A Promised Land by Obama

Ref: Barack Obama (2020). A Promised Land. Crown Publishing.

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Summary­

• I went into government for the taproot idea that maybe politics could be less about power and positioning and more about community and connection…It was my job to tear down less visible walls: between rich and poor, between races and tribes, between natives and immigrants, between Christians, Muslims, and Jews…I promised to raise taxes on high-income Americans to pay for vital investments in education, research, and infrastructure. I promised to strengthen unions and raise the minimum wage as well as to deliver universal healthcare and make college more affordable…I wanted to restore in the minds of the American people the crucial role that government had always played in expanding opportunity, fostering competition and fair dealing, and making sure the marketplace worked for everybody.

• Resolving the economic crisis, winding down two wars, delivering on healthcare, and trying to save the planet from climate change- was going to be a long, hard slog. It would require a cooperative Congress, willing allies, and an informed, mobilized citizenry that could sustain pressure on the system- not a solitary savior.

• As president, I would be able to articulate a vision and set a direction for the country; promote a healthy organizational culture and establish clear lines of responsibility and measures of accountability. I would be the one who made the final decisions on issues that rose to my attention and who explained those decisions to the country at large.

• What I was quickly discovering about the presidency was that no problem that landed on my desk, foreign or domestic, had a clean, 100% solution. If it had, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already. Instead, I was constantly dealing with probabilities: a 70% chance, say, that a decision to do nothing would end in disaster; a 55% chance that this approach versus that one might solve the problem (with a 0% chance that it would work out exactly as intended); a 30% chance that whatever we chose wouldn’t work at all, along with a 15% chance that it would make the problem worse. In such circumstances, chasing after the perfect solution led to paralysis.

• 90% of the job (of President) was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises.

• The point of most presidential trips was not so much to gather new information, but to communicate concern and resolve.

• Looking back, I sometimes ponder the age-old question of how much difference the particular characteristics of individual leaders make in the sweep of history—whether those of us who rise to power are mere conduits for the deep, relentless currents of the times or whether we’re at least partly the authors of what’s to come. I wonder whether our insecurities and our hopes, our childhood traumas or memories of unexpected kindness carry as much force as any technological shift or socioeconomic trend.

• I was learning a difficult lesson about the presidency: that my heart was now chained to strategic considerations and tactical analysis, my convictions subject to counterintuitive arguments; that in the most powerful office on earth, I had less freedom to say what I meant and act on what I felt than I’d had as a senator.

• To a degree unmatched by any superpower in history, America chose to bind itself to a set of international laws, rules, and norms. More often than not, we exercised a degree of restraint in our dealings with smaller, weaker nations, relying less on threats and coercion to maintain a global pact. Over time, that willingness to act on behalf of a common good—even if imperfectly—strengthened rather than diminished our influence, contributing to the system’s overall durability, and if America was not always universally loved, we were at least respected and not merely feared.

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Major Issues

• Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

• Immigration; Dreamers Act

• Iraq War

• Afghanistan War

• Iran; nuclear energy

• Housing Market Collapse

• Radical Islam

• Arab Spring

• Climate Change

• Healthcare

• OP Neptune Spear

• H1N1

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Political Career

• 1996: Obama is elected to IL 13th Legislative District in Chicago for a 2-yr term.

  • In Summer, 1995, 2nd District of IL congressman, Mel Reynolds is indicted on several charges, including sex with a 16yo campaign volunteer. The state senator from the area, Alice Palmer, was eligible to run for the seat and, not long before the congressman was convicted in August, she threw her hat into the ring. Based on the work I’d done for Project VOTE! I was asked to help her nascent campaign, and as the weeks went by, several people encouraged me to think about filing to run for Alice’s soon-to-be-vacant senate seat. The following week she held a press conference in Springfield, announcing that she was filing her own last-minute petitions to get on the ballot and retain her seat. The petitions Alice had submitted appeared to be filled with invalid signatures: people whose addresses were outside the district, multiple signatures with different names but the same handwriting.

• 1998: Obama is re-elected to the IL 13th Legislative District in Chicago for a 4-yr term.

• 2000: Obama loses to Bobby Rush in a House primary election.

  • I recognized that in running for USC I’d been driven not by some selfless dream of changing the world, but rather by the need to justify the choices I had already made, or to satisfy my ego, or to quell my envy of those who had achieved what I had not. In other words, I had become the very thing that, as a younger man, I had warned myself against. I had become a politician—and not a very good one at that.

  • Following my ill-fated run for Congress, I experienced a certain letting go—if not of my desire to make a difference in the world, then at least of the insistence that it had to be done on a larger stage.

  • My loss to Bobby Rush had given me a clear blueprint for upping my game: I needed to interact more effectively with the media, learning to get my ideas across in pithy sound bites. I needed to build a campaign that was less about policy papers and more about connecting one-on-one with voters. And I needed to raise money—lots of it.

• 2002: Obama is re-elected to the IL 13th Legislative District in Chicago for a 4-yr term.

• 2004: Obama is elected US Senator.

  • The country was desperate for a new voice… and with my connection with young voters, minorities, and independents, I might broaden the map in a way that could help other Democrats down the ballot.

• 2009: Obama is elected US President.

  • At some basic level people were no longer seeing me, I realized, with all my quirks and shortcomings. Instead, they had taken possession of my likeness and made it a vessel for a million different dreams.

  • Since winning the Democratic nomination, I’d begun to experience reading the newspapers differently, in a way that gave me a jolt. Every headline, every story, every exposé, was another problem for me to solve. And problems were piling up quickly.

  • It felt sometimes as if I’d been caught in a tide, carried along by the current of other people’s expectations before I’d clearly defined my own.

  • In presidential primaries, what matters is not so much the number of individual votes you get but rather how many pledged convention delegates you win, with delegates apportioned based on a series of arcane rules unique to each state.

  • A presidential general election resembles a big math puzzle. Which combination of states do you need to win to get the requisite 270 electoral votes? For at least 20y, nominees of both parties had come up with the same answer, assuming that the majority of states were inalterably Republican or Democratic, and therefore concentrating all their time and money on a handful of big battleground states like OH, FL, PA, MI.

  • What became abundantly clear as soon as Sarah Palin stepped into the spotlight was that on just about every subject relevant to governing the country, she had absolutely no idea what the hell she was talking about. The financial system. The Supreme Court. The Russian invasion of Georgia. It didn’t matter what the topic was or what form the question took—the Alaskan governor appeared lost, stringing words together like a kid trying to bluff her way through a test for which she had failed to study.

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Campaigning

• Grassroots organizing got me out of my own head. I had to listen to, and not just theorize about, what mattered to people. I had to ask strangers to join me and one another on real-life projects—fixing up a park, or removing asbestos from a housing project, or starting an after-school program. I experienced failure and learned to buck up so I could rally those who’d put their trust in me. I suffered rejections and insults often enough to stop fearing them. In other words, I grew up—and got my sense of humor back.

• I asked people to describe their world as it was and as they would like it to be.

• Looking back, I realize I was doing what most of us tend to do when we’re uncertain or floundering: We reach for what feels familiar, what we think we’re good at. I knew policy; I knew how to consume and process information. It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn’t a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

• My head was crammed with too many facts and too few answers.

• It was part of the brutal nature of modern politics, I was discovering, the difficulty of competing in a game where there were no clearly defined rules, a game in which your opponents are not merely trying to put a ball through a basket or push it across your goal line, but are instead trying to convince the broad public- at least implicitly, more often explicitly- that in matters of judgment, intelligence, values, and character, they are more worthy than you.

• The longer the campaign goes on, the tighter the contest, the higher the stakes, the easier it is to justify hardball tactics. Until those basic human responses that normally govern our daily lives—honesty, empathy, courtesy, patience, goodwill—feel like weakness when extended to the other side.

• A lesson I learned from voters: They weren’t interested in hearing me parrot conventional wisdom.

• If supporters could mold bits and pieces of me into an outsized symbol of hope, then the vague fears of detractors could just as readily congeal into hate. And it was in response to this disturbing truth that I’d seen my life change the most.

• My stump speech became less a series of positions and more a chronicle of disparate voices, a chorus of Americans from every corner of the state. “Here’s the thing,” I would say. “Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect. “That’s about it. It’s not a lot. And although they don’t expect government to solve all their problems, they do know, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities government could help.”

• Mobilizing public opinion, shaping working coalitions—that was the job. Whether I liked it or not, people were moved by emotion, not facts. To elicit the best rather than the worst of those emotions, to buttress those better angels of our nature with reason and sound policy, to perform while still speaking the truth—that was the bar I needed to clear.

  • (After debating); “You got an A on the quiz,” Axe would reply. “No votes, though.”

  • “Your problem,” he said, “is you keep trying to answer the question.” “Isn’t that the point?” I said. “No, Barack,” Axe said, “that is not the point. The point is to get your message across. What are your values? What are your priorities? That’s what people care about. Look, half the time the moderator is just using the question to try to trip you up. Your job is to avoid the trap they’ve set. Take whatever question they give you, give ’em a quick line to make it seem like you answered it…and then talk about what you want to talk about.” “That’s bullshit,” I said. “Exactly,” he said.

