[Peace-discuss] Obama will not be our commander-in-chief

[C. G. Estabrook]

 From <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/11/02/biden/>--


Joe Biden, speaking yesterday at a rally in Ohio...

     "Over the past week, Republicans have gone way over the top in my view, 
calling Barack Obama every name in the book, and it probably will get worse in 
the next three and a half to four days ... After next Tuesday, the very critics 
he has now and the rest of America will be calling him something else - they 
will be calling him the 44th president of the United States of America, our 
commander in chief Barack Obama!"

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago ...:  if I could be granted one small political 
wish, it would be the permanent elimination of this widespread, execrable 
Orwellian fetish of reverently referring to the President as "our commander in 
chief."

And Biden's formulation here is a particularly creepy rendition, since he's 
taunting opponents of  Obama that, come Tuesday, they will be forced to refer to 
him as "our commander in chief Barack Obama" (Sarah Palin, in the very first 
speech she delivered after being unveiled as the Vice Presidential candidate, 
said of John McCain:  "that's the kind of man I want as our commander in chief," 
and she's been delivering that same line in her stump speech ever since).

This is much more than a semantic irritant.  It's a perversion of the 
Constitution, under which American civilians simply do not have a "commander in 
chief"; only those in the military -- when it's called into service -- have one 
(Art. II, Sec. 2).

Worse, "commander in chief" is a military term, which reflects the core military 
dynamic:  superiors issue orders which subordinates obey.  That isn't supposed 
to be the relationship between the U.S. President and civilian American 
citizens, but because the mindless phrase "our commander in chief" has become 
interchangeable with "the President," that is exactly the attribute -- supreme, 
unquestionable authority in all arenas -- which has increasingly come to define 
the power of the President.  Recall the explanation by GOP Sen. Kit Bond in June 
when explaining why telecoms should be immunized for lawbreaking after being 
"directed" by George Bush to allow illegal government spying on their customers:

    "I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the 
government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think 
you all recognize that is something you need to do."

And, in a December 2005 speech, Joe Lieberman infamously invoked the same 
twisted mentality to attack those Democrats who were committing the crime of 
criticizing George W. Bush "in a time of war":

    "It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he 
will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of 
war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril."

It's this distinctly authoritarian mindset that also explains the 
still-astonishing confession by The New York Times' White House reporter 
Elizabeth Bumiller that reporters such as herself were "very deferential" to the 
Bush administration in press conferences in the run-up to the war because "It's 
frightening to stand up there ... You are standing up on prime time live 
television, asking the president of the United States a question when the 
country is about to go to war."  White House reporters weren't questioning a 
political official who is to be held accountable.  They were gently -- 
"deferentially" -- posing questions to The Commander-in-Chief.

This is also a crucial aspect of the still broader trend of vesting more and 
more unchecked, centralized power in the White House.  The more the President is 
glorified and elevated (he's not merely a public servant or a political 
official, but "our Commander in Chief"), the more natural it is to believe that 
he should have the power to do what he wants without anyone interfering or 
questioning.

Whether deliberate or not, the chronic assignment to the President of this title 
is a method for training the citizenry to conceive of our political leaders, 
especially the President, as someone whose authority is naturally and desirably 
expansive and absolute.  He's supreme.  It converts civilians into soldiers and 
Presidents into supreme rulers.  It's no surprise that this is the shape our 
government has now taken; this phraseology both reflects and helps to enable the 
transformation of the President into an unaccountable, virtually omnipotent figure.

Worse still, to equate "the President" with "our commander in chief" is to 
depict the U.S. as a state of endless war and pervasive militarism.  Even in the 
limited sense that the Constitution uses the term ("Commander in Chief of the 
Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States"), 
the President doesn't always wield that power, but only when those branches are 
"called into the actual Service of the United States."

It was never envisioned by the Founders that we would have a permanently 
deployed military, which is why they imposed on Congress' power "To raise and 
support Armies" the prohibition that "no Appropriation of Money to that Use 
shall be for a longer Term than two Years" (Art. I, Sec. 8).  Equating "the 
President" with "our commander in chief" rests on the opposite assumption: that 
this power is not just central to the presidency, but intrinsic to it, because 
we're always a nation at war.

Garry Wills, in a superb New York Times Op-Ed last year, described the history 
of how the term "commander in chief" has recently been expanded and abused, and 
wrote:

"The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous 
and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways 
that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those 
aggrandizements."

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-- Glenn Greenwald