Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Obama After Massachusetts
I have other stuff on my mind, which I will get to, but for now just my latest op-ed, written after watching the President's State of the Union last Thursday morning. What does it say? Massachusetts is a set-back. Politics isn't fair: you work hard to avoid a new Great Depression, and succeed, but because job growth lags, the focus is on unemployment and debt, and you increasingly get blamed. There was the campaign from the right. But there was also the leeway for the Democrats in Congress, probably too much. And there was the expansion of the role of government, necessary perhaps, but never popular, least in time of huge deficits. The State of the Union speech? Primarily a sincere call for everyone in Washington to start acting like responsible adults. Health care reform? If the Democrats don't pass it now, their troubles will only deepen, as will popular distrust of the integrity and effectiveness of the national political process. Too easy on the president? Could be, but who/what else: Boehner? Pelosi? Palin? Gimme a break. In het Eindhoven's Dagblad, yesterday (in Dutch).
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6 comments:
I'm struck by the difference between Obama's campaign and his style of governing. He campaigned as a charismatic, visionary, inspirational leader -- he promised a "transformational" presidency. Yet he has governed as a pedantic, lifeless technocrat, wedded to plodding half measures in style, tactics, and substance.
1) Style: Obama and his staff take great interest in the arcana of backroom deals with Congress or corporate America, but they show little enthusiasm for translating policy into a vernacular that will resonate beyond the insular elites of Washington.
2) Tactics: faced with a GOP dominated by Palin-Limbaugh extremists, Obama insists on outreach even when there is no one who wants to reach back. I think he hoped this approach would appeal to the anti-Washington masses. It hasn't. It makes him look weak. Which, in fact, he is. He should be demonizing the Republicans, not negotiating with them. Just as Reagan took advantage of popular discontent in 1980-81 to demonize liberals and build support for a long-term conservative transformation of American politics.
3)Substance: Obama and his team tempermantally tilt toward watered down centrism, meant to appease key sectors of corporate America. Slap the banks on the hand, but don't punish them or require fundamental changes; tinker around the edges with health care but don't create the government-supervised system that all industrialized countries have adopted.
Granted, pretty much the entire U.S. policy-making elite is tilted to this sort of tired, Clintonian, center-right policy agenda. Or to alternatives even further right. Obama missed a golden opportunity, in the crisis atmosphere of late 2008 to early 2009, to push that worn out framework in a different (i.e. center-left) direction.
Now he's in retreat because an incompetent dullard of a candidate lost in Massachusetts. If we ever see a President Palin speaking to a Congress run by Fox News drones, we'll have Obama and co-President Emanuel to thank for it.
Final point, at the risk of being unfair: a phrase like "job growth lags" is the sort of bloodless euphamism that the Peter Orszags of the world use without thinking. What it conceals are the realities of people like my under-employed cancer-survivor father. He is not a "lag," he is a human being. One who has more problems than President Obama or his crowd of well-dressed technocrats will ever have to face in their ever-so fortunate lives. Obama has given him little reason to believe that anybody in Washington gives a crap about people like him.
I would never belittle the difficulties many people are going through in this crisis (nor did I in this post, I think), and maybe I'm sounding like a broken record, but on the whole your comment strikes me as unfair toward Obama. True, his rhetoric often soared during the campaign, promising significant change in the nation's government. This was at the end of the Bush Jr. era, and I'd argue that personally, he's more than done his part. But in spite of the (over)selling of "transitional" leadership, it was also clear during the campaign that this was an utterly serious and pragmatic man who meant what he said when he talked about overcoming the divisive, partisan culture in Washington. This may have been wishful thinking, I think it also represented who Obama really is--and remains. But even if he had had no illusions about being able to work with Republicans, there are still plenty of divisions in his own party to mandate a cautious course. To get things done, after all, you need the votes. You criticize him for being too centrist, but there are many (not flaming right-wing radicals) who believe he went too far to the left. But maybe more important for not coming down very hard on him now is the deteriorating situation that confronted him when he came into office. Doesn't he deserve a little credit for helping stabilize things to some extent, avoiding a much deeper crisis? Could he have pushed harder for more rigorous reform? Under the circumstances, I doubt it. I'm intrigued, though, by David Brooks' suggestion last week, that he should become a Ross Perot from the inside: a challenger to the status-quo, taking on both parties in the interest of better government (and smaller deficits). Because if Obama doesn't do it from within the system, some egomaniac billionaire will probably try to do it from the outside. Did you see that column?
Only now do I see who "anonymous" is. So good to see your comments! You made me sweat late in the evening, and I'm not sure if I've done all of your points justice. But now it's approaching my bedtime, so I'll sign off. But I'm very happy to be back in touch. In the meantime, I'll work hard to gather some of the proverbial "dust under my fingernails" so as to be prepared for further "mugging with history [and current affairs]".
Hey there,
Good to be in touch, indeed. Was good to find your blog, hope you are doing well. Please forgive my rantings. I know they can be more than a bit on the intemperate side.
I'll try to write more later on your specific points, in a more policy wonky way than what I'm about to write here.
For now, by way of explaining my unforgiving tone toward Obama, suffice it to say my political opinions are highly determined by personal circumstance. My family situation is perpetually uncertain, perpetually threatening to become desperate, thanks to the economy and health care. I work with physicians (at a university teaching hospital) who are my friends and have to function in a dysfunctional, inhuman health care system that seems deliberately geared to destroy human beings. Forgive my transgression against neutral-sounding policy-wonk phraseology, but it's true. One of our docs introduced me recently to a man who's going to die soon because he lost his health insurance.
Thinking about him, it's hard for me to have any sympathy at all for Barack Obama. Or much tolerance for a social and political system that allows such things to happen, in such an egregious and preventable way, in a world where at least some human societies have found much more humane ways of organizing themselves.
I remember enough of my academic training to understand why the American system functions as it does. And know the difficulties a political leader operating in America's governing elite must face. And appreciate the limits imposed by the realities of the human condition.
I don't really see how that appreciation helps my family, though. Or that poor dying man I met in the hospital. I don't think they'd appreciate being lectured by Barack Obama on the virtues of pragmatism.
And I understand why some unspecified group of very comfortable, affluent pundits thinks that a stimulus bill extending my dad's unemployment benefits was "too left" on the part of Mr. Obama. My dad being able to eat upsets their delicate centrist sensibilities, I suppose. Forgive my dad if he doesn't give a fuck.
In a graduate school seminar, that kind of statement would be regarded as unbecoming. A cheap, unnecessarily emotional personalization of reasoned political discourse. I'm sorry. Since leaving academia, it's become very hard for me to write or think about politics in any other way. Although I can still do it, when I have to.
Have to go for now. Take care.
It occurs to me that it's only fair for you be able to leave scathing critiques at my blog, if you so choose:
http://martianutopiacafe.blogspot.com/
Happy mugging,
-The commenter formerly known as "Anonymous"
It's all James Madison's fault,IMHO!
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