• The most effective debate answers, it seemed, were designed not to illuminate but to evoke an emotion, or identify the enemy, or signal to a constituency that you, more than anyone else on that stage, were and would always be on their side.

• The moment I arrived, they gave me a detailed breakdown of the debate format and an outline of every conceivable question that might be asked. Along with Axe, Plouffe, communications advisor Anita Dunn, and the rest of the team, they drilled me for hours on the precise answers they wanted to hear, down to the last word or turn of phrase. In the old Biltmore Hotel where we had set up shop, Ron and Tom had insisted on building an exact replica of the debate stage, and that first night they subjected me to a full 90min mock debate, picking apart every aspect of my performance, from pace to posture to tone. It was exhausting but undeniably useful, and by the time my head hit the pillow, I was certain I would be dreaming in talking points.

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Race

• While I didn’t believe racism was the reason for the botched response to the Katrina disaster, it did speak to how little the ruling party, and America as a whole, had invested in tackling the isolation, intergenerational poverty, and lack of opportunities that persisted in large swaths of the country.

• Appealing to common interests discounted the continuing effects of discrimination and allowed whites to avoid taking the full measure of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and their own racial attitudes.

• I recognized that, at a time when I was asking white voters to judge me on merits, a raw appeal to racial solidarity would feel like hypocrisy.

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Supreme Court

• The idea of giving nine unelected, tenured-for-life lawyers in black robes the power to strike down laws passed by a majority of the people’s representatives doesn’t sound very democratic.

• As far as I was concerned, they had it upside down (on strict constitutionalism): It was precisely the ability of a judge to understand the context of his or her decisions, to know what life was like for a pregnant teen as well as for a Catholic priest, a self-made tycoon as well as an assembly-line worker, the minority as well as the majority, that was the wellspring of objectivity.

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GOP

• Someone asked me to explain why I thought so many working-class voters in PA continued to vote against their interests and elect Republicans. I’d been asked a form of this question a thousand times. Normally I had no problem describing the mix of economic anxiety, frustration with a seemingly unresponsive federal government, and legitimate differences on social issues like abortion that pushed voters into the Republican column. It was a bit of political posturing, I said, designed to give the impression of action without actually solving the problem.

• Steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment-America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

• For the 8y of my presidency, McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, would deploy, with impressive discipline, a refusal to work with me or members of my administration, regardless of the circumstances, the issue, or the consequences for the country.

• Influence over the Republican Party was held by billionaire ideologues like David and Charles Koch, who had spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars systematically building a network of think tanks, advocacy organizations, media operations, and political operatives, all with the express goal of rolling back every last vestige of the modern welfare state. For them, all taxes were confiscatory, paving the road to socialism; all regulations were a betrayal of free-market principles and the American way of life.

• Between Republican attacks and Democratic complaints, I was reminded of the Yeats poem “The Second Coming”: My supporters lacked all conviction, while my opponents were full of passionate intensity.

• The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed.

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Media

• The collective approach to reporting on Washington followed a depressingly predictable script: Report what one side says (quick sound bite included). Report what the other side says (opposing sound bite, the more insulting the better). Leave it to an opinion poll to sort out who’s right.

• Over time, my staff and I became so resigned to this style of “he said / he said” coverage that we could joke about it. (“In dueling press conferences today, the debate over the shape of planet Earth heated up, with President Obama—who claims the Earth is round—coming under withering attack from Republicans who insist that the White House has covered up documents proving the Earth is flat.”)

• (Beware) the hermetically sealed bubble of conservative media outlets.

• The degree to which the line between news and entertainment had become so blurred, and the competition for ratings so fierce, that outlets eagerly lined up to offer a platform for a baseless claim.

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Policy

• I would spend countless hours with (my) brain trust and their deputies, asking questions, sifting through recommendations, poring over slide decks and briefing books, formulating policy and then subjecting whatever we had thought up to relentless scrutiny. Arguments were heated, dissent was encouraged, and no idea was rejected because it came from a junior staffer or didn’t fit into a particular ideological predisposition.

• Throughout the 20c, in law after law and in cooperation with presidents of both parties, Congress had kept delegating regulatory and enforcement authority to a host of specialized agencies, from the SEC to OSHA to the FAA. The reason was simple: As society grew more complex, corporations grew more powerful, and citizens demanded more from the government, elected officials simply did not have time to regulate so many diverse industries. Nor did they have the specialized knowledge required to set rules for fair dealing across financial markets, evaluate the safety of the latest medical device, make sense of new pollution data, or anticipate all the ways employers might discriminate against their employees on account of race or gender. In other words, if you wanted good government, then expertise mattered. You needed public institutions stocked with people whose job it was to pay attention to important stuff so the rest of us citizens didn’t have to. And it was thanks to those experts that Americans could worry less about the quality of the air we breathed or the water we drank, that we had recourse when employers failed to pay us the overtime we were due, that we could count on over-the-counter drugs not killing us, and that driving a car or flying on a commercial airplane was exponentially safer today than it had been just 20-30, or 50y ago.

• The vast majority of regulations reviewed (by Cass) stood up to scrutiny—and by the end of my presidency, even Republican analysts would find that the benefits of our regulations outweighed their costs by a six-to-one margin.

• When done properly, ambitious regulatory standards spur businesses to innovate.

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Climate Change

• At the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it.

• For millions of struggling villagers who lived in developing countries, the addition of a coal-fired electrical generator or a new, smoke-belching factory often represented their best chance for more income and relief from backbreaking toil. To them, worrying about maintaining pristine landscapes and exotic wildlife was a luxury only Westerners could afford.

• Climate change is one of those issues governments are notoriously bad at dealing with, requiring politicians to put in place disruptive, expensive, and unpopular policies now in order to prevent a slow-rolling crisis in the future.

• “Nobody gives a shit about solar panels when their homes in foreclosure.”-Axe.

• It was a lot easier to measure a business’s profits and losses than it was to put a price on preserving an endangered bird or reducing the probability that a kid got asthma.

• Cap & Trade: The federal government would cap the amount of GHG’s companies could emit, leaving it up to each company to figure out how to hit those targets. Companies exceeding their limit would pay a penalty. Companies that stayed below their limit could sell their unused pollution “credits” to less-efficient businesses. By setting a price on pollution and creating a market for environmentally friendly behavior, a cap-and-trade approach gave corporations an incentive to develop and adopt the latest green technologies; and with each technological advance, the government could lower the caps even further, encouraging a steady and virtuous cycle of innovation.

• Carbon Tax: A tax on emissions all fossil fuels, discouraging their use by making them more expensive.

• Common but Differentiated Responsibilities: A CC concept that places the burden of cutting GHG emissions almost exclusively on advanced, energy-intensive economies like those of the US, EU, and Japan.

  • The existing buildup of GHGs was largely the result of a hundred years of Western industrialization, and rich countries also had a much higher per capita C footprint than other places. There were limits to how much you could expect poor countries like Mali, Haiti, or Cambodia—places where lots of people still lacked even basic electricity—to cut their already negligible emissions (and possibly slow their short-term growth).

• Differentiated Responsibilities: A CC concept from the Kyoto Accord in which emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, had no binding obligation to curb emissions.

  • Although the average Chinese or Indian citizen consumed a fraction of the energy used by the average American, experts projected a doubling of those countries’ C footprints in the coming decades, as more and more of their >2B people aspired to the same modern conveniences that folks in rich countries enjoyed.

Obama CC Policy (Failed)

• Every nation would be required to put forward a self-determined plan for GHG reduction with each country’s plan differing based on its wealth, energy profile, and stage of development and would be revised at regular intervals as that country’s economic and technological capacities increased.

• Each country would agree to measures allowing the other parties to independently verify that it was following through on its pledged reductions.

• Wealthy countries would provide poor countries with billions of dollars in aid for climate mitigation and adaptation, so long as those poor countries met their (far more modest) commitments.

• As part of an interim agreement, the US would reduce GHG emissions by 17% by 2020, as well as a $10B pledge towards the $100B international Green Climate fund to help poor countries with CC mitigation and adaptation.

• One by one, leaders explained why our proposal was unacceptable: Kyoto was working just fine; the West was responsible for global warming and now expected poorer countries to impede their development to solve the problem; our plan would violate the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”; the verification mechanism we were suggesting would violate their national sovereignty.

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Military

• There was a high likelihood that pushing reform might be harder for a newly elected African American president who’d never served in uniform, had opposed a mission that many had devoted their lives to achieving, wanted to rein in the military budget, and had surely lost the Pentagon vote by a sizable margin.

