Obama-Paul: What Would You Do?

With Barack Obama running just four points ahead of Ron Paul (51-47% according to last month’s CNN poll), it might be useful to ask ourselves where we would come down in such a race. Not that there’s any realistic possibility of this contest actually taking place, mind you. The libertarian Texas Congressman probably has about as much chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination as that pizza guy from Atlanta. But in politics there’s always something to be said for figuring out all the options, isn’t there? (And by the way, the “we” I have in mind here isn’t Republicans who think Obama coddles labor, but Democrats, independents or “third party” voters who may think he coddles capital.)

Certainly, so far as domestic economic policy goes, Paul holds about zero appeal – he doesn’t just favor cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare, but complete abolition of the programs. Basically a utopian capitalist, Paul presumably doesn’t even hold an “enlightened capitalist” position that might acknowledge that New Deal and Great Society programs may have forestalled a return to Great Depression-era conditions by directing resources to the lower rungs on the economic ladder. So, no matter how critical we might be of the shortcomings of Obama’s health insurance plan or his defense of Social Security, there’s no question that his policies are far superior to Paul’s in all of this.

And that would be that, except for one thing – the rest of the world. Rejecting equally the welfare and the warfare state, Paul categorizes current American foreign policy as “delusional” and, in that regard, he is far superior to a President who appears to have embraced war as a permanent condition of American life, to be conducted on a worldwide basis, with targets that may now even include American citizens.

What are we make of a split like this? If we were we speaking in electoral terms, the answer might be simple: “It’s the economy, stupid;” you don’t win elections on foreign policy – at least not when there’s no military draft. But for the purposes of our political thought experiment, let’s not confuse what we think would work with what we think is right. The question here is whether one of these two deeply flawed political profiles is somehow better, or at least not as bad as the other. This could be a much more difficult calculation.

Let’s consider the Afghanistan War – something not likely to be much of an issue in the campaign that will actually transpire next year. Twice as many American troops have now died there under Obama’s watch as during the Bush years (1153 of the 1728 total.) And with talk of keeping 25,000 soldiers there until 2024, can any but the hardest core Obama zealot really believe that he’s working on any kind of plan other than not being the president who “lost Afghanistan”? For a point of reference, we had “only” 25,000 troops there in 2007. So under the Obama Plan, America’s Ten Years War will become its Twenty Years War. Clear point to Ron Paul on this one.

And let’s look at some much larger numbers – like the cost of this war. In its recommendations to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the Congressional Progressive Caucus estimates the savings from “a responsible end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” at $1.6 trillion. Where will the money come from to continue this military adventure from one decade to the next as Obama apparently hopes to do? Probably not Wall Street.

We’re still just talking about the tip of the iceberg, though. Obama appears to have drunk the military establishment’s Kool Aid in a single gulp. With nary a murmur about the absurdity of continuing to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union, twenty years after that country has ceased to exist, the President has accepted the necessity for seven hundred or so foreign military bases. As for the idea of his administration being in some way “transformational,” as some once hoped, so far as foreign policy goes, the only transformation he’ll be remembered for is the transition to drone warfare.

Which is worse, then – Paul’s domestic policy or Obama’s foreign policy? So far as their effect on Americans goes, there are arguments to be made either way. But, again, there’s the rest of the world. Estimates of civilian deaths caused by U.S. led operations in Afghanistan run from 10-30,000. These numbers, of course, carry little weight in any domestic American political calculation since the friends and relatives of these unfortunates – collateral damage, as we call civilian casualties when they’re not Americans – cannot vote or even be heard in this country. But one might argue that they hold greater moral weight for that very reason. For all that we may suffer under our government’s misguided domestic policies, the fact is that we have some say in them. Limitations and imperfections in our democratic system notwithstanding, we could vote the people responsible for them out of office, but, for a variety of reasons, we have not done so. Those who suffer under our misguided foreign policy, however, do not have that power – not even in theory.

For better or worse, any electoral match-up that we are actually likely to see next year will pose no such dilemma. The Republican candidate will almost certainly be calling for both more war and more domestic cutbacks than Obama, so the considerations raised by an Obama-Paul match up will remain just abstract questions. We’ll be “lucky” that way.

Nevertheless, if there is ever to be a paradigm shift in American politics of the sort that the Occupy movement hints at; if we are ever to be able to make common cause with the wider range of people necessary to effect real change, then it will probably require that we think all of this through and see our supposed friends with as clear eyes as we see our supposed enemies.