I'm in the Paper!

Today. Not that it has never happened before. I'm in the paper somewhere in the Netherlands just about every month. Have been for years. But late last year the syndicate of regional papers I've been contributing to for the past ten years had to cut cost, and so the occasional op-ed writers were let go. Since that time I've made contact with several of the individual papers, and in January (on the Arizona shooting and the political debate in the U.S.) and earlier this month (Wisconsin union battle) this led to articles in the Leeuwarder Courant (of Frysland), and today I have commentary on President Obama as "imperial president" in the Nederlands Dagblad. They told me yesterday that it would come out today, so I went to buy the paper this afternoon. It had been a while since I had done that. The article is a commentary on the way the president took the country into the Lybian intervention, and how members of Congres have criticized it. The argument is that Obama is much like his predecessors in the office, including George W. Bush: he's an imperial president at the head of a powerful national security state. I don't dig too deeply into the reasons why there seems to be such a big difference between Obama the candidate and Obama the president on this, but the suggestion is that the structure, the machine, the complex that is the national security/surveillance state has a way of severely limiting the room for maneuver individual politicians may seek for themselves. This very much includes the president, on whose desk the national security buck stops. Of course, given that in the Lybia case no vital U.S. national interests seemed to be at stake, is has worked a little differently here as far as the motive is concerned. (Secretary Gates's apparent reluctance for the U.S. to get involved suggests that the Pentagon certainly was not chomping at the bit to get the country into this operation). It's a war of choice, and maybe it will turn out to have been the right choice. Let's hope so. But I think the way Congres feels taken for granted (it's probably right about this) is revealing of how much leeway presidents have in these matters nowadays. The unhappiness has not developed into a firestorm, and if things work out in Lybia it probably won't. But I'm wondering if we're not gradually reaching a turning point in executive-Congressional relations similar to what we saw at the end of the Vietnam era. Such a Congressional push-back would fit nicely with the insurgency type of politics we're seeing right now. Might not be a bad thing, if it was done right.