President Obama meets with his national security team to discuss Afghanistan in the Situation Room of the White House on Nov. 11, 2009. (White House/Pete Souza)

The indispensable Fred Kaplan has a piece for Slate on the kinds of questions Obama is asking of his national security team. It's an enlightening read.

I don't know if Obama will reach the right decision, whatever that is, on the war. What I do know is that those who interpret the amount of time he's taking over this as a lack of gumption, the sign of a weak and inexperienced president, are profoundly wrong. Obama's refusal to be pressured or maneuvered or bullied into a decision, by the media, by his political opponents, by five-star generals, is admirable - and extraordinary. From Kaplan's piece:

According to some officials, after each of the eight sessions, Obama has been dissatisfied with the answers at some level and has hammered them to bring back more detail the next time—on the state of the Afghan army, on the impact that various deployments would have on the state of the U.S. Army, on a province-by-province breakdown of Afghan politics and security. All these questions directly, even crucially, affect calculations of acceptable risk or clear futility—the chances of success or failure. In his ABC interview, the president said he's now satisfied "there's not an important question out there that has not been asked and that we haven't answered to the best of our abilities," and, as a result of this process, he will feel "much more confident" about whatever orders he ends up issuing.

Less than a year into his presidency, this guy, with no military experience and only a few years in national politics, is sitting in a room with storied military commanders, Pentagon veterans and foreign policy mavens and pressing them to come up with better arguments, to question their own assumptions, to rethink every premise. To put it bluntly, that takes balls. And it's what a president is for.

In war, Bush did whatever his generals asked. Sometimes that made for good decisions, often it meant disastrous ones. McCain would have done the same, as long as they were calling for an advance. Obama's determination to take his time matches the profundity of the moment. Far from being a mark of inexperience, it suggests exceptional mental strength, self-belief, and coolness under skull-crushingly intense pressure. To me, this president's "dithering" is the most impressive episode of his first year in office.

Although I spend a lot of my time reading or listening to American political discourse there are still some things about it I don't understand. Here's the conclusion of a very sensible and necessary appraisal of what the Stupak amendment on abortion (inserted into last week's health bill to appease conservative Democrats) will actually mean in practice:

The uncertainties are substantial, but it's safe to say that, initially, a minority of women, and a minority of abortions will be impacted by the Stupak amendment. Those women will be very disproportionately poor and middle-class.

Very poor and middle-class? Doesn't he mean working-class?

I know "middle-class" tends to a broader definition in the States than it does here. I'm also aware that politicians, from Clinton onwards, have been using it as a catch-all, in order to flatter working-class Americans who aspire to be middle-class.

But the author of this piece isn't a politician. He's a journalist, writing for a liberal blog. He can describe things objectively. And yet he can't bring himself to say "working class". Is there a good reason for this? On the face of it, his usage seems to render the latter term obsolete and the term he actually uses pretty much meaningless.

Maybe America doesn't have a working-class. Or maybe I'm missing something?

A few heads may be banging against desks in the White House this morning when they wake up and discover that the British Prime Minister has disclosed Obama's decision on Afghanistan, before Obama.

In the course of a long interview with Evan Davies on the Today programme Brown said the president was going with "the counter-insurgency strategy of General McChrystal". Well, there you are then. It's a remarkably plain statement, especially for one so skilled at obfuscation. And one that ratchets up the pressure on the White House.

Only the other day Obama's National Security Adviser vehemently denied that any such decision had been taken. The White House have been hoping to delay an announcement for another couple of weeks, and tried to give themselves breathing space by talking about a whole range of options still under consideration. GB - whether by accident or design - has just dumped on this communications strategy. Maybe he'll write Obama a letter to apologise.

Difficult to conclusively discern causality, but it looks to me like the sweeter the rock, the freer the oil does flow.

(via Urban Cartography)

A New York art dealer has traded her claim to ownership of two Damien Hirsts for custody of her daughter:

Kapernekas, a 49-year-old New York art dealer filed a suit in federal court in Manhattan claiming an interest in the two Hirsts, which have been valued at an estimated $47.6 million, court documents show. The custody suit, involving their 8-year- old daughter, was being heard in New York County Family Court.