• The image of me that had emerged from the campaign—the starry-eyed idealist who instinctively opposed military action and believed that every problem on the international stage could be solved through high-minded dialogue—had never been entirely accurate. Yes, I believed in diplomacy and thought war should be a last resort. I believed in multilateral cooperation to address problems like climate change, and I believed that the steady promotion of democracy, economic development, and human rights around the world served our long-term national security interests.

• Michael Chertoff, President Bush’s secretary of homeland security, had called to inform us of credible intelligence indicating that four Somali nationals were thought to be planning a terrorist attack at the inauguration ceremony.

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Healthcare

• Spiraling healthcare costs burdened American businesses: Japanese and German automakers didn’t have to worry about the extra $1,500 in worker and retiree healthcare costs that Detroit had to build into the price of every car rolling off the assembly line. In fact, it was in response to foreign competition that U.S. companies began off-loading rising insurance costs onto their employees in the late 1980s and ’90s, replacing traditional plans that had few, if any, out-of-pocket costs with cheaper versions that included higher deductibles, co-pays, lifetime limits, and other unpleasant surprises hidden in the fine print.

• Passing something as monumental as healthcare reform on a purely party-line vote would make the law politically more vulnerable down the road.

• The idea of requiring people to buy insurance was extremely unpopular with voters, and I’d instead focused my plan on lowering costs—I was now convinced, as were most healthcare advocates, that Romney’s model offered us the best chance of achieving our goal of universal coverage.

• Public Option: A modification to the Massachusetts Healthcare model that gave consumers the choice to buy coverage from an online marketplace owned and operated by the government. By highlighting the cost-effectiveness of government insurance and exposing the bloated waste and immorality of the private insurance market, they hoped the public option would pave the way for a single-payer system.

  • Insurance companies balked at the idea of a public option, arguing that they would not be able to compete against a government insurance plan that could operate without the pressures of making a profit.

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Social Security

• Emphasis on universal programs often means benefits are less directly targeted to those most in need.

• People learned that being left to your own devices could mean penury and shame. Which is how the US and other advanced democracies came to create the modern social contract. As our society grew more complex, more and more of the government’s function took the form of social insurance, with each of us chipping in through our tax dollars to protect ourselves collectively—for disaster relief if our house was destroyed in a hurricane; unemployment insurance if we lost a job; Social Security and Medicare to lessen the indignities of old age; reliable electricity and phone service for those who lived in rural areas where utility companies wouldn’t otherwise make a profit; public schools and universities to make education more egalitarian. The goal is to build a floor beneath which nobody can sink.

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Immigration

• The economic gulf between us and our southern neighbors drove hundreds of thousands of people to illegally cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, searching for work and a better life…American consumers benefit from this invisible workforce, many fear that immigrants were taking jobs from citizens, burdening social services programs, and changing the nation’s racial and cultural makeup, which led to demands for the government to crack down on illegal immigration.

• ~40% of America’s unauthorized immigrants arrive through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas.

• Dreamer’s Act: Grants temporary legal residence and a pathway to citizenship, so long as immigrants entered the US before the age of 16, lived in the US for 5 continuous years, graduated from high school or obtained a GED, attended college for 2y or joined the military, and had no serious criminal record.

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---Foreign Policy---

• That the USG had long supported purported allies with billions of dollars in military and economic aid despite complicity with violent extremists and records of significant and irresponsible proliferation of nuclear weapons technology in the world—said something about the pretzel-like logic of US foreign policy.

• My foreign policy views—and, indeed, my early opposition to the invasion of Iraq—owed at least as much to the “realist” school, an approach that valued restraint, assumed imperfect information and unintended consequences, and tempered a belief in American exceptionalism with a humility about our ability to remake the world in our image.

• My dealings with aging autocrats: they were shut away in palaces, their every interaction mediated by the hard-faced, obsequious functionaries that surrounded them, they were unable to distinguish between their personal interests and those of their nations, their actions governed by no broader purpose beyond maintaining the tangled web of patronage and business interests that kept them in power.

• At the end of the day, each nation’s foreign policy remained driven by its own economic interests, geography, ethnic and religious schisms, territorial disputes, founding myths, lasting traumas, ancient animosities—and, most of all, the imperatives of those who had and sought to maintain power. It was the rare foreign leader who was susceptible to moral persuasion alone.

• War is both terrible and sometimes necessary; that reconciling these seemingly contradictory ideas requires the community of nations to evolve higher standards for both the justification and the conduct of war; and that avoidance of war requires a just peace, founded on a common commitment to political freedom, a respect for human rights, and concrete strategies to expand economic opportunity around the world.

• In the conduct of foreign policy, I had to constantly balance competing interests, interests shaped by the choices of previous administrations and the contingencies of the moment; and that just because I couldn’t in every instance elevate our human rights agenda over other considerations didn’t mean that I shouldn’t try to do what I could, when I could, to advance what I considered to be America’s highest values.

• For most of America’s history, the thought of using our combat forces to stop a government from killing its own people would have been a nonstarter—because such state-sponsored violence happened all the time; because U.S. policy makers didn’t consider the death of innocent Cambodians, Argentinians, or Ugandans relevant to our interests; and because many of the perpetrators were our allies in the fight against communism.

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United Nations

• Although the U.N. secretary-general presides over a budget of many billions of dollars, a sprawling bureaucracy, and a host of international agencies, his or her power is largely derivative, dependent on an ability to herd 193 countries toward something resembling a common direction…Any significant action required consensus among the five permanent members of the UNSC—the US the USSR (later Russia), the UK, France, and China—each possessing an absolute veto.

  • In much of the Cold War, the chances of reaching any consensus had been slim, which is why the UN had stood idle as Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary or US planes dropped napalm on the Vietnamese countryside.

• UN peacekeeping missions are dependent on voluntary troop contributions from member states which were consistently understaffed and ill-equipped.

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China

• China used nontariff barriers like quotas and embargoes; it also engaged in the theft of US intellectual property and placed constant pressure on US companies doing business in China to surrender key technologies to help speed China’s ascent up the global supply chain…For years, China used state subsidies, as well as currency manipulation and trade dumping, to artificially depress the price of its exports and undercut manufacturing operations in the US.

• For Wen and the rest of China’s leaders, foreign policy remained purely transactional. How much they gave and how much they got would depend not on abstract principles of international law but on their assessment of the other side’s power and leverage. Where they met no resistance, they’d keep on taking.

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Russia

• The evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased.

• Despite having a nuclear arsenal second only to our own, Russia lacked the vast network of alliances and bases that allowed the US to project its military power across the globe. Russia’s economy remained smaller than those of Italy, Canada, and Brazil, dependent almost entirely on oil, gas, mineral, and arms exports.

• Unlike Putin, I had the good fortune of having been born in a nation where political success hadn’t required me to ignore billion-dollar kickbacks or the blackmailing of political opponents.

• Putin reminded me of the sorts of men who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall—tough, street smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences, and who viewed patronage, bribery, shakedowns, fraud, and occasional violence as legitimate tools of the trade.

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India

• India’s politics still revolved around religion, clan, and caste.

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---Middle East---

• We worried about the autocratic, repressive nature of nearly every Arab government—not just the lack of true democracy but also the fact that those who held power seemed entirely unaccountable to the people they ruled. Even as conditions varied from country to country, most of these leaders maintained their grip through an old formula: restricted political participation and expression, pervasive intimidation and surveillance at the hands of police or internal security services, dysfunctional judicial systems and insufficient due process protections, rigged (or nonexistent) elections, an entrenched military, heavy press censorship, and rampant corruption. Many of these regimes had been in place for decades, held together by nationalist appeals, shared religious beliefs, tribal bonds, familial ties, and webs of patronage. It was possible that the stifling of dissent combined with plain inertia would be enough to keep them going for a while.

• Every so often, a report would surface from the Pentagon or Langley, recommending that US policy pay more attention to human rights and governance issues when dealing with our Middle East partners. But then the Saudis would deliver a vital tip that kept an explosive device from being loaded onto US- bound cargo planes or our naval base in Bahrain would prove critical in managing a flare-up with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, and those reports would be relegated to the bottom of a drawer.

• Only rarely did the US scold allies like Egypt or Saudi Arabia publicly for their human rights violations. Given our concerns over Iraq, al-Qaeda, and Iran, not to mention Israel’s security needs, the stakes felt too high to risk rupturing our relationships.

• The transition to democracy requires strong political parties, an independent judiciary and media, impartial election monitors, broad-based civic associations, an effective civil service, and respect for minority rights.

• “The corrupt, rotting authoritarian order.”-On Life in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Islam

• By losing our focus on the small band of terrorists who had actually planned and carried out 9/11 and instead defining the threat as an open-ended, all-encompassing “War on Terror,” we’d fallen into what I believed was a strategic trap—one that had elevated al-Qaeda’s prestige, rationalized the Iraq invasion, alienated much of the Muslim world, and warped almost a decade of U.S. foreign policy.

• Around the world, in places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.

• If we don’t squarely address the sources of tension between the West and the Muslim world, and describe what peaceful coexistence might look like, we’ll be fighting wars in the region for the next 30y.

