Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, and the military-industrial complex: Letting the Tail Wag the Dog.

Barack Obama, like John F. Kennedy, is an enormously inspiring figure.  Like Kennedy did, Obama gives hope to the people of this country.  Like Kennedy did, obama looks above and beyond the morass of contemporary politics to a tomorrow  that is more positive, cooperative, and progressive, then today.  But while that ability to evoke one of the 20th century's most beloved presidents has been the engine that has driven much of Obama's support, negative aspects of the comparison give me pause about Obama as president.

Before I go on, I want to say that this comment is predicated upon two ideas.  The first is that I think both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have their hearts in the right place when it comes to policy and values.  Neither is a traitor to the liberal values that I believe are the true fulfillment of the promise and the project of America that began hundreds of years ago based on equality, freedom, and justice.  The second premise is that either of them have an excellent chance of defeating the Republican nominees, who are defective not only in their plans for America, but as candidates--in the values, their abilities, and their appeal.  Mostly they are defective through their association with the party that took America from its highest heights to its lowest lows, and their declared adherence to arrogant, wasteful, corrupt, bigoted, and bellicose values that continue to drive that party.  My choice between Barack and Hillary is not driven by a confidence in my predictive powers of voters' reactions to them in the future.  Having seen in 2004 the result of a strategy driven by too-clever-by-half evaluations of "electability," I conclude that the best way to get a White House I like is to just devote all my support to the candidate I prefer.

Barack Obama is the candidate I prefer less, and the comparison with John F. Kennedy illuminates why.  As will be true if Obama becomes president, Kennedy came in with a very brief Senate career behind him (though twice as long as Obama's, and augmented by six years in the House of Representatives before it).  Also like Obama, one of Kennedy's most primary qualifications during that period was sitting on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  And as Obama will likely do if he becomes president, Kennedy compensated for his lack of institutional familiarity with the workings of the US government by surrounding himself with a number of impressive and intelligent experts to help him govern the country.

Nonetheless, when Kennedy came into office, one of his first acts was to approve the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that the top military brass left behind by the Eisenhower administration cooked up.  That action not only drove Fidel Castro into the arms of Nikita Khrushchev, but confirmed this country's continuity for nearly three decades on a path of vicious animosity to any movement or regime in Latin America and wider world that smelled pink.  It ratified the role of the US military leadership in taking the lead on which regimes to support, and gave important precedent to active American support of the Diem brothers in Vietnam, and of comparably vicious, undemocratic, right-wing regimes all over Latin America and the rest of the world.

I don't believe that Kennedy's heart was in the wrong place or that he really thought that this was the best way to deal with questionable regimes.  But in spite of his values, inspiration, and intelligence, what Kennedy lacked was institutional knowledge.  His years on the Foreign Relations Committee had given him good ideas about foreign policy, but not the familiarity with the workings of the vast military, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatus of the US government that would have enabled him to come up with well-grounded objects or alternatives to the plans the military brass were champing at the bit to carry out.  And so, he deferred to them, and allowed them to lead the US into a foreign policy fiasco. 

And this when the characters he confronted were left behind by a relatively reasonable and moderate Republican president, who lead us out of war, not into it, and who cut defense spending and warned of the growing power of the military-industrial complex, rather than accelerating its bloated growth and giving the Pentagon the largest budget, even adjusted for inflation, since World War II.  I do not doubt that Barack Obama's heart is pure.  But as president, I fear that a lack of detailed familiarity with the way the federal government works will weaken his ability to shift the rudder on the giant American ship of state.  When confronting the tendrils the Bush Administration has spread through all levels of the federal bureaucracy, especially in the defense sector, I am afraid Obama will let the tail wag the dog.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast with Obama (and Kennedy), has sat on the Senate Armed Services Committee for eight years.  There is no doubt from her statements, her performance in debates, and her time close to the center of the federal bureaucracy in the 1990s, that she will have an answer to every attempt to wag the dog by the root structure the Bush Administration will leave behind.  And despite the fault that idealists might find with her realpolitik approach to politics, it should be clear to all that she is no pushover.

Is Barack Obama likely to be a pushover?  It is difficult to tell from his brief federal career.  Conveniently for his own implications about what should constitute a test of fortitude, he was still in the Illinois state legislature in 2002 when US Senators had to vote whether to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein.  He has not had to face down a journalistic class bent upon asking him the tough questions about his candidacy, his past, his spouse, or his gender.  Even his path to US Senate was smoothed by his opponent's late-breaking sex scandal (Hillary Clinton's was also eased by Rudy Giuliani's extra-marital affair, but the Republicans still had Rick Lazio to throw at her). 

While there is little to make us doubt that Hillary Clinton will have a firm hand on the tiller of the ship of state, Barack Obama's seamanship will remain unknown until the moment he grasps the wheel, and that in the middle of a storm worse than any Kennedy had to deal with until he'd had two years of on-the-job training.  If Kennedy, himself a war hero, was so quick to let the tail the dog in those first weeks, will Barack Obama not emulate him in this, too, and with a much more dangerous tail behind the Bush Administration?  Although I have every faith in his heart and his vision, and that by 2012 either he or Hillary Clinton will make this country look far better than it does today, it is this very similarity between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy that gives me pause when I imagine him becoming president.