Kapernekas has agreed to drop the federal suit and claims on the Hirsts in exchange for: custody of their daughter (Brandhorst gets visitation and vacation rights); a one-time payment of $100,000; a $500,000 trust for the daughter’s education; a loft on Wooster Street in Manhattan’s Soho district valued at about $5 million to be held in the daughter’s name as sole owner; $5,000 a month in child support; and $640,000 to cover Kapernekas’s legal expenses, according to Kapernekas.

Sounds like a good deal. I should think the daughter will be worth more than the Hirsts in twenty years' time.

(via Marginal Revolution)

There's a lovely anecdote in Daniel Finkelstein's latest column, from his time as an adviser to the Conservative Party leadership. It's the day after Labour's thumping general election victory in 1997. The Tories suddenly find themselves out of power for the first time in eighteen years. Shellshocked, they are having their first Shadow Cabinet meeting:

It wasn’t much of one, since a goodly proportion of the members had lost their seat at the election. And instead of the smooth Civil Service taking a crisp minute, they were stuck with me trying to scribble notes down. But, nevertheless, within a few minutes an excitable discussion was taking place about how best to respond to the incoming Government’s Queen's Speech.

After letting everyone rabbit on for a while, Michael Heseltine intervened. I can still see him now, pushing his chair away from the table, leaning back languidly and saying: “I think we should just calm down. We are all going to be here for a very long time.”

Also in WaPo, a furrowed-brow piece on how Obama is feeling the strain of being commander-in-chief:

War and tragedy are putting President Obama through the most wrenching period of his young administration. Visibly thinner, admittedly skipping meals, he is learning every day the challenges of a wartime presidency.

Maybe he can't eat because he's under strain - but maybe he's just trying the McChrystal diet?

The Washington Post reports on friction between the Obama administration and Karzai (made manifest in Eikenberry's warning against sending more troops):

U.S. officials were particularly irritated by a interview this week in which a defiant Karzai said that the West has little interest in Afghanistan and that its troops are there only for self-serving reasons. "The West is not here primarily for the sake of Afghanistan," Karzai told PBS's "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" program. "It is here to fight terrorism. The United States and its allies came to Afghanistan after September 11. Afghanistan was troubled like hell before that, too. Nobody bothered about us."

I can see why they might be irritated by this - Karzai would be in a lot more trouble without American troops - but which part of it isn't true?

The pundits were highly impressed by Obama's speech at Fort Hood.

Even the paper that (allegedly) wants to destroy him.

Sarah Palin can relax. Obama has announced that under his healthcare reforms, old people can choose how they want to be killed (or so the Onion reports):

"Let me dispel these ridiculous rumors once and for all and set the record straight: Under my plan, seniors are going to be killed the way they want to be killed, end of story," said the president, who acknowledged that "wiping out" the nation's elderly population has always been his No. 1 priority.

Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, is already running hard for 2012 Republican nomination (his basic strategy is to position himself as more credible than Romney and less crazy than Palin). He was in Iowa at the weekend, pitching to its pampered electorate:

Test-driving a new stump speech, he offered a reworking of the president’s signature call-and-response chant: “Are you fired up and ready to fight back?

Did Pawlenty or his advisers think they were clever when they came up with this? Did they laugh uproariously? Did no-one mention previous attempts to appropriate Obama's slogans (McCain's sniggery repetition of the phrase "That's not change we can believe in" against a lime-green background was the low point of his campaign... and before that Hillary Clinton tried something similar)?

One of the truisms of American politics is that if you let your opponent define the terms of the debate, you've already lost. Similarly, if your best shot at a soundbite relies on your opponent's slogan, it's time to write your own.

The Sun's battering of Gordon Brown over a few mistakes in his handwritten letter to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan feels wrong to me. I wasn't able to put my finger on why until I read a post from a commenter on Alistair Campbell's blog:

I was livid over the letter. This woman lost her son and she's worried about a spelling mistake??? Then I remembered. That's grief. Been there, done that. The Mail and other scummy papers are so wrong to milk this because the poor woman is going to feel awful about it in months from now.