• Muslim Brotherhood: A group that sought to establish an Islamic government through grassroots political mobilization and charitable works, but also included members who occasionally turned to violence.

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Israel & Palestine

• I thought it was reasonable to ask the stronger party (Israel) to take a bigger first step in the direction of peace.

• Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli PM—even one who presided over a fragile coalition government—exacted a domestic political cost that simply didn’t exist when I dealt with the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.

• The speeches, the small talk, the easy familiarity—it all felt too comfortable, almost ritualized, a performance that each of the four leaders had probably participated in dozens of times before, designed to placate the latest U.S. president who thought things could change. I imagined them shaking hands afterward, like actors taking off their costumes and makeup backstage, before returning to the world that they knew—a world in which Netanyahu could blame the absence of peace on Abbas’s weakness while doing everything he could to keep him weak, and Abbas could publicly accuse Israel of war crimes while quietly negotiating business contracts with the Israelis, and Arab leaders could bemoan the injustices endured by Palestinians under occupation while their own internal security forces ruthlessly ferreted out dissenters and malcontents who might threaten their grip on power. And I thought of all the children, whether in Gaza or in Israeli settlements or on the street corners of Cairo and Amman, who would continue to grow up knowing mainly violence, coercion, fear, and the nursing of hatred because, deep down, none of the leaders I’d met with believed anything else was possible.

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Afghanistan

• Much of the Afghan countryside was beyond the control of Kabul, and Karzai rarely ventured out, reliant not just on US forces but on a patchwork of alliances with local warlords to maintain what power he possessed.

• President Karzai’s reelection strategy mainly consisted of buying off local power brokers, intimidating opponents, and shrewdly playing various ethnic factions against one another.

• The costs of Afghanistan were staggering—~$1B for every thousand additional troops deployed. Our men and women in uniform, some on their 4th or 5th tours after close to a decade of war, would face an even greater toll. And given the resilience of the Taliban and the dysfunction of Karzai’s government, there was no guarantee of success. In their written endorsement of the plan, Gates and the generals acknowledged that no amount of U.S. military power could stabilize Afghanistan “as long as pervasive corruption and preying upon the people continue to characterize governance” inside the country. I saw no possibility of that condition being met anytime soon.

• The status quo was untenable. We couldn’t afford to let the Taliban return to power, and we needed more time to train more capable Afghan security forces and to root out al-Qaeda and its leadership.

• Riedel Report on Afghanistan: The principal goal should be to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat aQ in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent their return to either country in the future…Unless Pakistan stopped sheltering the Taliban, our efforts at long-term stability in Afghanistan were bound to fail.

  • We landed on a set of achievable objectives: reducing the level of Taliban activity so they didn’t threaten major population centers; pushing Karzai to reform a handful of key departments, like the MoD and Finance, rather than trying to get him to revamp the entire government; accelerating the training of local forces that would eventually allow the Afghan people to secure their own country.

• “My frustrations would flare, especially whenever I heard anyone respond to a tough question by falling back on the argument that we needed to send more troops in order to show “resolve.” What does that mean exactly? I’d ask, sometimes too sharply. That we keep doubling down on bad decisions we’ve already made? Does anyone think that spinning our wheels in Afghanistan for another ten years will impress our allies and strike fear in our enemies?”-Obama on Afghanistan.

• “In the here and now, the threats we faced—deadly but stateless terrorist networks; otherwise, feeble rogue nations out to get weapons of mass destruction—were real but not existential, and so resolve without foresight was worse than useless. It led us to fight the wrong wars and careen down rabbit holes. It made us administrators of inhospitable terrain and bred more enemies than we killed.”-Obama on Afghanistan.

• “Afghan good enough.”-Gates, US SECDEF.

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Iraq

• Until Iraq found a way to strengthen its civic institutions and its leaders’ developed habits of compromise, the country would continue to struggle.

• After 5y of heavy US involvement, with Saddam Hussein gone, no evidence of WMDs, and a democratically elected government installed, I believed phased withdrawal was in order: one that would build in the time needed to stand up Iraqi security forces and root out the last vestiges of al-Qaeda in Iraq; guarantee ongoing military, intelligence, and financial support; and begin bringing our troops home so that we could hand Iraq back to its people.

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Iran

• Khomeini’s call to overthrow Sunni Arab monarchies turned Iran and the House of Saud into bitter enemies and sharpened sectarian conflict across the Middle East…Khomeini’s vow to wipe Israel off the map—manifest in the IRGC’s support for armed proxies like the Lebanon-based Shiite militia Hezbollah and the military wing of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas—made the Iranian regime Israel’s single greatest security threat and contributed to the general hardening of Israeli attitudes toward possible peace with its neighbors.

• Khomeini’s rendering of the world as a Manichaean clash between the forces of Allah and those of “the Great Satan” (America).

• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose manic anti-Western outbursts, Holocaust denial, and persecution of gays and others he considered a threat made him a perfect distillation of the regime’s most hateful aspects.

• We’d discovered that Iran was on the verge of completing construction of a secret enrichment facility buried deep inside a mountain near the ancient city of Qom. Everything about the facility—its size, configuration, and location on a military installation—indicated Iran’s interest in shielding its activities from both detection and attack, features inconsistent with a civilian program.

• An Iranian nuclear arsenal wouldn’t need to threaten the U.S. homeland; just the possibility of a nuclear strike or nuclear terrorism in the Middle East would severely limit a future U.S. president’s option to check Iranian aggression toward its neighbors. The Saudis would likely react by pursuing their own rival “Sunni bomb,” triggering a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region.

• Having been rebuffed in our attempts to open a dialogue with Iran, and with the country spiraling into chaos and further repression, we shifted to step two of our nonproliferation strategy: mobilizing the international community to apply tough, multilateral economic sanctions that might force Iran to the negotiating table.

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Libya

• Did the US have an obligation to prevent atrocities in its foreign policy? Where would the obligation to intervene end? And what were the parameters? How many people would need to have been killed, and how many more would have to be at risk, to trigger a U.S. military response? Why Libya and not the Congo, for example, where a series of civil conflicts had resulted in millions of civilian deaths? Would we intervene only when there was no chance of U.S. casualties?

• (Typical question from a White House reporter at the time: “How many more people have to die before we take this one step?”) What they were missing was the fact that establishing a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace would require us to first fire missiles into Tripoli to destroy Libya’s air defenses—a clear act of war against a country that posed no threat to us. Not only that, but it wasn’t even clear that a no-fly zone would have any effect, since Gaddafi was using ground forces and not air bombardment to attack opposition strongholds.

• Gaddafi was pledging to go “house by house, home by home, alley by alley, person by person, until the country is cleansed of dirt and scum.”

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Saudi Arabia

• The Saudi royal family steered billions of dollars to clerics to build mosques and madrassas across the Sunni world. As a result, from Pakistan to Egypt to Mali to Indonesia, fundamentalism grew stronger, tolerance for different Islamic practices grew weaker, drives to impose Islamic governance grew louder, and calls for a purging of Western influences from Islamic territory—through violence if necessary—grew more frequent.

• I’ve wondered sometimes whether there was a point when the Saudi monarchy might have reassessed its religious commitments, acknowledging that Wahhabist fundamentalism—like all forms of religious absolutism—was incompatible with modernity, and used its wealth and authority to steer Islam onto a gentler, more tolerant course. Probably not. The old ways were too deeply embedded, and as tensions with fundamentalists grew in the late 1970s, the royals may have accurately concluded that religious reform would lead inevitably to uncomfortable political and economic reform as well.

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Guantanamo

• To close GITMO, we had to figure out what to do with the 242 detainees being held there when I took office. A small number of Gitmo prisoners were sophisticated aQ operatives, known as high-value detainees (HVDs)—like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the self-professed masterminds behind the 9/11 attacks. The largest contingent- 99 men- was from Yemen, a dirt-poor country with a barely functioning government, deep tribal conflicts, and the single most active aQ chapter outside Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Another group consisted of members of a Muslim ethnic minority group, known as Uighurs.

• International law prohibited us from repatriating detainees who we had grounds to believe might be abused, tortured, or killed by their own government.

• Bush administration officials hadn’t considered any of this to be a problem since, in their view, all Gitmo detainees qualified as “unlawful enemy combatants,” exempt from the protections of the Geneva Conventions and unentitled to civilian trials.

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---Economy---

• For years, U.S. consumer spending—turbocharged with credit card debt and home equity loans—had been the primary engine of global economic growth. Americans bought cars from Germany, electronics from South Korea, and practically everything else from China; these countries, in turn, bought raw materials from countries further down the global supply chain.

• U.S. manufacturers had shifted production overseas, taking advantage of low-cost labor and shipping back cheap goods to be sold by big-box retailers against which small businesses couldn’t hope to compete.

