Over at Opino Juris, Deborah Perlstein looks at the optics of the Obama Administration’s decision to move forward on military commissions:

I was struck over the past few days by President Obama’s commencement addresses at Arizona State University and Notre Dame (and indulge me a moment’s digression). Both speeches had been preceded by mini-political dramas – one about whether Obama’s accomplishments to date were sufficient to justify the awarding of an honorary degree, the other about whether a Catholic university should feature a commencement speaker who was avowedly committed to protecting the lawfulness of abortion. While it would’ve been trivially easy to craft appropriately soaring speeches on such occasions that avoided any whiff of politics, Obama took both controversies head on. Indeed, in response to a heckler at his Notre Dame speech, the New York Times quotes Obama as saying: “We’re not going to shy away from things that are uncomfortable sometimes.” Even just on rhetorical grounds, I tend to think this kind of directness is one of Obama’s greatest strengths, and one of the things he does best.

The contrast between these speeches and the Administration’s public handling of detainee issues to date was pretty stark. The Administration has just made a tough decision, one that is predictably and reasonably unpopular with a lot of smart people who care about legal rights. Yet the official news came late on a Friday afternoon. It had a short statement attached. There was a quiet (reportedly unpersuasive) phone conference with human rights groups. And there’s a long, inevitable, and chronically newsworthy battle ahead (especially if reports are correct the trials will be held, as should be the case, onshore). If the goal is (as it should be) to mitigate the legitimacy problem, I’m just not sure how the bury-it-Friday approach works. It hasn’t had a very good track record as policy options in this realm go. It hasn’t worked on torture, a story that continues to metastasize day by day. And I worry whether it will work here. So what’s the downside to a different approach? One that states the commission decision boldly, embraces it, owns it, and most of all, explains it. To what extent did existing facts drive the decision? Who will gain and who will lose? What are the tough calls yet to come? What can we hope the commissions will achieve? And most of all, why are these commissions worthy of our legal faith?

Good questions.  Treating this as a “Friday Night Surprise”  — a tactic designed to bury unpleasant news in the Saturday morning news cycle (traditionally the least-read/watched news cycle of the week) — is not exactly encouraging.  It’s as if they know it’s a bad idea and they want to hide the fact.

Unfortunately for the administration, that approach doesn’t work very well anymore, thanks to the wonders of the twenty-four-hour news cycle.  This will continue to be a major story, as will torture.  And the Administration’s decision to avoid the big questions (instead of taking them on, as Obama did on abortion this weekend) only makes them look like they’re avoiding the big questions.

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