by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Our Invisible Poor — All Over Again

      President Obama’s role in a panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown has gotten across-the-board coverage: the Times, the Post, NPR, CNN, Politico, the National Catholic Reporter, Rush Limbaugh …

From a seat in the balcony of Gaston Hall I took notes on the event, and I wrote them up overnight for The New Yorker, which posted my piece on its website a few hours ago:

In our anti-monarchy, it was a sight beautiful to behold—the leader of the free world ambling onstage and settling into a chair just like the chairs occupied by his fellow-interlocutors, Robert Putnam, of Harvard, Arthur Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute, and E. J. Dionne, of the Washington Post, and speaking about poverty and listening to the others while the bells of the university chapel chimed noonday in the background.

A little further into the piece I draw a dotted line between President Obama’s engagement with Robert Putnam’s new book on poverty and inequality and President Kennedy’s engagement with Michael Harrington’s book The Other America, which he read about in The New Yorker:

Now Michael Harrington, an alumnus of the Catholic Worker and the Fund for the Republic who is at present a contributing editor of Dissent and the chief editor of the Socialist Party biweekly, New America, has written “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” (Macmillan). In the admirably short space of under two hundred pages, he outlines the problem, describes in imaginative detail what it means to be poor in this country today, summarizes the findings of recent studies by economists and sociologists, and analyzes the reasons for the persistence of mass poverty in the midst of general prosperity. It is an excellent book—and a most important one.

It’s neat to see Macdonald’s long and consequential piece – “Our Invisible Poor” – billboarded alongside my short one on the magazine’s website.

Politics (see: Crimea, Syria) and the English Language

“We’re seeing the light footprint run out of gas.”

That’s a former Obama administration foreign policy official, trying to explain the situation in Syria and Crimea to the Times – and executing a drone strike on the English language in the process.

A recent Times piece proposed that the White House’s struggle to develop a clear strategy in Crimea has to do with the post-Cold War dearth of American experts on Russia and its neighbors.  (It told the story of Georgetown Russian studies professor Angela Stent dashing from one media appearance to another to meet demand.)

But it’s just as likely that Orwell was right: just as “the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes,” so “an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form.”  In this case, a lack of clarity in our use of English as a society has led to a lack of clarity in our foreign affairs, and this lack can be seen in these “action-plan” clichés, which are passed around in government, business, and the military like so many no-bid contracts.  Instead of fighting “dumb wars,” strive to leave a “light footprint.”  Instead of “leading from behind,” get some “skin in the game.”

You might expect the Times analyst, whose name is David E. Sanger, to try to figure out what these expressions mean – to “unpack them.“  But he matches his sources in the use of fuzzy language – he “doubles down” on cliché:

As he learned to play the long game, the Treasury Department became Mr. Obama’s favorite noncombatant command. It refined the art of the economic squeeze on Iran, eventually forcing the mullahs to the negotiating table.

Is U.S. foreign policy under President Obama weaker than it was in the recent past, or is the geopolitical and economic situation more challenging than it was then?  Here is the analyst, striving (but not "going to the wall”) for clarity of insight:

It is almost certainly some combination of the two. But the most stinging critique of Mr. Obama is that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of nonintervention.

“To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration,” Orwell declared.  Barack Obama is the clearest thinker and speaker in the White House in living memory.  He’s a brilliant editor of his own work (see the photograph) and the work of his staff writers.  It is time for him and his policy makers to think clearly – and to express their thoughts in clear, strong English.