• Keynian Economics: The pumping of money into the economy during times of stagnation to get the “gears moving again,” until families grew confident enough to spend more. Once the economy was kick-started, the government could then turn off the spigot and recoup its money through the resulting boost in tax revenue. According to Keynes, it didn’t matter much what the government spent the money on, so long as it generated economic activity.

  • From the perspective of the individual family or firm, it was prudent to tighten one’s belt during a severe recession. The problem was that thrift could be stifling; when everyone tightened their belts at the same time, economic conditions couldn’t improve. Keynes’s answer to the dilemma was just as simple: A government needed to step in as the “spender of last resort.”

• The hard evidence shows that austerity in response to recession is disastrous…I sought to Implement policies that increased aggregate demand.

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Housing Market Collapse

• Whereas banks had once typically held the mortgage loans they made in their own portfolios, a huge percentage of mortgages were now bundled and sold as securities on Wall Street. Since banks could now off-load their risk that any particular borrower might default on their loan, this “securitization” of mortgages had led banks to steadily loosen their lending standards. Credit rating agencies, paid by the issuers, had stamped these securities as “AAA,” or least risky, without adequately analyzing the default risk on the underlying mortgages. Global investors, awash in cash and eager for higher returns, rushed in to buy these products, pumping more and more money into housing finance. Meanwhile, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant companies that Congress had authorized to purchase qualified mortgages to encourage homeownership—and which, by virtue of their quasi-governmental status, could borrow money much more cheaply than other companies—were knee-deep in the subprime market, with their shareholders making money hand over fist as the housing market swelled.

• As soon as large numbers of homeowners started defaulting, investors would realize that a lot of mortgage-backed securities weren’t so AAA after all. They’d likely rush for the exits, dumping the securities as fast as they could. Banks that held these securities would be vulnerable to runs, and would probably pull back on lending to cover losses or maintain capital requirements, making it hard for even qualified families to get a mortgage, which in turn would depress the housing market even further.

• As people had felt poorer, they’d stopped spending, just as mounting losses had caused banks to stop lending, imperiling more businesses and more jobs…With interest rates already close to zero, neither businesses nor consumers, already badly overleveraged, showed any inclination to take on more debt…The biggest concern was that mass unemployment and bankruptcies were further weakening the financial system, creating an adverse feedback loop.

USG Response

• Lower interest rates to make the purchase of everything from homes to cars to appliances significantly cheaper in order to reverse the cycle of contracting demand.

• Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP): Established by POTUS Obama with an emergency fund of $700B.

  • All TARP funds would be fully repaid (having actually made rather than cost taxpayers money).

• Fiscal Stimulus Package: Have the government spend more money.

  • Rep.-leaning economists typically preferred stimulus in the form of tax cuts rather than govt. programs.

  • The best thing we could do to lower the deficit was to boost economic growth—and with aggregate demand as weak as it was, this meant more federal spending, not less.

• The most important thing was to get the money into people’s pockets as quickly as possible, and that aim was best served by providing food stamps and extended unemployment insurance, as well as middle-class tax cuts and aid to states to help them avoid having to lay off teachers, firefighters, and police officers.

• Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP): Designed to reduce the monthly mortgage payments of eligible homeowners to no more than 31% of their income.

• Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP): Designed to help borrowers refinance their mortgage at lower rates even if their homes were underwater.

• Was it fair to devote the hard-earned tax dollars of those Americans to reducing the mortgage payments of a neighbor who’d fallen behind? What if the neighbor had bought a bigger house than they could really afford? What if they had opted for a cheaper but riskier type of mortgage? Did it matter if the neighbor had been duped by a mortgage broker into thinking they were doing the right thing? What if the neighbor had taken their kids to Disneyland the year before rather than putting that money into a rainy-day fund—did that make them less worthy of help? Or what if they had fallen behind on their payments not because they’d put in a new swimming pool or taken a vacation but because they’d lost their job, or because a family member had gotten sick and their employer didn’t offer health insurance, or because they just happened to live in the wrong state—how did that change the moral calculus? For policy makers trying to halt a crisis, none of these questions mattered—at least not in the short term. If your next-door neighbor’s house is on fire, you don’t want the fire department dispatcher asking whether it was caused by lightning or by someone smoking in bed before agreeing to send a fire truck; you just want the fire put out before it reaches your house. Mass foreclosures were the equivalent of a five-alarm fire that was destroying everyone’s home values and taking the economy down with it. And from our perspective, at least, we were the fire department.

• Since it was neither possible nor even desirable to eliminate all risk to investors and firms, the goals of reform were defined narrowly: Put guardrails around the system to reduce the most excessive forms of risk-taking, ensure transparency in the operations of major institutions, and “make the system safe for failure,” as Larry put it, so that those individuals or financial institutions that made bad bets didn’t drag everyone else down with them.

• At the core of the package was a proposal to increase the percentage of capital that all financial institutions of “systemic” importance—whether banks or non-banks—were required to hold. More capital meant less borrowing to finance risky bets. Greater liquidity meant these institutions could better weather sudden runs during a market downturn. Forcing Wall Street’s main players to maintain a bigger capital cushion against losses would fortify the system as a whole; and to make sure these institutions hit their marks, they’d have to regularly undergo the same kind of stress test we’d applied at the height of the crisis.

Financial Market Bailout

• Tim’s proposed solution would come to be known as a “stress test.” The Federal Reserve would set a benchmark for how much capital each of the nineteen systemically significant banks needed to survive a worst-case scenario. The Fed would then dispatch regulators to pore over each bank’s books, rigorously assessing whether or not it had enough of a financial cushion to make it through a depression; if not, the bank would be given six months to raise that amount of capital from private sources. If it still fell short, the government would then step in to provide enough capital to meet the benchmark, with nationalization coming into play only if the government’s infusion exceeded 50%.

• My attorney general, Eric Holder, would later point out that as egregious as the behavior of the banks may have been leading up to the crisis, there were few indications that their executives had committed prosecutable offenses under existing statutes—and we were not in the business of charging people with crimes just to garner good headlines.

• When it was the executives’ turn to respond, each one offered some version of the following: (a) the problems with the financial system really weren’t of their making; (b) they had made significant sacrifices, including slashing their workforces and reducing their own compensation packages; and (c) they hoped that I would stop fanning the flames of populist anger, which they said was hurting their stock prices and damaging industry morale.

Auto Industry Bailout

• What ailed the Big Three automakers- bad management, bad cars, foreign competition, underfunded pensions, soaring healthcare costs, an overreliance on the sale of high-margin, gas-guzzling SUVs- decades in the making.

• The Auto Task Force negotiated a change in GM management, brokered Fiat’s stake in Chrysler, and helped put together a plausible plan for the structured bankruptcies and reorganization of both car companies.

Unemployment

• Unemployment was typically a “lagging indicator,” meaning the full scale of job losses during recessions didn’t show up right away, and usually continued well after an economy started growing again.

Global Impact (EU)

• Unlike the US—which could cheaply finance rising deficits even in a crisis, as risk-averse investors rushed to buy our Treasury bills—countries like Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and Spain found it increasingly difficult to borrow. Their efforts to placate financial markets by cutting government spending only lowered already weak aggregate demand and deepened their recessions. This, in turn, produced even bigger budget shortfalls, necessitated additional borrowing at ever higher interest rates, and rattled financial markets even more.

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People

• Sarah Palin (1964- Present): Alaska Rep. Governor and McCain VP pick; a small-town basketball player and pageant queen who bounced among 5 colleges before graduating with a journalism degree. She worked as a sportscaster before getting elected mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and then taking on the state’s entrenched Republican establishment and beating the incumbent governor in 2006. She’d married her high school sweetheart, had five kids (including a teenage son about to be deployed to Iraq and a baby with Down syndrome), professed a conservative Christian faith, and enjoyed hunting moose and elk during her spare time.

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Misc Quotes

• “My meetings with Joe (Biden) began with him explaining all the reasons why the job of vice president might be a step down for him (along with an explanation of why he’d be the best choice).”-Obama.

• “I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness.”-Obama.

• “The world of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity.”-Obama.

• “As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.”-Obama.

• “Every generation is limited by what it knows.”-Dr. Moss.

• “I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.”-Obama.

• “What great contest was I preparing for? Whatever it was, I knew I wasn’t ready. That uncertainty, that self-doubt, kept me from settling too quickly on easy answers. I got into the habit of questioning my own assumptions, and this, I think, ultimately came in handy, not only because it prevented me from becoming insufferable, but because it inoculated me against the revolutionary formulas embraced by a lot of people.”-Obama.

• “My mother had always been quick to remind me that there’s a direct link between doing your work and having your wishes come true.”-Obama.

• “It was only by hitching my wagon to something larger than myself that I was ultimately able to locate a community and purpose for my life.”-Obama.

• “The continuing elevation of me as a symbol ran contrary to my organizer’s instincts, that sense that change involves “we” and not “me.” It was personally disorienting, too, requiring me to constantly take stock to make sure I wasn’t buying into the hype and remind myself of the distance between the airbrushed image and the flawed, often uncertain person I was.”-Obama.

