The malaise of the present time has given rise to various polemics of the left and right. The latter are mostly lunatic, but I follow the former. Green is pretty consistent; emotional but well-argued. I'm trying not to acquiesce to everything he says. I think Obama is in real political trouble, and unlike Green, I was pretty pessimistic from the start on his chances to bring real reforms. But I never dreamed he would be selling out quite to this degree--doesn't fit his personality, somehow.
So, let me see if I have this straight.
One year ago, the Democrats won commanding victories resulting in
control of the presidency and lopsided majorities in the House and
Senate.
One year ago, the Republican brand was so weak that the party was on
death watch, literally capable of sliding into the history books
alongside the Whigs and the Federalists.
One year ago the country was enthralled with the notion of a new
president who seemed committed to solving a host of problems and, above
all, offering change from a hated predecessor and his disastrously
failed politics.
But now, today, that promised change seems a lot more like chump change instead.
Now, today, the Big Hope president has virtually nothing of import to show for nearly a year in office.
Now, today, that president continues to follow the policies of his
horrid predecessor on everything from civil liberties to civil rights
to economics and foreign policy.
And now, today, he and his comrades in Congress have squandered
whatever goodwill they once had and face an angry public turning back
to the right, desperately seeking solutions to their problems.
Better still, this is likely only the beginning. Does anyone think the
job situation is going to get better in the next year? How about
Afghanistan? Does anyone believe that the public will be enthusiastic
about Obama’s healthcare plans, assuming anyone can locate them, and
assuming that a bill can actually get through Congress? Who out there
thinks that his position on global warming will please anyone in
America, even as it does next to nothing serious about addressing the
problem, and even as it remains – like his healthcare ideas – playing
hide-and-seek with the American public?
I am not surprised that Barack Obama – like the last two Democratic
presidents – has turned out to be a conservative, corporate creature
whose interest in the public interest is scarce and superficial. What
does surprise me, though, is just how bad he is at playing politics,
especially where his own self-interest is overwhelmingly at stake. Can
this really be the same person who ran such a remarkable campaign last
year, stealing the presidency from two of the great figureheads of
American politics?
Obama is one of the most articulate politicians in American history.
And yet, his communications strategy is the absolute worst I’ve seen
since Carter. In fact, what’s most stunning about it is that his team
seems to have dismissed all the lessons learned over the last three
decades – especially from masterful Republican administrations – about
how to market presidents and policies from the White House. This is no
longer rocket science, if it ever was. How can a guy this sharp be so
clueless and, thus, adrift?
Obama is also one of the smartest people ever to sit in the Oval
Office, but he has demonstrated astonishing levels of cluelessness
about what the public wants, about the nature of his opposition, and
about what makes a presidency successful. He doesn’t understand that
the public will follow you if you lead them, especially if you do so
with passion. He doesn’t get that the conservative movement is a lethal
cancer seeking to commodify, monetize and profitize every aspect of
America, and therefore is committed to the destruction of all else,
including this administration, despite even that it is essentially
staffed by Goldman Sachs. He doesn’t understand that the most
successful American presidents were the ones who brought a vision to
the table, and fought for it.
Fundamentally, Obama is an anachronism. He is essentially a nineteenth
century president operating in a crisis era, as the early twenty-first
grapples with cleaning up after the late twentieth.
Historians sometimes debate over whether history makes the man or the
man makes history. Leaving aside the sexist construction of the
question, I think, manifestly, it has to be both. Almost all the great
presidents served during time of great crisis, usually war. But that
doesn’t guarantee their place in the historical pantheon. You have to
also meet those challenges of your time. Lincoln is widely considered
America’s greatest president. His predecessor, James Buchanan, is
generally thought to be the country’s worst. Both faced the same crisis
of Southern secession, but they responded to it very differently,
earning their respective places in history. On the other hand, had the
civil war come twenty years earlier or later, we’d hardly even know
their names, except as the answer to trivia questions. “Who was the
first president from Illinois?!” “Who was our tallest president?” And
so on.
Obama could be Lincoln – or better still, FDR – if he wanted to be. He
has chosen instead to be Buchanan. Faced with crisis scenario after
crisis scenario, the candidate of ‘change’ repeatedly and instinctively
homes in on the weakest, most centrist, most useless response possible.
His stimulus bill probably stopped the economy from continuing its free
fall, but it leaves the country stuck in months or even years of
unyielding recession at worst, and jobless recovery at best. His
healthcare bill helps in some important ways, but does nothing to hold
down costs in a society that utterly wastes one dollar out of every
three it spends in this area, and it does nothing to make healthcare
more affordable for most Americans. He seems to have some interest in a
global warming bill and a banking regulation bill and maybe even doing
something about civil rights for gays. But in none of these areas is
there any sense that he will do what is morally necessary. Likewise,
with Afghanistan, all the indicators seem to suggest that he will opt
for some numbingly anodyne middle ground.
The guy is a leaky bucket at a time when the boat has been swamped.
He’s an pressureless fire hose when the house is in flames. A tattered
parachute when the ground is coming up fast. A rusty musket as the Huns
come over the ridge. At a time when America needs a bold, powerful and
wise leader in the White House – principally to undo the damage of the
bold, powerful and sociopathic guy who was just in there – we have
instead Mr. Rogers’ pet gerbil. Complete with cardigan sweater and
barbiturate-laced water supply. Obama seems to want nothing more than
to be liked. In the neighborhood called Earth.
