Post-American Presidency (39 page)

What Landesman really meant was that since Obama was the most powerful man in the world and a writer as well, the president was the most politically powerful writer since Caesar. “This is the first president,” Landesman asserted, “that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.” Landesman is wrong about this in several ways: as Scott Johnson at the popular “Powerline” blog pointed out, Lincoln never actually wrote a book, and Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon wrote books without employing ghostwriters. Johnson also mentions Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, whose
Profiles in Courage
was ghostwritten; “my guess,” Johnson
concludes, “is that JFK and Obama share the attribute of authorship in roughly equal measure.”

Probably so. But that didn’t stop Landesman from exulting: “If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.” Ludicrous? Yes. After all, the inevitable question was, “What has he done to deserve this?” Did
Dreams from My Father
and
The Audacity of Hope
really merit being placed above Churchill’s
The Second World War, The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
, or even Theodore Roosevelt’s
The Strenuous Life
?

Landesman’s ridiculously exaggerated praise recalled the Soviet literary establishment’s hailing of Stalin’s turgid
Marxism and Problems of Linguistics
and
Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
as “works of genius.” Every German home once had a copy of
Mein Kampf
, even if nobody in the house read it, and every Chinese citizen once knew that he better own a copy of Chairman Mao’s
Little Red Book
—if he knew what was good for him. Landesman has given Barack Obama the perfect companion to his spurious Nobel Prize: the fulsome and empty literary praise usually reserved for totalitarian autocrats of little or no actual literary accomplishment.

At a time when the Obama administration was relentlessly demonizing dissenting voices and manifesting a shaky (at best) commitment to the freedom of speech, it was hardly a reassuring message to send. It demonstrated once again this administration’s utter tone deafness and apparent indifference to genuine concerns about its commitment to core principles of the U.S. Constitution—witness Nancy Pelosi’s incredulous response of “Are you serious?” to a questioner who asked her about the constitutionality of nationalizing health care.

With free speech under attack everywhere—attacks that were sometimes abetted by the Obama administration—it was not the time
to be inviting comparisons with history’s greatest oppressors. Even comparisons on the absurdity meter.

Writing in 1962, Ayn Rand foresaw the disaster the Obama administration was bringing upon the nation:

ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA WARNED
ABOUT THE ARROGATION OF POWER IN THE EXECUTIVE
branch: “The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States.”
¹

When he did become president, however, he did just the opposite. He took steps to centralize power in the executive branch that George W. Bush would never have dreamed of taking. Working at a furious pace, he appointed an unprecedented proliferation of officials—known popularly as “czars”—with a huge array of responsibilities over immense swaths of domestic and foreign policy. These appointments bypassed the legislative branch altogether, for while conventional
Cabinet appointments required the approval and oversight of Congress, these czars were accountable to no one except Barack Hussein Obama.

The czars all have Cabinet counterparts, also—people who should be doing their jobs, and as far as the general public is concerned,
are
doing their jobs. Yet while Cabinet members are subject to confirmation hearings and public scrutiny, the czars perform many of their ostensible duties—out of the public eye and far away from any accountability.

Obama wasn’t the first president to appoint “czars” answerable only to himself. The media first used the term in connection with World War II–era Roosevelt administration officials overseeing various emergency programs, and revived it during the Nixon administration; it has been around ever since. But many of these earlier czars were performing special duties, without having responsibilities that overlapped with those of other officials. And none of his predecessors could match the post-American president in his proliferation of czars—Obama appointed thirty-two during his first months in office, and showed no sign of stopping.

It was an all-out assault on the American system of checks and balances, and a concentration of power in the executive branch unmatched by anything in American history.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House minority whip, pointed out in August 2009 that “by appointing a virtual army of ‘czars’—each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House—the president has made an end-run around the legislative branch of historic proportions.… Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances.”

Even Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), the dean of Democrats in the
Senate, was upset. In February 2009 he wrote to Obama about several of the czars, saying: “I am concerned about the relationship between these new White House positions and their executive branch counterparts. Too often, I have seen these lines of authority and responsibility become tangled and blurred, sometimes purposely, to shield information and to obscure the decision-making process.” Like Cantor, he warned: “The rapid and easy accumulation of power by White House staff can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances.”
²

This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. Cantor declared that, by appointing so many czars, Obama has departed from constitutional mandates: “The Constitution mandates that the Senate confirm Cabinet-level department heads and other appointees in positions of authority. This gives Congress—elected by the people—the power to compel executive decision-makers to testify and be held accountable by someone other than the president. It also ensures that key appointees cannot claim executive privilege when subpoenaed to come before Congress.”
³

Likewise Byrd: “If the czars are working behind the scenes and the secretaries will be the mouthpieces of the administration, it calls into question who is actually making the policy decision. “Whoever is making the policy decisions needs to be accountable and available to Congress and the American public.”
⁴
But by contrast, Cantor says, Congress has “not been able to vet” Obama’s czars, “and we have no idea what they’re doing.”
⁵

The post-American president may have a very good reason for that: much of what they’re doing is not good, and several among them are committed socialists: red czars.

