The Deep State (11 page)

Where all this stage management has evolved to in the present sometimes reads like a vignette from the political satire
Thank You for Smoking
. In February 2015, the
Washington Post
reported that a horde of advertising executives had descended upon Hillary Clinton's (as of then yet-to-be-announced) campaign in order to “rebrand” a woman who had been on the national stage for more than twenty years. Their advertising patter sounded like a parody of Madison Avenue advertising talk: “It's exactly the same as selling an iPhone or a soft drink or a cereal,” gushed Peter Sealey, a longtime corporate marketing strategist. “She needs to use everything a brand has: a dominant color, a logo, a symbol. . . . The symbol of a Mercedes is a three-pointed star. The symbol of Coca-Cola is the
contour bottle. The symbol of McDonald's is the golden arches. What is Clinton's symbol?”
23

Bill Clinton, Triangulator of Deep State Interests

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he had an ambitious agenda, even if it was overshadowed in the campaign by the frequent need to tamp down what his staff called “bimbo eruptions” (it was on the strength of his ability to talk his way out of these scandals that he proudly wore the moniker “the Comeback Kid”). He found, on taking office, that his agenda would be trimmed down, whether he liked it or not.

His top priority was to grow the economy through an ambitious program of federal spending. But his advisers quickly told him that his scheme would have to be significantly scaled back as adverse reaction from the bond market would raise interest rates, choke off growth, and nullify any stimulative effects of the spending. His response: “You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f*cking bond traders?”
24

Clinton took the hint and surrounded himself with money men. Within a year he had replaced his treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen, who had previously been a senator, with banker Robert Rubin, who had been running Goldman Sachs. When Rubin left to cash in on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Clinton nominated Lawrence Summers to fill the post and reappointed Ayn Rand fanboy Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. When Brooksley Born, Clinton's chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, proposed to regulate the derivatives market, she was crushed by the troika of Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers. On his way out the White House door in December 2000, Clinton signed into law a bill prohibiting the regulation of derivatives. Later, Clinton claimed he could not buck a veto-proof majority in Congress on this issue, but a documentary filmmaker who interviewed him about this said that it was one of “the most amazing lies I've heard in quite a while,” as Clinton's operatives had actually been lobbying for the bill.
25

Clinton was a quick learner. He understood early in his first term that the presidency is not always imperial and that if he did not accommodate unelected power he would become a one-term president. He accordingly adjusted his goals to the expectations of Wall Street and loaded his administration with the Street's fixers. As for his original policy goals, his “bridge to the twenty-first century” led straight to 2008 and the financial meltdown. Wall Street did not forget to show its gratitude for services rendered: the financial industry has paid him $23 million in speaking fees since he left office.
26

Bush the Decider

On the surface, Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, bulldozing his way into office after the Florida recount travesty, could hardly have been more different. He knew what he wanted and brooked no opposition—not that there was any to speak of. There can be little doubt that the disastrous policies of his administration were
his
policies (even if the invasion of Iraq had been sketched out by a cabal of neoconservatives long before he became president). His subordinates, chosen for their loyalty, eagerly carried out his plans, and those who harbored doubts, like Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, soon found themselves looking for work. Bush was, in his own words, “the decider.”

Or was he? It is a commonplace observation that Vice President Cheney was a virtual co-president—the kind of relationship GOP operatives nearly imposed on Reagan in the 1980 Republican Convention, when party grandees were convinced that they needed a co-presidential number two on the ticket like Gerald Ford to do the actual governing. Throughout Bush's presidency, the most dogged proponent of presidential authority was Cheney, who knew that the vice president's powers had been fuzzily defined both in the Constitution and by custom. By increasing the president's powers, he would increase his own. He even claimed executive privilege extended to him just as it covered the president.

Bush was new to Washington; Cheney had been a top-level inside
operator for thirty years and he knew what made the wheels go around. He had been Ford's chief of staff; when offered the possibility of a cabinet appointment, he turned it down because he knew the real power often lay in positions that are less impressive on paper.

Throughout the 1980s, as ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Cheney participated with his friend Don Rumsfeld (then out of office) in secret “continuity of government” exercises. The premise of the drills was that in the event of a nuclear attack, three teams would go to separate locations around the United States to prepare to take leadership of the country. The participants became familiar with the emergency powers available to them in the event of a crisis, and, according to one participant, took the unconstitutional position that in an extreme situation it would be better to operate without Congress altogether.
27
“Over three decades, from the Ford administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never too far away,” wrote James Mann, a Bush biographer and the author of
The Rise of the Vulcans
. “They stayed in touch with its defense, military, and intelligence officials and were regularly called upon by those officials. Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense, a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States.”
28

Cheney's selection as vice president was fishy. Although the Bush campaign went through the motions of interviewing candidates for a running mate (with Cheney, of course, in charge of that operation), he had already decided to join Bush on the ticket, and the Republican hopefuls lining up for a chance at the vice presidential slot were wasting their time. Kasich, who toyed with running for president and dropped out early in the 2000 campaign, immediately threw his support to Bush and was one of those invited to participate in the charade of the candidate interviews. Afterward, commiserating with him about how Cheney, looking for the most qualified candidate, had by sheer happenstance stumbled upon himself, I asked Kasich, half-jokingly, whether he thought Bush had chosen Cheney or Cheney had actually chosen Bush. “That's a really interesting question,” was his only response.