The presence of the odd spelling mistake in a letter like this shouldn't be a news story. In some ways it's a reminder of the authenticity of the gesture: it isn't written by an adviser or carefully spellchecked, it's one guy (with bad eyesight) scrawling a note of condolence. The only reason this is even a story is that the woman concerned is angry about it. But as the comment above reminds us, intense grief can distort a person's judgment. The Sun's exploitation of this woman's anger in order to score a point in its campaign against Brown is quite disgusting.

In the NYT, Bruce Buschel has 100 pieces of advice for anybody running or aspiring to run a restaurant:

56. Do not ignore a table because it is not your table. Stop, look, listen, lend a hand. (Whether tips are pooled or not.)

57. Bring the pepper mill with the appetizer. Do not make people wait or beg for a condiment.

58. Do not bring judgment with the ketchup. Or mustard. Or hot sauce. Or whatever condiment is requested.

59. Do not leave place settings that are not being used.

60. Bring all the appetizers at the same time, or do not bring the appetizers. Same with entrees and desserts.

61. Do not stand behind someone who is ordering. Make eye contact. Thank him or her.

62. Do not fill the water glass every two minutes, or after each sip. You’ll make people nervous.

If you're a customer, like me, you'll be nodding along at most of this.

The normally sensible Clive Crook writes a handwringing column about how Obama is messing it all up:

Last year this centre elected Mr Obama and put Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress. This year it is switching sides in an unusually abrupt way. Polls have been saying this since the summer and the elections confirmed it. Independents voted against Democratic candidates two to one.

Crook argues that Obama is taking the country too far to the left, or at least that he's allowing Democrats in Congress to do so. But Crook provides no evidence that this explains the loss of independents from Obama's 2008 coalition. A much simpler and more likely explanation is that the economy is in a mess, and unemployment is still rising; in these circumstances it would be against every known political law if the incumbent's ratings were not falling, and independents were not jumping sides (I suspect Mr C has been over-impressed by the amount of noise generated by the angry right, and assumes that such ideological fervour is more widespread than it actually is).

He continues, exuding bracing optimism:

Health reform might still fail. Senate Democrats are developing a more moderate measure, though liberal enough on current plans to repel all Republicans and trouble their own centrists. There is talk now of delay until after Christmas. What the Senate produces must be merged with the House’s bill. So there is more to come of the wrangling that has already so dismayed the electorate.

Has Crook got a suggestion for a different way to make a law under the constitution?

Rallying the country behind health reform in the abstract has been the limit of the president’s ambition. It has not worked.

Um, it seems to be working OK, so far. When was the last time the House passed a health reform bill?

Mr Obama must take responsibility for an actual proposal and rally the country behind that.

In other words, the president must become a prime minister, pronto.

White House butlers watch as President Barack Obama makes his way towards the State Dining Room of the White House.

There's something about this photo I like. It gives you a glimpse of the preparation that accompanies a president's every official move. But what I really like is that sense of concern in their faces, like anxious parents seeing their child off to school.

Pelosi was unable to get the bill through without making a major concession to anti-abortionists (allowing a vote on the suggestively named Stupak amendment). The amendment prohibits people who receive insurance subsidies from purchasing private plans that cover abortion - which means many will have their access to abortion services removed. This will sour yesterday's achievement for many Democrats across the country.

The excellent Amy Sullivan thinks the concession should have been avoidable and was the result of the Dems overplaying their hand near the beginning of the process, and then failing to take the anti-abortionist faction in their own party seriously until the last minute:

Perhaps the best way to have headed off this debate in the first place would have been to make sure that the original health reform legislation was not introduced with language that could have allowed direct federal funding of abortion. That starting point signaled to pro-life Democrats--rightly or wrongly--that their colleagues hoped to use health reform to change the status quo regarding government funding of abortion. And the fact that their concerns went unacknowledged for months from both the White House and House leadership seemed to confirm their fears.

Still, who knows what will happen when if and when the bill gets to conference (the process of negotiation by which the Senate and House versions of a bill are merged).

If three congressmen had switched their votes yesterday, the bill wouldn't have passed. This despite the Democrats having an historically large majority (one that will be reduced or even lost in a year's time). 39 Democrats voted against the bill. Just one Republican voted for it. This tells you something about how hard healthcare reform is to pass the system and why successive administrations have failed to get it through. It also tells you how successful the GOP has been at sticking together in opposition to Obama - a success that may rebound on them with some force if the bill passes into law and is not generally seen as a disaster.

