White House Memo Leading Military at Time of War, but Not as a ‘War President’

WASHINGTON — President Obama rarely, if ever, uses the phrase “war on terror.” Like presidents before him, Mr. Obama has a top-secret intelligence briefing every day, yet it is not necessarily first on his schedule. And when he sent 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, he announced the news in a written statement, not a public address.

As he heads toward his next big decision as commander in chief — a new strategy for Afghanistan, to be announced as early as this week — Mr. Obama, by necessity and temperament, is wearing the role in ways distinctly different from former President George W. Bush.

Mr. Obama, of course, leads in very different times. Mr. Bush forged his identity as commander in chief during the crucible of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Obama faces not only two wars but also a crumbling world economy that his homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, has described as a threat to the nation.

But while Mr. Bush often called himself “a war president,” that phrase seems to be missing from Mr. Obama’s lexicon.

The shift is evident in their schedules.

The first person Mr. Bush saw in the Oval Office each morning was his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, for a discussion, among other things, about what had happened overnight in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the top-secret intelligence briefing, the “president’s daily brief,” had a sacrosanct place in the presidential schedule: 8 a.m.

By contrast, Mr. Obama has added a briefing on the economy, and the timing of his Oval Office intelligence sessions varies each morning. Occasionally, the economics briefing comes first; one day early in his presidency, he visited his daughters’ school and held a bill-signing event first. He has also discontinued Mr. Bush’s practice of weekly videoconferences with ground commanders in Iraq — a sign that conditions have improved, but also a stylistic change.

And while Mr. Bush had routine secure video exchanges with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has less personal contact with those heads of state, his aides say.

“The president believes that we’ve got multiple means of communication,” said his senior adviser, David Axelrod.

Mr. Obama’s style of decision-making is also different. He “is somewhat more analytical, and he makes sure he hears from everybody in the room on an issue,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has worked for both presidents, said this month on “Meet the Press” on NBC.

Mr. Gates added that Mr. Bush “was interested in hearing different points of view but didn’t go out of his way to make sure everybody spoke.”

Mr. Bush often said he relied on his military commanders to determine troop levels; his last step before making such decisions was typically to meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a process set up by Mr. Gates. But Mr. Obama has made clear he wants to hear from his entire national security team, including his secretary of state, before making major military decisions.

Thus, Mr. Obama’s first visit to “the tank,” the secure Pentagon conference room, did not focus exclusively on Iraq and Afghanistan. “This was less a meeting about the wars than it was an opportunity for the new commander in chief to get to know his top generals,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, who was there. “It was a very energetic, sophisticated conversation about global threats.”

The weight of military leadership has hardly disappeared. In an interview broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes” on CBS, Mr. Obama said that sending the additional troops to Afghanistan had been the hardest decision of his young presidency. And he has followed some patterns set by Mr. Bush.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama sends letters to the families of those killed in combat; he signs them, simply, “Barack.”

Mr. Axelrod said the deaths took a toll on the ordinarily even-keeled president. “He doesn’t get too high or too low,” Mr. Axelrod said, “but to the extent that he does become reflective, it is after the notification of a soldier’s loss.”

And like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama tries to meet privately with wounded soldiers, as he did at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. In his speech there last month, he also took pains to praise the success of the military in a war he opposed, saying, “We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime, and you got the job done.”

Now Afghanistan is high on Mr. Obama’s agenda, and his new strategy for the war could define his presidency the way Iraq defined Mr. Bush’s.

Top Obama aides said last week that they were still deciding how he would make the announcement — whether in a speech, a White House ceremony or some other setting. If the past two months are any guide, the president, who never served in the military and campaigned as an antiwar candidate, will use the occasion to try to reach out to troops, all while forging a different path from his predecessor.

“After the attacks on 9/11, George Bush talked about the global war on terror as a kind of central theme of his thinking,” said Lee H. Hamilton, a Democratic former congressman who was co-chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and occasionally advises Mr. Obama. “And he viewed all of his actions, including the accumulation of executive power, even the phrase ‘enemy combatants,’ as flowing from the commander in chief’s powers.

“With President Obama, conceptually it is very different.”

Mr. Obama’s critics accuse him of trying to minimize the role of commander in chief. Several former Bush advisers said they were shocked that he had sent troops to Afghanistan without a formal public explanation.

“The contrast to Bush could hardly be more striking,” said Thomas Donnelly, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, calling it “L.B.J. and Vietnam-type behavior.”

Mr. Obama is too young to have faced the draft and is unencumbered by the ghosts of the Vietnam War — an accident of birth that his advisers believe gives him a certain freedom in cultivating relationships with the military, a core constituency for Mr. Bush. “He’s been able to shift the paradigm a little bit,” said Mark Lippert, a top foreign policy adviser.

Mr. Obama’s words of praise for the troops at Camp Lejeune were part of that presidential courtship. Soldiers who knew how critical he had been of the Iraq war were surprised.

“Marines are a tough crowd, and he is our new commander in chief,” said Sgt. Maj. Joel Collins, who served in Iraq and is now stationed at Camp Lejeune with a battalion that cares for wounded soldiers. “That went a long way toward telling us that the president does have our back.”

Aides said the language was included at Mr. Obama’s direction. “He wanted to acknowledge that, from a military standpoint, the troops in Iraq have succeeded in their mission,” said Ben Rhodes, his foreign policy speechwriter. “He wanted to be very clear about that, from his standpoint as commander in chief.”

The Caucus For Populism, a Return to Economic Roots

In selecting villains, politicians reflect the anxieties of their era. Today’s populist uproar reaches far beyond the American International Group — and may mark a turning point.

