, the economic cost to West African economies, the way Ebola has devastated the fragile health care systems in the region. Yet, now that Ebola has finally drawn a more robust international response, I am again struck by how profoundly unprepared we seem to be to handle this kind of thing. The SARS outbreak in 2002-2004 should have been a wake-up call. In the winter of 2003, several SARS patients turned up in Southern Ontario, severely testing the capacities of a rich country health care system. It was not a widespread outbreak in Canada (44 dead, an estimate 450 infections), yet it paralysed the health care system and much of Southern Ontario itself as fear and uncertainty spread more rapidly than SARS itself.

In the summer of 2001, a think-tank in Washington, D.C. put on a table-top exercise in which weaponized smallpox was released into the ventilation system of a mid-western shopping centre (Dark Winter exercise). Smallpox evidently has a 14 day incubation period (Ebola's is 21) and it was many days before the players in this exercise figured out what was happening and began to respond in earnest. The sobering element in this exercise for me is not so much the act of terrorism as the public health response and how quickly things began to spin out of control. I still don't think we will get very far down the road toward a "dark winter" with Ebola. That said, I am a little nervous. Two weeks ago no one was talking about robust screening of international travellers or restrictions on travel from  Ebola "hot-zones." Two weeks ago, there were no transmissions of the disease outside Africa. This past week, health care workers in Spain and the US became confirmed cases. That it is going to be a bumpy ride for the next little while was demonstrated by the absurd events that transpired on a US Airways flight from Philadelphia to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. A dumb ass passenger announced to everyone that he had Ebola. The response by both the airline and Dominican officials was surreal (see video here). It was clearly a false alarm in terms of Ebola, but were it a real threat, it's completely unclear to me that this was the correct response. Not seeing much here that makes me sleep well at night.

3) Middle-Eastern Bedfellows. I think most would agree that the Middle East is a complicated part of the world. Yet, I was struck by a Washington Post article that highlighted several clever, funny, and mostly serious, attempts to depict some of those relationships. It was enlightening, although I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. A very good example of this complexity is Qatar (see story). It's not hard to reason from this that the US should simply quit the region.