The lone Republican supporter of the bill was Joe Cao of Louisiana. Cao, a freshman, is no ordinary Republican. He won his seat, in a heavily Democratic district, in one of the biggest upsets of 2008. Cao ousted a Democrat who, despite facing a string of corruption charges - one of which involved $75,000 cash kept in a freezer - was expected to hang on. The first Vietnamese-American to win national office, Cao is a quiet, thoughtful man with degrees in physics, law and theology. As I say, not your average Republican House member. The pressure on him not to break the party line would have been intense.

The House passes a healthcare bill. A messy and deeply imperfect bill no doubt, but one that will make a significant difference to the lives of tens of millions of Americans for years to come (if the Senate follows suit). Credit must go to Mrs Pelosi, who despite being a deeply unattractive figure is tremendously effective at getting things done (there's someone like her in every office). Credit goes also, of course, to Obama, who in his final lobbying of House Dems used a couple of his signature rhetorical techniques: first, try and get people to raise their heads out of the day-to-day and take the longer view; second, persuade them that they, not he or anyone else, will receive the acclaim - that this is really in their ultimate self-interest:

During the private meeting with Democrats in the Cannon Caucus Room, the president acknowledged the political difficulty of supporting major legislation in the face of unanimous Republican opposition and tough criticism from conservatives.

But, those present said, he urged them on, saying, “When I sign this in the Rose Garden, each and every one of you will be able to look back and say, ‘This was my finest moment in politics.’ ”

(Photo: Luke Sharrett/NYT)

As you watch this video, fixate on the green spot in the middle. You'll notice the yellow dots flashing in and out as you go. Then replay the video, and focus on any of the yellow dots. Your tiny mind will be blown.

More details at Neurophilosophy.

The Treasury Secretary recently invited some influential economics bloggers to meet for a chat. One of the attendees, Tyler Cowen (of the wonderful Marginal Revolution), offers his - very Cowenesque - impressions:

1. Tim Geithner is very smart and he was conceptually stronger than one might have expected.

2. I believe that the long, L-shaped hallways encourage "visits to offices" rather than hallway conversations; this is a speculation and perhaps some reader can confirm or deny it.

3. The quality of the painted portraits of Treasury Secretaries declines as time passes.

4. The free cookies were good and fresh, with a warm, fluid chocolate interior.

Full list here.

National Geographic reports:

On September 23, 2008, Dorothy, a female chimpanzee in her late 40s, died of congestive heart failure. A maternal and beloved figure, Dorothy had spent eight years at Cameroon's Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, which houses and rehabilitates chimps victimized by habitat loss and the illegal African bushmeat trade.... (Monica) Szczupider (she took the above photograph), who had been a volunteer at the center, told me:  'Her presence, and loss, was palpable, and resonated throughout the group. The management at Sanaga-Yong opted to let Dorothy's chimpanzee family witness her burial, so that perhaps they would understand, in their own capacity, that Dorothy would not return. Some chimps displayed aggression while others barked in frustration. But perhaps the most stunning reaction was a recurring, almost tangible silence. If one knows chimpanzees, then one knows that [they] are not [usually] silent creatures.' "

(via Cognition and Culture)

Krauthammer on Tuesday's election results:

November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

Hmm. Good luck with that one, Charlie. I still have a feeling that in November 2012 we may witness the second greatest fluke in American political history.

As eccentric as she sometimes sounds in public, I suspect Sarah Palin is even stranger in person. You occasionally get glimpses of it. The authors of a new book about her 2008 adventure - a couple of reporters who seem to have had access to McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt - have turned up some interesting tidbits, including this one:

Palin couldn’t bring herself to tell her children she had accepted McCain’s offer to be his running mate. “The governor decided not to deliver the life-changing news herself. Instead, she asked Steve Schmidt to tell her children that their worlds were about to be turned upside down.” There’s no explanation for why this happened – but Conroy and Walshe do point out that the timeline means the children weren’t asked for their permission, as Palin suggested during the campaign.

Assuming this is true - why would she want her children to find out about this from a stranger? To absolve herself of responsibility in some way? To make it sound real serious?