As baby boomers came of age, targets for populist scorn typically tracked fears of social breakdown. At various points, they included the 1960s counterculture, welfare cheats, violent criminals, illegal immigrants and gay men and lesbians.

Now A.I.G. executives and their bonuses have set off revulsion among lawmakers, and the House last week voted overwhelmingly for tax rates at a level — 90 percent — unseen in decades. Amid recession and the troubles on Wall Street, economic populism has displaced social populism as the emotional flash point in American politics.

And as baby boomers approach retirement with depleted savings, it may last a while.

“I’ve not seen anything like this,” said a Republican consultant, Ed Rollins, who was a strategist for presidential bids by Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot and Mike Huckabee. “They think it’s all occurring because of greedy bastards on Wall Street and inept government officials.”

“If I wanted to run a populist presidential campaign,” Mr. Rollins added, “I’d have a lot more tools than I had with Ross Perot.”

Anger over economic change spawned the Populist Party after the Gilded Age in the late 19th century. Championing rural America, the party accused East Coast elites of dividing the country into “tramps and millionaires.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt attacked “economic royalists” during the Great Depression. “They are unanimous in their hate for me,” Roosevelt said, “and I welcome their hatred.”

Focus on Social Issues

That conflict, however, lost its spark with the economic boom after World War II and the advent of the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution and the Vietnam War. “In the 1960s, the center of gravity of populism shifted to social issues,” said Jeffrey Bell, a Republican who is the author of “Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality.”

George Wallace attacked “pointy-headed intellectuals who couldn’t park their bicycle straight.” Richard M. Nixon contrasted the “silent majority” of Middle America with unruly protesters, whom his vice president Spiro T. Agnew condemned as “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”

Crusading against government excess, Reagan, as a candidate, lampooned a “Chicago welfare queen” who received benefits under multiple identities. George Bush used the rapist Willie Horton to cast Democrats as soft on crime.

In the early 1990s, as worldwide economic integration showcased gaps between rich and poor, economic populism gained force from the voices of Mr. Perot and Bill Clinton. But the free trade policies that Mr. Clinton followed as president frustrated those seeking to place corporate elites in the cross hairs.

In 2000, Al Gore’s charge that “powerful interests” blunted working-class aspirations could not win him the White House. George W. Bush prevailed in two elections while courting “values voters,” and in 2004 backed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

“The distribution of income and opportunity is likely to dominate the next stage of American politics,” Jeff Faux predicted in “The Global Class War” in 2006. But opposition to the Iraq war proved more powerful that November, even as Democrats regained control of Congress.

Anger’s Course

As the 2008 campaign began, Iraq and illegal immigration loomed as the most volatile issues. Then last fall, the financial crisis shoved other concerns aside and began to vindicate Mr. Faux’s prediction.

How long economic anger will persist remains unclear. “So far we don’t have the big political movement that helped stir up class issues in the 1930s,” said Alan Brinkley, a historian at Columbia, referring to the populist firebrands Huey P. Long and Father Charles Coughlin who put pressure on Roosevelt.

Public ire could help President Obama reverse Republican policies on taxes, domestic spending and regulation — shifts that he argues will curb the inequalities behind the current sense of outrage.

But it also could threaten Mr. Obama’s plan to stabilize the financial system. His temperament and public demeanor run toward cooling that anger rather than stoking it.

Once the Wall Street crisis eases and economic growth resumes, Mr. Bell predicts, social populism will regain pre-eminence. Others, though, see a continuing search for scapegoats as Washington uses more taxpayer money to cover bad bets by financial executives.

“You’re just seeing the beginning of this with A.I.G.,” said Robert Borosage, an adviser to the Rev. Jesse Jackson when he ran for president. “The people making off with all the rewards led the whole economy off a cliff.

“Working Americans are now asked to bail them out. This anger is going to get much worse.”

Baby boomers nearing retirement have long fretted that government cannot afford their promised Social Security and Medicare benefits. Now fallen housing and stock values have shrunk their savings. Their effort to pin blame could color the political agenda for years.

“You’re going to see a lot of elderly people coming up short,” said Mr. Rollins, the Republican strategist. “It’s not a normal cycle like we’ve been in. That’s the scary part.”

Obama to Deliver Three Commencement Addresses

By Liz Robbins

President Obama is going back to school in his first year in office. He will be delivering commencement speeches at three universities this May, touching three distinct parts of the country and three different types of educational institutions.

The White House said on Friday that Mr. Obama will speak first at Arizona State University, in Tempe, a public school, on May 13. His next stop, on May 17, will be at a private university, Notre Dame, in South Bend, Ind. Former President George W. Bush delivered his first commencement speech as the nation’s chief executive there in 2001.

President Obama will conclude his tour at a service academy — the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis — on May 22.

No Slam Dunk for Obama (the A.C.C., That Is)

No Slam Dunk for Obama (the A.C.C., That Is)

By Helene Cooper

WASHINGTON — President Obama may have picked the North Carolina Tar Heels to win the NCAA basketball tournament, but he was sounding a little fed up with the Atlantic Coast Conference Saturday morning, after two high-seeded A.C.C. teams — Florida State and Wake Forest — were eliminated in the first round on Friday.

“Is the A.C.C. overrated?” a reporter, Hans Nichols of Bloomberg News, shouted at Mr. Obama as the president and the First Lady walked to the Marine One helicopter on Saturday morning to fly to Camp David.

Mr. Obama grinned, then replied: “Apparently so.”

Well, the Tar Heels are still in the game, so there’s hope for Mr. Obama’s pool picks.