In today’s Guardian there is a story about Reggie Love, the so-called “man behind the man”, Barrack Obama’s aide and confidante. Or as the U.S media has referred to him, as Obama’s “body man”. A former basketball player and Political Science major, Love manages Obama’s day, carrying the candidate’s pens, buying his snacks and drinks, sorting out the podium before Obama steps out etc.
Personal aides like Reggie Love are common in American politics. John Kerry had Marvin Nicholson and Hillary Clinton’s ”body woman” was one Huma Abedin. Wikipedia already has a description and list of such body men. However, we rarely hear about these aides, even though they exist in British politics too and can be immensely influential.
In my experience, such aides – let’s dispense with that odd, butler-sounding term “body man” – not only ensure that “their man” looks good and has what he needs, they often act as confidante, sounding-board and even gate-keeper. Like Charlie Young in the television series The West Wing.
When a senior politician needs a second opinion, after all the officials and subject-matter experts have left the room, he may turn to his personal aide. Often such aides give views not only about policy, but about people. Whom to trust, whom to be wary of etc. Equally often, officials will talk with personal aides, seek their advice, before presenting a senior politician with an issue. Personal aides often know the moods of “their” boss better than anyone else and can advise on how best to present a case.
The Civil Service does not like the notion of personal aides, preferring Ministers to have either Private Secretaries – who are officials – or Special Advisers. But personal aides – different from a secretary or an assistant – can play a very important role in the management of a minister’s work-load. No doubt their employment needs to be covered by some form of regulation. But hopefully talk of Reggie Love’s role in the Obama campaign will put attention to the British experience of such “body men”.
Since I’ve already renounced any and all claims to knowing anything about US politics, I’m happily unburdened by any pressure to predict the shape of an Obama cabinet should he win. But what are the experts of the commentariat predicting?
I spent some time this afternoon ranging far and wide over t’internet in search of speculation on who’s in line for the key foreign policy-related posts in an Obama Administration (Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence, National Security Adviser and Ambassador to the United Nations) – using a thoroughly unscientific but broadly mainstream selection of 20 newspapers, magazines, foreign policy experts and foreign policy bloggers.
As I surveyed this glittering array of insight, these were the names that came up at least three times each:
Why yes, since you ask: four out of the top five names are Republicans. A ‘government of all the talents’, as you might say.
(Gideon Rachman goes further than most in applying this admirable principle: he’s gleefully suggesting Sarah Palin for Ambassador to Russia. As he observes, “The governor’s taste for hunting, plain-spoken talk, and foxy boots—not to mention long years of staring at Russia from Alaska—ensure a special relationship with Putin.”)
Think an Obama Administration would spell an upwards march on the US aid budget? Think again.
The Obama / Biden campaign platform is formally committed to a doubling of US foreign assistance to $50 billion (which by my calculations works out at 0.36% of US gross national income – still a way off from the 0.7 target, but hey).
But now, it looks as though that commitment got dropped – in a little-noticed part of the Vice-Presidential debate between Biden and Palin on October 3. The debate chair asked:
“What promises — given the events of the week, the bailout plan, all of this, what promises have you and your campaigns made to the American people that you’re not going to be able to keep?”
And the very first thing that Joe Biden said in his reply was this:
“Well, the one thing we might have to slow down is a commitment we made to double foreign assistance. We’ll probably have to slow that down.”
And that was it; no explanation, no regrets, just a bald statement – a blunt demonstration of the relative weakness of the development lobby in the US.
Obama professes a love for this country. One needn’t doubt his sincerity to grasp that what he loves is a vision of America, not America as she is. The object of his affection is not our Unum [as in E Pluribus Unumh- the motto on the US seal], the glorious inheritance we Many cherish through generations past, present, and (one prays) future. For The One, that One earns only disdain. Eroding it has been his life’s work.
Move through Obama’s career as a community organizer, his embrace of ACORN, his radical associations: the common denominator is a purpose to break down the Unum at its foundations, what he calls the “grass-roots.” For America, he plans an atom bomb. Or, to be precise, an atoms bomb: countless communities in cities and towns across the land, organized along the Marxist principles of Saul Alinsky into socialist enclaves. Each atom smothers the individual freedom and enterprise that have defined the American character, replacing them with welfare states that prize dysfunction and reward the rabble-rousers.
To be sure, there is an Unum that Obama sees. It is in his mind’s eye — clearer on the horizon now than when he began his project 23 years ago. It will arrive when the atoms reach critical mass and finally devour the hollowing carcass of our present society… For Obama and his allies, capitalist democracy is an abject failure, habituated to racism, relentless in its materialism. It is an ironic critique: The senator and his fellow travelers are driven by nothing if not a crass materialism: They see themselves entitled to society’s benefits without the burden of its toils. They are, moreover, such prisoners of their own racism — have you ever heard anyone else describe his own grandmother as “a typical white person”? — that race has become their unified field theory for all of life’s disparities. It is a stubborn theory, heedless of the fact that, in our free society, members of all races, ethnicities, and economic classes move up and down the ladder of opportunity by the yardstick of merit.
Obama will tolerate no such yardstick. He derides the very core of what makes American society exceptional: individual liberty. Freedom. “We have this strong bias toward individual action,” Obama ruefully told De Zutter — and note the crafty shift: his choice of the amorphous action instead of the value-laden freedom, lest the listener realize just what is at stake. “You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”
Of course, we already have collective institutions and organizations. They are the branches of a limited government, designed by our Constitution precisely to promote individual liberty and national security. They are the churches, synagogues, PTAs, neighborhood clubs, and other social organizations by which each citizen may freely set the balance between his personal fulfillment and his interaction with fellow citizens. They are the arts, the sports arenas, the charities, the congeries of fulfillment for those who know the personal is not the political. That is American democracy, ourUnum.
In this article for the National Review, McCarthy – a former federal prosecutor who led the case against the 1993 WTC bombers – weaves together every insane, paranoid, and self-serving myth (racial, ideological and otherwise) about who Obama is and what he plans for America. You should read the whole thing and weep.
Ross Douthat has a good take on the wilderness his fellow right-wingers are driving themselves into. They should all take time to see what happened to the British left, after Thatcher drove it insane. Or compare the dark night of the Tories, after Blair accomplished the same trick.
Once you start frothing at the mouth and ranting in public, it’s a long hard road before you’re fit to be in polite company again…