While the war on terrorism bears the indelible stamp of the Bush presidency, it is an open question whether he or his operatives set policy in some of the most contentious areas. Bush has much to answer for, but evidence from the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's conduct of torture suggests that he was not entirely in control of his own administration, and that policy was being made with the president deliberately kept “out of the loop.”
*
We read that White House counsel Alberto Gonzales deleted any mention of waterboarding from the talking points used to brief the president. Elsewhere, the report cryptically quotes an unnamed official saying that “there would be no briefing of the President on this matter.”
29

Deniability is everything in Washington, and these evasions may have been concocted with a nod and a wink. But it is in the nature of institutions that such arrangements become habitual. The tail ends up wagging the dog, and the president, by insensible degrees, transforms into the dupe of his own subordinates. Americans do not consciously elect co-presidents, and they certainly do not expect that his underlings will serve him best by keeping information from him. But if Bush was clueless and never one to read briefing memos of any length, his successor was a far more disciplined student—a constitutional scholar, no less, and a man capable of penning his own rhetorical flourishes. So what would happen when Barack Obama entered the White House? Many waited with hope and anticipation.

Barack Obama, Reluctant Chairman of the Deep State

In 2008, Barack Obama the change agent ran against the legacy of George W. Bush. But when he assumed office, his policies in the areas of national security and financial regulation were strikingly similar. Even the
Affordable Care Act, which Republicans vilify with uncontrollable rage, is hardly different in outline from Bush's Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (both expand medical coverage by subsidizing corporate interests). Still, Obama remains misapprehended by friend and foe alike.

According to his opponents, Obama is an un-American Muslim socialist worthy of every term of abuse in the Republicans' voluminous lexicon. His defenders counter that while he has not achieved what they had hoped, this was principally due to the GOP's relentless obstruction. They forget that during his first two years in office, he had a Democratic majority in Congress: Lyndon Johnson did not waste this opportunity in similar circumstances.

Why has Obama generated such polarizing opinions despite an actual record that corresponds neither to the fears of his enemies nor the hopes of his friends? His motivations are difficult to understand because of his diffident and aloof manner. Silly-clever gossip columnists like Maureen Dowd have reduced this critique to the lowest common denominator by complaining that he should not play golf when anything is happening in the world.
30

More substantively, something about his style does not please the national security establishment, despite the fact that his administration undertook the surge in Afghanistan, quietly expanded a rigorous internal security apparatus within the federal government, significantly widened his predecessor's drone campaign in Pakistan, and has either supported or acquiesced in the NSA's surveillance policies.

In his campaign for the presidency, Obama promised to close the prison at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base because its operation made a mockery of due process and served only as a recruitment tool for Islamic extremists. He was on firm ground—the American judicial system had a much better record of prosecuting and convicting terrorists, like Zacarias Moussaoui, a 9/11 conspirator, than did Guantánamo Bay's legally questionable process. On the day he took office, Obama even signed an executive order to wind down and close the facility. Yet nothing came of it.
When panicked members of Congress stampeded themselves into supporting a ban on closing Guantánamo, Obama did nothing but talk in vague generalities. He could have wielded his veto pen and forced some serious horse trading in the tradition of Harry Truman, a tough little banty rooster who thirsted for a scrap with Congress. Obama's veto pen lay unused. In his presidency to date, Obama has issued fewer vetoes than any other president since James Garfield, who was assassinated six months into his administration.

The Deep State's disappointment in Obama for only reluctantly doing what they wanted is mirrored by the disillusion of many of his former supporters for doing those things at all. After more than a dozen long years, the American people have grown tired of an endless succession of wars that have brought no tangible benefit at enormous cost in lives and treasure, just as they are spooked by the implications of a surveillance state. At the same time, Americans are constantly bombarded with new threats—ISIS, Russia, even Somali terrorist groups threatening to attack American shopping malls. The public is less antiwar than simply shell-shocked into a state of apathy and resignation.

When Obama took office in 2009, he was immediately confronted with what to do in Afghanistan. While he had campaigned on the premise that Iraq was the “dumb” war and Afghanistan the “good” one, he still wanted to end the latter conflict as quickly as prudently possible. In a series of White House strategy meetings, Obama debated the options in Afghanistan with his senior national security team, and, according to Bob Gates's memoir, Obama and Biden both aggressively pushed back at the military's off-the-shelf plan for an increase of 40,000 U.S. troops.

Gates chose to regard it as discourtesy toward professional military officers that Obama and his vice president should poke holes in the rationales of Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, the main proponents of the surge in Iraq. Both generals claimed that if the Taliban were not defeated, the group would invite al-Qaeda back into Afghanistan, though it later turned out there was no intelligence to support the
assertion.
31
Gates also said Obama accused the military of “gaming” him by forcing a strategy on him with no alternatives.

The military reacted in its accustomed fashion. Leaks sprang in the press, linked to anonymous sources at the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department, suggesting that Obama's reticence about the surge and preference for focusing on al-Qaeda rather than the Taliban was endangering the mission.
32
Obama soon acceded to the pressure and compromised on 30,000 additional troops and set a date for withdrawal. But it did not end there: determined to lengthen the time allotted for the mission, Gates and Clinton undercut the agreed-to policy in congressional testimony, arguing that the withdrawal date was not firm.

It was a textbook case of how the permanent state boxes in and bypasses its own elected leaders by spreading false intelligence, leaking to the press, and stirring up opposition on the Hill. The Gates-Clinton-Petraeus squeeze play raises serious questions about civilian control of the military and whether an elected president can control his own bureaucracy.