• “Larry could hear your arguments, restate them better than you could, and then show why you were wrong.”-Tim.

• “Instead, I came to experience my responsibilities the way I imagine a bomb-disposal expert feels about clipping a wire or a tightrope walker feels as she steps off the platform, having learned to shed excess fear for the sake of focus—while trying not to get so relaxed that I made sloppy mistakes.”-Obama.

• “We were ready to extend a hand to those willing to unclench their fists.”-Obama.

• “For all the power inherent in the seat I now occupied, there would always be a chasm between what I knew should be done to achieve a better world and what in a day, week, or year I found myself actually able to accomplish.”-Obama.

• “Depression was more likely to creep up on me when I felt useless, without purpose—when I was wasting my time or squandering opportunities.”-Obama.

• “An irony that I- like many modern leaders- eventually learned to live with: You never looked as smart as the ex-president did on the sidelines.”-Obama.

• “So much of what really mattered in government came down to the daily, unheralded acts of people who weren’t seeking attention but simply knew what they were doing and did it with pride.”-Obama.

• “Contrary to the beliefs of many in the Arab world (and more than a few American reporters), the US is not a grand puppet master whimsically pulling the strings of the countries with which it does business.”-Obama.

• “In a crisis people need a story that made sense of their hardships and spoke to their emotions—a morality tale with clear good guys and bad guys and a plot they could easily follow. In other words, FDR understood that to be effective, governance couldn’t be so antiseptic that it set aside the basic stuff of politics: You had to sell your program, reward supporters, punch back against opponents, and amplify the facts that helped your cause while fudging the details that didn’t.”-Obama.

• “The only difference between Trump’s style of politics and other conservatives was Trump’s lack of inhibition. He understood instinctively what moved the conservative base most, and he offered it up in an unadulterated form.”-Obama.

• “A lesson the presidency was teaching me: Sometimes it didn’t matter how good your process was. Sometimes you were just screwed, and the best you could do was have a stiff drink—and light up a cigarette.”-Obama.

• “I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. The fact that we could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies, I took as a measure of how far my presidency still fell short of what I wanted it to be—and how much work I had left to do.”-Obama on OP Neptune Spear.

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Terminology

• Al Jazeera: A Qatari-controlled media outlet.

• Austerity: Budget Cuts in response to a ‘crisis.’

• Body Man: A personal assistant and jack-of-all-trades responsible for making sure that a candidate has everything he or she needs to function, whether a favorite snack or a couple of Advil, an umbrella when it’s wet or a scarf when it’s cold, or the name of the county chairman who’s striding your way for a handshake.

• BP (previously British Petroleum): Started off as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company- the same company whose unwillingness to split royalties with Iran’s government in the 1950s had led to the coup that ultimately resulted in that country’s Islamic Revolution.

• BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and S. Africa.

• Caucus: Voters show up at an appointed hour, usually at a school gym or a library in their precinct, and debate the merits of each candidate in a neighborly manner for as long as it takes to come up with a winner.

• Chief of Staff (WH): The day-to-day quarterback, the end of the funnel through which every issue facing the president had to first pass. Few in government (including the president) worked longer hours or under more unrelenting pressure.

• Community Organizing: Grassroots work that brings ordinary people together around issues of local concern.

• Congressional Budget Office (CBO): An independent professionally staffed operation charged with scoring the cost of all federal legislation.

• Coyotes: Smugglers who make big money transporting human cargo in barbaric and sometimes deadly fashion.

• Derivatives: A form of stock market trading used by businesses to hedge their risk against big swings in currency or commodity prices.

• Dog-Whistle Politics: The use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition.

• Earmark: Practice in which members of Congress insert various pet projects (many dubious) into must-pass legislation.

• Filibuster: A prolonged speech intended to obstruct progress in a legislative assembly.

  • By the 1990s, as battle lines between Republicans and Democrats hardened, whichever party was in the minority could—and would—block any bill not to their liking, so long as they remained unified and had at least the 41 votes needed to keep a filibuster from being overridden. Without any constitutional basis, public debate, or even the knowledge of most Americans, passing legislation through Congress had come to effectively require 60 votes in the Senate, or what was often referred to as a “supermajority.”

• Gaffe: Expression used by the press to describe any maladroit phrase by a candidate that reveals ignorance, carelessness, fuzzy thinking, insensitivity, malice, boorishness, falsehood, or hypocrisy—or is simply deemed to veer sufficiently far from conventional wisdom to make said candidate vulnerable to attack.

• Gerrymandering: The practice of drawing congressional districts with the explicit aim of entrenching incumbency and minimizing the number of competitive districts in any given election; aided today with the help of voter profiles and computer technology.

• Global 20 (G20): An annual meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors representing the worlds 20 largest economies to exchange information and tend to the routine details of globalization.

• Global 8 (G8): An annual meeting for leaders of the worlds 7 largest economies (USA, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada) and Russia.

• Kibbutz: A place where everyone is equal, everyone pitches in, and everyone is welcome to share in the joys and struggles of repairing the world.

• Muslim Brotherhood: A Sunni-based Islamist organization whose central objective was to see the entire Arab world governed by sharia law. It embraces political participation rather than violence as a way of advancing its goals, and in any fair and free election, the candidates it backs would be odds-on favorites to win.

• National Identity: The distinctions of language, culture, history, and levels of economic development.

• Primary Election: An election in which citizens cast votes privately and largely at their convenience.

• Republican in Name Only (RINO): A pejorative used to describe members of the GOP politicians deemed insufficiently loyal to the party or misaligned with the parties ideology.

• Tea Party: An organized effort to marry people’s honest fears about a changing America with a right-wing political agenda. Began as a handful of ragtag, small-scale protests against TARP and the Recovery Act. A number of the early participants had apparently migrated from the quixotic, libertarian presidential campaign of Republican congressman Ron Paul, who called for the elimination of the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve, a return to the gold standard, and withdrawal from the U.N. and NATO.

  • The Tea Party’s anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government manifesto was hardly new; its basic story line- that corrupt liberal elites had hijacked the federal government to take money out of the pockets of hardworking Americans in order to finance welfare patronage and reward corporate cronies- was one that Republican politicians and conservative media had been peddling for years.

• Three Amigos: Graham, McCain, and Lieberman; served as the biggest boosters of the Iraq War.

• Uighurs: Members of a Muslim ethnic minority who had fled to Afghanistan because of brutal, long-standing repression in their native China.

• Wahhabism: An Islamic teaching made popular by 18c cleric Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab, whose followers claimed to practice an uncorrupted version of Islam, viewing Shiite and Sufi Islam as heretical and observing religious tenets that were considered conservative even by the standards of traditional Arab culture: public segregation of the sexes, avoidance of contact with non-Muslims, and the rejection of secular art, music, and other pastimes that might distract from the faith.

• White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Hosted by the White House press corps and attended at least once by every president since Calvin Coolidge, the dinner had originally been designed to give journalists and those they covered a chance, for one evening, to set aside their often-adversarial stance toward one another and have some fun.

  • Over time, as the news and entertainment businesses had begun to blend, the annual gathering had evolved into Washington’s version of the Met Gala or the Oscars, with a performance from a comedian, televised on cable, and with a couple of thousand journalists, politicians, business tycoons, and administration officials, plus an assortment of Hollywood celebrities, packing themselves into an uncomfortable hotel ballroom to schmooze, be seen, and listen to the president deliver what amounted to a stand-up routine, roasting rivals and joking about the latest political news of the day.

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Chronology

• Mar, 2011: Arrest and torture of 15 schoolboys in Syria who had sprayed anti-government graffiti on city walls, which set off major protests against the Alawite Shiite-dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad in many of the countries predominantly Sunni communities. After tear gas, water cannons, beatings, and mass arrests failed to quell the demonstrations, Assad’s security forces went on to launch full-scale military operations across several cities, complete with live fire, tanks, and house-to-house searches.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 10 Feb, 2011: Donald Trump hints he might run for president during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, hinting that “our current president came out of nowhere….The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.”-Promised Land by Obama.

• Jan, 2011: CIA Contractor Raymond Allen Davis kills 2 armed men in Lahore, setting off angry anti- CIA protests.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 18 Dec, 2010: DADT is repealed by the USG following a senate vote of 65-31.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 17 Dec, 2010- Dec, 2012: Arab Spring (and Arab Winter and Arab Summer): ~61K people die in mass protests that, in some cases, deteriorate to outright civil war, against authoritarian Islamic regimes across the Arabian world. The Arab Spring resulted in the following (Wiki):

  • Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ousted, charged, exiled; his government overthrown.

  • Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ousted, arrested, charged, and government overthrown; the Sinai insurgency begins.

  • Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi killed following an 8-month civil war.

  • Algeria lifts its 19yo emergency law.

  • Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh ousted and power handed to a national unity government.

  • Syrian President Bashar al-Assad faced civil uprising that deteriorated into full scale civil war.

  • Bahraini civil uprising against the government is crushed by authorities and Saudi-led intervention.

  • Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman undergo government changes implemented in response to protests.

  • Morocco and Jordan institute constitutional reforms in response to protests.

  • Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Sudan, Palestine see mass Protests.

  • 17 Mar, 2011: UNSCR 1973 is signed, forming the legal basis for military intervention during the First Libyan Civil War, demanding an immediate cease fire, and authorizing the international community to establish a no fly zone to protect civilians.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • Mid Feb, 2011: Libyan security forces fire into a large group of civilians who’d gathered to protest the arrest of a human rights lawyer. Within days, the protests had spread, and >100 had been killed. A week later, much of the country was in open rebellion, with anti-Gaddafi forces taking control of Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • 11 Feb, 2011: Egyptian VP Suleiman appears on Egyptian television to announce that Mubarak had left office and a caretaker government led by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces would initiate the process for new elections. For many Arab rulers, the main lesson out of Egypt was the need to systematically, ruthlessly crush the protests—no matter how much violence that might require and no matter how much international criticism such crackdowns might generate.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 10 Sep, 2010- 2 May, 2011: “Geronimo ID’d…Geronimo EKIA;” Operation Neptune Spear led by NSW DEVGRU succeeds in killing Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • Fall, 2010- Spring, 2011: The IC establishes surveillance around the compound, an unusually spacious and secure area, 8x larger than neighboring residences and surrounded by 10-18’ walls topped with barbed wire and additional perimeter walls. As for the people who lived there, the analysts said they went to great lengths to conceal their identities: They had no landline or internet service, almost never left the compound, and burned their trash instead of putting it outside for collection. Aerial surveillance, observes a tall man who never left the property but regularly walked in circles in a small garden area within the compound’s walls (termed the ‘pacer’), who was identified as bin Laden. I (Obama) had two options.-Promised Land by Obama.

    • Air Strike: There were an estimated 5 women and 20 children living with the 4 adult males at the Abbottabad compound. Hoss Cartwright offered a new, more surgical option- one involving a drone that would fire a small, 6kg missile directly at the Pacer while he was taking his daily walk.-Promised Land by Obama.

    • Special Ops Mission: A select team would covertly fly into Pakistan via helicopter, raid the compound, and get out before the Pakistani police or military had time to react. To preserve the secrecy of the operation, and deniability if something went awry, we’d have to conduct it under the authority of the CIA rather than the Pentagon.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • 10 Sep, 2010: CIA analysts locate aQ courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti by tracking his phone and daily habits, leading them to an affluent neighborhood on the outskirts of the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, 35 miles N. of Islamabad.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Sep, 2010: DADT is declared unconstitutional by a CA Federal District Court.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Mid- Jul, 2010: The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is signed into law by POTUS Obama after a vote of 237-192 (House) and 60-39 (Senate).-Promised Land by Obama.

• May, 2010: Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen raised in Pakistan and trained by the Pakistani Taliban unsuccessfully attempts to detonate a car bomb in the middle of Times Square.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 2010: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. BP ultimately pays settlements >$20B.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • 15 Jul, 2010: BP engineers cap the spill; for the first time in 87d, oil stops leaking from the Macondo well. It would take a couple more months and a series of additional procedures before BP declared the Macondo well permanently sealed.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • 20 Apr, 2010: After the Deepwater Horizon drill reaches 3.5 miles below the ocean’s surface. A team from Halliburton, a contractor on the project, injects cement down the well bore to seal the edges of the pipe. Once the cement had set, BP engineers began to conduct a series of safety tests before moving the Deepwater to its next assignment. Shortly after 1700, one of those tests revealed a possible gas leak through the cement casing, signaling a potentially dangerous situation. Despite the warning signs, BP engineers decide to continue their process, pumping out the muddy lubricant used to offset pressure imbalances during drilling. By 2130, a powerful surge of gas enters the drill pipe. A four-hundred-ton set of emergency valves called the blowout preventer—designed to seal off the well in the event of a sudden pressure increase—malfunctioned, allowing the highly pressurized and combustible gas to erupt through the platform and shoot a black geyser of mud lubricant up into the sky. Of the 126 persons aboard the rig, 98 managed to escape without physical harm, 17 were injured, and 11 platform workers remained unaccounted for. The Deepwater Horizon would continue to burn for the next 36h.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • Early, 2010: BP dispatches the Deepwater Horizon to drill an exploratory well in the Macondo Oil Field, Gulf of Mexico.

• 9 Jun, 2010: UNSCR 1929 is signed, imposing unprecedented new sanctions on Iran, including a ban on weapons sales, a suspension of new international financial activities by Iranian banks, and a broad mandate to bar any commerce that could help Iran expand its nuclear weapons program.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 5 Apr, 2010: A coal dust explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine, in WV, kills 29.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Feb, 2010: The Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis threatens to unravel the EU as Greece has no currency, other than the euro, to devalue. The US under Obama works with the IMF and the Euro Central Bank to cover Greece’ Payments.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 25 Dec, 2009: Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boards a NWA flight from AMS- DTW and attempts to detonate explosive materials sewn into his underwear. The IED fails to work and passengers restrain him after seeing smoke and flames coming from his blankets.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 5 Nov, 2009: The Fort Hood Massacre; US Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan kills 13 people and wounds scores others on Fort Hood Army Base in Killeen, Texas. He is shot and apprehended by base police officers.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Jun, 2009: Israeli PM Netanyahu declared, for the first time, conditional support for a two-state solution.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Jun, 2009: H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) is officially declared a pandemic by the WHO, the first in 40 years.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Jun, 2009: Iranian opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi credibly accuses government officials of vote rigging to help reelect Ahmadinejad to a second term as president. Millions of protesters inside Iran take to the streets to challenge the election results, launching a self-described “Green Movement.” Mousavi and other opposition leaders are placed under house arrest. Peaceful marchers are beaten, and a significant number killed.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Fall, 2008: The Housing Market Collapse; the stock market loses 40% of its value, household income drops 16%, and ~2.3M homes are filed for foreclosure.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • Sep, 2008: The USC authorizes $200B to prevent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the two privately owned behemoths that together guaranteed nearly 90% of America’s mortgages—from going under. Both were placed in government conservatorship through the newly formed Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).-Promised Land by Obama.

  • 15 Sep, 2008: Lehman Brothers, a $639B company, announces that its filing for bankruptcy.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • 2 Apr, 2007: New Century Financial, the US’ second largest subprime lender, declares bankruptcy after a surge in mortgage defaults in the subprime housing market. The largest lender, Countrywide, avoided the same fate only after the Federal Reserve stepped in and approved a shotgun marriage with Bank of America.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 2008: Indian Terrorist Organization Lashkar-e-Tayyiba attack the Gateway to India Hotel in Mumbai.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1-12 Aug, 2008: Russia under Putin invades Georgia resulting in the expulsion of ethnic Georgians from S. Ossetia and the Kodori region in Abkhazia, recognition of S. Ossetia as an independent nation, establishment of Russian military bases in Abkhazia and S. Ossetia and severance of Georgia- Russian relations (Wiki).

• 2008: The USG under POTUS Bush directs the construction of a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 2008: The Kyoto protocol goes into effect. Within a year, the US was one of only 5 nations not party to the agreement.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 2007: Massachusetts v. EPA; a narrow majority of the SCOTUS hold that President Bush’s EPA had failed to apply “reasoned judgment.”-Promised Land by Obama.

• 2004: Death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Gaza comes under the control of Hamas and soon finds itself under a tightly enforced Israeli blockade, while the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority, which continued to govern the West Bank, comes to be viewed by even some of its supporters as feckless and corrupt.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 2002: Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party rise to power in Türkiye.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 2002: Bush names Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” in State of the Union speech.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 28 Sep, 2000- 2004: The Second Intifada; four years of violence between Israel and Palestine, marked by tear gas and rubber bullets directed at stone-throwing protesters; Palestinian suicide bombs detonated outside an Israeli nightclub and in buses carrying senior citizens and schoolchildren; deadly IDF retaliatory raids and the indiscriminate arrest of thousands of Palestinians; and Hamas rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli border towns, answered by US-supplied Israeli Apache helicopters leveling entire neighborhoods. ~1K Israelis & 3K Palestinians die during the period.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Dec, 1999: Russian President Boris Yeltsin vacates the office of President due to several compounding scandals including corruption, drinking, bad health, economic mismanagement, &c. Vladmir Putin assumes the Presidency.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Aug, 1999: Russian President Boris Yeltsin appoints Putin as PM.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1999: Israeli Elections; Ehud Barak defeats incumbent Netanyahu. Barak begins efforts to establish a broader peace in the Middle East, including outlining a two-state solution that goes further than any previous Israeli proposal. Arafat demanded more concessions, and talks collapsed in recrimination.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1998: The Good Friday Agreement brings an end to the decades-long conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1995: Sanctions are placed on Iran blocking US companies from doing business with them.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1995: Assassination of Israeli PM Rabin by a far-right Israeli extremist.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1994: POTUS Bill Clinton institutes Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) for homosexual members of the US Armed Forces.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 13 Sep, 1993: The Oslo Accord; The PLO recognize Israel’s right to exist while Israel recognizes the PLO as the rightful representative of the Palestinian people and agrees to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, with limited but meaningful governance over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1992: Earth Summit; world leaders convene in Rio to sign the UN Framework Convention on CC- the first global agreement to try to stabilize GHG concentrations before they reached catastrophic levels. The Clinton administration soon took up the baton, working with other nations to translate the broad goals announced at Rio into a binding treaty. The final result, called the Kyoto Protocol, laid out detailed plans for coordinated international action, including specific GHG reduction targets, a global C-trading system similar to cap-and-trade, and financing mechanisms to help poor countries adopt clean energy and preserve C-neutralizing forests like the Amazon. In the US, where treaty ratification requires an affirmative vote from two-thirds of the Senate, Kyoto hit a brick wall.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1990: The USG under POTUS Bush put a cap-and-trade system in place to curb the emissions of SO2, which contribute to acid rain that destroys lakes and forests.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 17 Nov- 29 Dec, 1989: Velvet Revolution (Gentle Revolution); a non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia due to popular demonstrations against the one-party government of the Community party of Czechoslovakia that included students and older dissidents (Wiki).