OBAMA’S HARD-LEFT INTERNATIONALIST SCIENCE CZAR

John P. Holdren, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is Obama’s assistant to the president for Science and Technology, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and cochair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)—that is, the science czar. As he announced Holdren’s appointment, Obama, never a reliable friend of the freedom of speech, indulged in some bitterly ironic pieties: the post-American president said that “the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”
⁶

Yet John P. Holdren was a relentlessly politicized ideologue—so much so that one could find more fervent true believers only in a Soviet Politburo meeting, or, more recently, staffing other positions in the Obama administration. Holdren was, not surprisingly, a true believer in global government and tight controls on free citizens. A longtime and deeply committed Leftist, he participated in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Joseph Rotblat, Barack Obama’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner, founded the Pugwash Conferences (named after the Nova Scotia site of the first conference) in the 1950s to enable Western and Soviet scientists to meet together. Rotblat himself was a nuclear scientist who had been part of the Manhattan Project, but who left the project and devoted himself to nuclear disarmament when it became clear that a post–World War II America would use nuclear weapons as a deterrent against the Soviet Union. The Pugwash Conferences Web site still contains a tribute to him.
⁷

Jay Nordlinger,
National Review
’s senior editor, identifies these
conferences as more political than scientific—and decidedly pro-communist: “Ostensibly, this was an anti-nuclear group, but somehow they managed to serve the Soviet agenda, whatever it was that year. The Pugwashers declared themselves completely opposed to the concept of deterrence—and everything else that eventually ended the Cold War, and won it for freedom. Before Rotblat received the Nobel Prize, he and the Pugwashers were decorated by such peace-lovers as Husak, the Czechoslovakian dictator, and Jaruzelski, the Polish dictator. In fact, the Pugwashers were pleased to hold their conference in Warsaw after Jaruzelski imposed martial law.”

Like Barack Obama, Holdren was from early in his career an advocate of the redistribution of wealth. In 1977 he coauthored the book
Ecoscience
with Paul and Anne Ehrlich, which espouses “the neo-Malthusian view.” This view, according to the Ehrlichs and Holdren, proposes “population limitation and redistribution of wealth,” and “on these points, we find ourselves firmly in the neo-Malthusian camp.”
⁸
They recommended that the “de-development of overdeveloped countries… be given top priority,” and called on the United States and other First World nations to “divert their excess productivity into helping the poorer people of the world rather than exploiting them.” (“Excess” according to whom?) How much of their excess productivity? Oh, 20 percent of their gross national products would be about right—indeed, necessary: “We believe an effort of this magnitude is not only justified but essential.”
⁹

They also advocated a “considerably more equitable distribution of wealth and income” within America itself, suggesting: “Possibly this would be achieved by some formal mechanism.”
¹⁰

The future president who lamented the fact that “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society”
would undoubtedly have approved—as his later appointment of Holdren made abundantly clear.
¹¹

Holdren and his coauthors also came out for government controls on population growth—controls so strict that they might have made the most committed Maoist blush. “There exists ample authority,” they asserted, “under which population growth could be regulated.” They even claimed that “compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.” And they recommended that the United Nations step in to enforce such laws if American authorities failed to do so.
¹²

The Erlichs and Holdren advocated more than just a role for the UN in internal U.S. affairs. They called for the establishment of a “comprehensive Planetary Regime” that would essentially control everything: it would “control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable… not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes.” It would also “be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade” and would be “given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits… the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”
¹³
They would enforce these limits by means of a global police force: “Security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force.… The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”
¹⁴

When he accepted the Nobel Prize that was awarded to both Rotblat and Pugwash in 1995, Holdren demonstrated that he still
held these views. “The post-Cold-War world,” he said, “needs a more powerful United Nations, probably with a standing volunteer force—owing loyalty directly to the UN rather than to contingents from individual nations.”
¹⁵
And in a January 2008 address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), he called for “a universal prohibition on nuclear weapons, coupled with means to ensure confidence in compliance.”
¹⁶

Global warming offered him an opportunity to reaffirm his commitment to internationalism and the destruction of American sovereignty. In response to climate change, he recommended in February 2007 that the UN establish a “global framework” for enforcement of various restrictions, including a global emissions tax: “a requirement for the early establishment of a substantial price on carbon emissions in all countries, whether by a carbon tax or a tradable permit approach.”
¹⁷