The Atlantic: Obama and the Limits of 'Fact-Based' Foreign Policy

The very notion of “facts” has been demeaned by Republicans, and most of all by Team Donald Trump. As Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes put it, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, as facts.” In response, Democrats have doubled down on their tendency to wield facts as cudgels, demonstrating their righteousness in the process. It would be a loss, though, if this came to be seen as merely another partisan schism. As it turns out, Obama’s foreign-policy legacy can offer an important window into whether facts—and being “reality-based”—are quite as critical to real-world policy success as we might like to think.

Unlike Kennedy and Johnson, Obama was very much the technocrat-in-chief, setting the tone for the people he would surround himself with. His intelligence was generally in little doubt. During his eight years in the Oval Office, the president was an almost unbelievably voracious reader, devoting around an hour on most days to books of history, philosophy, biography, or even sci-fi novels. But being smart and well-read doesn’t necessarily lead to good judgment or bold vision; in some cases, even, the former can undermine the latter. [...]

Matters of judgment still loom large four decades later. I, or any critic of Obama’s foreign policy, could sit with an Obama administration official, and, even if we agreed on all the facts and specifics of a particular country or conflict, it wouldn’t matter much. Divergences in how people interpret Obama’s legacy have much more to do with fundamentally different starting assumptions about America’s role in the world and even human nature—in other words, the very reasons why we do what we do. In fact, looking back at my own meetings with officials during the Obama era, rarely do I ever recall hearing something and thinking to myself that I had just heard some gross error of fact. This is why I found such meetings so frustrating and circular: The only things we disagreed on were the most important. [...]

Due to the formative experience of the Iraq war, as well as domestic political considerations, Obama hoped to reduce America’s footprint in the Middle East. This meant a general bias toward disengagement, irrespective of whether greater U.S. involvement could produce better outcomes in particular crises (even the Iran nuclear deal was basically about removing the possibility of an American war with Iran). There was also a general discomfort around the direct use of U.S. military force, a discomfort which was as ideological as it was practical.

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FiveThirtyEight: Can You Trust Trump’s Approval Rating Polls?

That third possibility is pretty much exactly what happened. Trump beat the final FiveThirtyEight national polling average by only 1.8 percentage points. Meanwhile, he beat the final FiveThirtyEight polling average in the average swing state — weighted by its likelihood of being the tipping-point state — by 2.7 percentage points. (The miss was larger than that in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but Clinton met or slightly exceeded her polls in several other swing states.) This was nothing at all out of the ordinary. The polls were about as accurate as they’d been, on average, in presidential elections since 1968. They were somewhat more accurate than they’d been in the most recent federal election, the 2014 midterms. But they were enough to tip the election to Trump because Clinton had been in a precarious position to begin with. [...]

There’s one other critical distinction that people often miss. The margin of error, as traditionally described, applies only to one candidate’s vote share (“Clinton has 47 percent of the vote”) or one side of a yes/no question (“41 percent of voters approve of Trump’s performance”). The margin of error for the difference between two candidates (“Clinton leads Trump by 5 percentage points”) — or a candidate’s net approval rating (“Trump has a negative-10 approval rating”) — is roughly twice as high: [...]

But so many of the articles I read toward the end of last year’s campaign didn’t convey any sense of uncertainty at all. A small Clinton lead was misreported as a sure thing. And then a small polling error was misreported as a massive failure of the data. It’s a fairly minor part of the puzzle, but if journalists want to rebuild trust in their reporting, ending the boom-and-bust cycle in how they report on polling — first overrating its precision and then being shocked when it’s even a couple of percentage points off — would be one way to start. Doing so would make it harder for Trump, or other politicians, to undermine confidence in polls they don’t like.

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Moment of Tangency: A Glimpse of What Might Have Been

The New Yorker: Draining the Swamp

There are moments in a hard-fought campaign when a catchy cluster of words can suddenly bubble up from the depths and become like a shiny new lily pad. “Drain the swamp” worked on many levels—it was active, it was funny, and it sounded like something a man in the real-estate business would actually say. It offered no details—another plus—and held a folksy charm.

It was also historically accurate. Indeed, the candidate had landed on a point the Founders had gone to some trouble to conceal—that the foundation upon which they built their capital included a great deal of water, sand, and mud. [...]

A scrap of paper in the Library of Congress, from around March, 1791, shows the earliest appearance of the plan. With a few quick strokes of his pen, Thomas Jefferson outlined a master vision: the single word “President” above the future location of the White House, and another word, “Capitol,” to the east. In between, there would be “public walks,” which was an accurate description of the Mall to come.

Jefferson was channelling the ancients as he daydreamed of the future. Over a small stream, he sketched the word “Tyber,” after Rome’s river. A nearby elevation called Jenkins Hill would soon be renamed Capitol Hill, after Rome’s Capitoline. Soon, elaborate street plans, with parks, grids, and slashing diagonals resembling those of Versailles, would be traced over a terrain that still housed more bears than people. [...]

Sometimes the waters demand attention more urgently. In 2006, the long-forgotten Tiber Creek reasserted itself, by rising up from its underground bed, where it still courses below Constitution Avenue, and threatening the actual Constitution of the United States. That document is preserved in a secure vault in the National Archives, along with the Declaration of Independence. After a severe rainstorm, the underground waters rose rapidly, stopping, fortunately, well short of the documents, but reaching alarming levels, coursing through the Archive’s basement and a theatre, where visitors could find an unwelcome reflecting pool the next day, lapping their feet.

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Vox: 100 years ago, Americans talked about Catholics the way they talk about Muslims today

This may seem absurd today, but there was a real fear among Protestant Americans back then that Catholics were planning to take over the country. As Pearce reported, the fears led to serious violence: Lynch mobs killed Catholic Italians, arsonists burned down Catholic churches, and there were anti-Catholic riots. It was a similar sentiment to the kind of Islamophobia today that’s led many Americans to call for shutting down mosques, forcing Muslims to register in a national database, and even banning Islam.

The point of the comparison is not to say that the US faces the same problems today as it did a century ago, or that the discrimination toward Catholics back then and Muslims today is exactly the same. But when looking back at the history of the US, it’s easy to see a pattern of consistent xenophobia and fears of outsiders. [...]

But this sort of rhetoric is not new to the US. As the Pew Research Center found, Americans have generally opposed taking in refugees even as they went through abhorrent, well-known crises. (Dara Lind reported for Vox that America even rejected some Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.)

Xenophobia has fueled other policies too. In the late 19th century, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to stop the flow of Chinese laborers into the US. During World War II, the US put Japanese Americans in internment camps after the country declared war on Japan. Throughout the war on drugs, lawmakers have regularly tapped into xenophobic sentiments to prohibit certain drugs — such as when San Francisco banned opium smoking that was perceived as popular among Chinese immigrants, and when prohibitionists built up opposition to marijuana by fearmongering about its use among Mexican immigrants.

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