• 1989: Death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, succeeded by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a cleric who’d barely traveled outside and apparently matched Khomeini in his hatred of America.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1989: Exxon Valdez Tanker Accident in Alaska.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1988: Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which kills citizens of 21 countries, including 189 Americans.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1987: The USG passes a law giving the DoE authority to set energy-efficiency standards on everything from lightbulbs to commercial air conditioners.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev takes over as the General Secretary of the CCCP, ushering in the cautious liberalization known as perestroika and glasnost.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1984: Assassination of Indira Gandhi, 16y Indian PM.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1981: Assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Apr, 1980: Operation Desert One; established to free 53 US Hostages in Tehran, ends in catastrophe after a US military helicopter crashes in the desert, killing 8 servicemembers.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1980-1988: Iran-Iraq War; Iraq under Hussein attempts to invade Iran, leading to an 8y war; the Gulf states provide Hussein with financing while the Soviets supply Khomeini with arms, including chemical weapons. Iran uses and sponsors terrorism as a way to offset Iraqi military advantages.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1980: The USG passes a law requiring an executive branch agency called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to perform a cost-benefit analysis on every new federal regulation.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1980: The US Fed hikes interest rates to an unprecedented 20% in order to break the back of America’s then-raging inflation, resulting in a brutal recession and 10% unemployment.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1979: Khomeini installs himself as Iran’s supreme leader, sidelining former secular and reformist allies and forming the paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to crush anybody who challenged his regime.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 17 Sep, 1978: The Camp David Accords, brokered by POTUS Carter, are signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli PM Begin, achieving a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt, returning Sinai to Egyptian control, and making Egypt a US Ally.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1978: A series of demonstrations in Iran blossom into a full-blown populist revolution. In successive waves, followers of Khomeini’s were joined in the streets by disaffected workers, unemployed youths, and pro-democracy forces seeking a return to constitutional rule. By the beginning of 1979, with the number of demonstrators swelling into the millions, the shah quietly fled the country and was briefly admitted into the US for medical treatment.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1978: Chinese President Deng Xiaoping effectively abandons Mao Zedong’s Marxist-Leninist vision in favor of an export-driven, state-managed form of capitalism.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1976: The Entebbe Raid; Israeli commandos rescue 101 passengers from Palestinian terrorists who had hijacked an Air France flight.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1972: Weeks after being elected to office of Senator, the wife and baby daughter of Joseph Biden are killed and his two young sons, Beau and Hunter, injured, in a car accident.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 5 Jan- 21 Aug, 1968: Prague Spring; a period of political liberalization and mass protest in the Czechoslovakia Socialist Rep begins when reformist Alexander Dubček is elected First Secretary of the KSC and ends when the USSR invade the country to suppress the reforms (Wiki).

• 1967: The Six-Day War; a greatly outnumbered Israeli military routs the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In the process, Israel seizes control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1965: A CIA backed military coup in Indonesia topples a Communist government. The bloody aftermath results in between 500K-1M deaths.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1965: Bloody Sunday occurs during a Civil Rights March on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1964: POTUS LBJ’s Great Society campaign; a universal single-payer program partially funded by payroll tax revenue is introduced for seniors (Medicare) and a not-so-comprehensive program based on a combination of federal and state funding was set up for the poor (Medicaid) .-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1963: The USG passes the Clean Air Act, authorizing the USG to monitor air pollution.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 7 Feb, 1958: Initiation of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in response to the USSR’s launch of Sputnik. DARPA would lead the development of stealth technology, advanced weapons systems, an early internet, automated voice activation, and GPS.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1955: Southern Democrats, in a fit of pique over the Brown decision, institutionalize the practice of having Supreme Court nominees appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to be grilled on their legal views.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1951: Iran’s secular, left-leaning parliament moves to nationalize the country’s oil fields, seizing control of profits to the British government, which owned a majority stake in Iran’s biggest oil production and export company. In response, the Brits impose a naval blockade to prevent Iran from shipping oil to would-be buyers and convince the US under Ike that the new Iranian government was tilting toward the Soviets. POTUS Eisenhower authorizes Operation Ajax, a CIA-MI6-engineered coup that deposes Iran’s democratically elected PM and consolidates power in the hands of the country’s young monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shah became a stalwart ally who extended contracts to US oil companies and bought plenty of expensive US weaponry. He maintained friendly relations with Israel, gave women the right to vote, used the country’s growing wealth to modernize the economy and the education system, and mingled easily with Western businesspeople and European royalty.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • Operation Ajax set a pattern for U.S. miscalculation in dealing with developing countries that lasted throughout the Cold War: mistaking nationalist aspirations for Communist plots; equating commercial interests with national security; subverting democratically elected governments and aligning ourselves with autocrats when we determined it was to our benefit.-Promised Land by Obama.

• Early 1950s: Egyptian Military Coup; Army colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrows the Egyptian monarchy, instituting a secular, one-party state. Soon after, he nationalizes the Suez Canal, overcomes attempted military interventions by the British and French, making him a global figure in the fight against colonialism and the most popular leader in the Arab world. Nasser went on to nationalize other key industries, initiate domestic land reform, and launch huge public works projects, all with the goal of eliminating vestiges of both British rule and Egypt’s feudal past. Overseas, he actively promotes a secular, vaguely socialist pan-Arab nationalism, fought a losing war against the Israelis, helped form the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Arab League, and became a charter member of the Non-Aligned Movement, which ostensibly refused to take sides in the Cold War.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1948: Creation of the modern Israeli state following Zionist victories over Arab Palestinians. For the ~700K Arab Palestinians who found themselves stateless and driven from their lands, the same events would be a part of what became known as the Nakba (Catastrophe).-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1947: UN partition of Palestine; the UN approves a partition plan to establish two sovereign states, one Jewish, the other Arab, with Jerusalem governed by an international body. Zionist leaders embrace the plan, but Arab Palestinians, as well as surrounding Arab nations strenuously object. As Britain withdrew, the two sides quickly fell into war.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 13 Feb, 1945: Allied bombing targeting Dresden result in a firestorm that engulfs the city, killing ~25K people.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1943: Mussolini is saved by a glider rescue ordered by Hitler.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 23 Sep, 1932: Abdulaziz Ibn Saud rises to power in Saudi Arabia as the nation’s first monarch. He is deeply wedded to the teachings of Wahhabism.-Promised Land by Obama.

  • Following the post–World War I collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Abdulaziz consolidated control over rival Arab tribes and founded modern Saudi Arabia.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1930s: After FDR imposed a nationwide wage freeze meant to stem inflation during World War II, many companies began offering private health insurance and pension benefits as a way to compete for the limited number of workers not deployed overseas. Once the war ended, this employer-based system continued, in no small part because labor unions liked the arrangement, since it enabled them to use the more generous benefit packages negotiated under collective bargaining agreements as a selling point to recruit new members.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1930s: The First Offshore Oil Drilling Operations in the Gulf of Mexico begin.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1917: The Balfour Declaration; the British, who were occupying Palestine, commit to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs. Over the next 20y, Zionist leaders mobilized a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine and organized highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1917: The practice of ‘cloture’ is adopted by the US Senate, allowing a vote of 2/3 present to end a filibuster.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1805: The Filibuster is born after VPOTUS Aaron Burr urges the Senate to eliminate the “motion to succeed”- a standard parliamentary provision that allowed a simple majority of any legislature to end debate on a piece of business and call for a vote.-Promised Land by Obama.

• 1803: Marbury v. Madison; US Supreme Court case that gave the Court the final say on the interpretation of the US Constitution, establishing the principle of judicial review over the actions of the Congress and the president.-Promised Land by Obama.

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