The great irony, of course, is that he is accomplishing just the
opposite. Gallup recorded his job approval ratings right after his
inauguration at 69 percent. Today they are down to 50. That’s not 35
percent, like his predecessor, to be sure. But since when did being
better than George W. Bush become the standard? A backed-up toilet was
more popular than Bush a year ago today. Hell, even gonorrhea was more
beloved. But the point is that dropping fifteen to twenty percent in
job approval in what is likely to be the best year of his presidency,
at a time when the public is likely to be most generous, is a
spectacular failure of the first order. Even according to Obama’s own
pathetic standards. If all he wants is to be liked, he’s still blowing
it. This is the equivalent of having every fourth friend or family
member drop you on Facebook. Not a good sign, especially if you live
for popularity.
It didn’t have to be this way. He could have been both a great
president, a popular president, and a heroic president. All he had to
do was be willing to treat the people who already hate his guts as
political enemies. All he had to do was be willing to treat the people
who live to fleece the country as treasonous thieves. All he had to do
was to speak clearly, act boldly, and lead a broken country down the
bright shining path toward repair that is obvious to anyone who is
willing to look. But since that group excludes most Americans right
now, this notion of bold leadership is especially essential.
In fairness to Obama, the public doesn’t really know what it wants
these days, and best of luck to the two new Republican governors trying
to cut taxes without deficit spending. If they can do it, they will
only do it by slashing government services. Idiotic voters love tax
cuts in the abstract. They will most likely feel a bit less enamored of
closed schools, pothole proliferation, massive prisoner releases and
state parks that cost as much to get in to as professional sports
stadiums now do. For the last several decades, these selfish citizens
have been all to willing to be trained by one of the sickest regressive
mantras of them all – that government is just some bloated pig wasting
tax dollars, and therefore that they could have their tax cuts without
any cost to service, or without deficit spending. Apart from occasional
lip service to Jesus, there is nothing closer to the core of the
regressive/Republican canon than this tax-cutting chant.
It’s a complete lie, of course, and it took about five minutes into the
Reagan administration to show that. Reagan slashed taxes so much that
he tripled the national debt in eight years time. That problem wasn’t
helped by the fact that Republicans actually blow through cash faster
when they control the government than do supposed “tax-and-spend
Democrats”.
But now the day of reckoning has arrived, especially for the states,
which generally do not have the federal government’s capacity to tell
gigantic lies through borrowing. People in New Jersey and Virginia have
been stupid, and all they had to do to see how stupid they were being
is to look at what that “economic girly-man” Arnold Schwarzenegger has
been doing to Caleefornya. The state government is essentially
conducting a going-out-of-business fire sale, and its creditworthiness
is now about as good as Bernie Madoff’s. Government services are being
tossed overboard as if they were lead cannonballs in a leaky rowboat.
This is the denouement of regressive fiscal policy these last decades.
Lotteries won’t save our state and local and federal governments
anymore. Selling off land and highways and other assets no longer
works, ‘cause they done all been sold. Privatization of every service
from prisons to the military not only doesn’t save money, it only gives
you less quality at greater cost. And whodathunk that? Who could
imagine that converting a not-for-profit government program into a
profit-making private one would cost more? Profits don’t cost anything,
do they? And you know how much more efficient(!) business is than the
government, right? Like health insurance, for example, where overhead
is a mere thirty-five percent, compared to the outrageous two percent
of Medicare.
So, yeah, in fairness to Obama, the public doesn’t know what it wants,
except that it wants it all. Since that can no longer be provided, it
will happily pull the lever for any politician offering the sweet song
of “change” from the status quo, the more vague the promise and the
more aggrandizing to the voter, the better.
But that doesn’t mean Obama isn’t both a fool and a disaster to his
country for his relentless pursuit of mediocrity in governance and
tepidness in policy. He’s a fool because he doesn’t realize that he and
his party have become the anti-change incumbent targets of the very
same tool they rode to power. In 2010 and then again in 2012, they will
be smashed by angry voters demanding that something be done, just as
they were in elections held this week.
And he’s both a fool and an American disaster because he could have
written a much different story for the history books. Americans want
their leaders to lead, oddly enough. Voters are incredibly lazy about
understanding politics, in between their bouts of rage at the lousy
politicians selected by those darned... lazy voters. That laziness
means that they will follow you if you lead. They’ll even follow you,
for a while anyhow, if you’re ideas are insane. George W. Bush is the
paradigmatic case. Americans didn’t want the war in Iraq. They didn’t
really even want the massive tax cuts. But he hammered those policies
home, using every technique of the bully pulpit to masterful effect,
and he got what he wanted, even when he lacked a majority in Congress.
He might have gotten his Social Security theft bill through Congress as
well, had he not already established himself to the electorate as a
liar and a disaster-inducing idiot. (Bush should get on his knees and
thank Darwin that he failed on that front. Seniors would likely be
lynching him now if his bill had passed.)
Obama could have been a bold, decisive and game-changing leader, but he
has chosen instead to be Bill Clinton in the time of Franklin
Roosevelt. He wants to do something about the Great Depression. But not
too much! He want to respond to Pearl Harbor and the Nazi threat to
plunge the world into a thousand years of darkness. But only if no one
would get hurt! He want to make sure Americans aren’t ill-fed, ill-clad
and ill-housed. But only if the Republicans literally seeking to
destroy his presidency will go along for the ride!
Brilliant. He doesn’t get that people want leadership from the
president, that they absolutely demand that in a time of crisis, and
that they will drop you like so much depleted uranium if you don’t
bring it during a time of big, multiple crises. Like now. This guy is
fast wearing out his welcome.
The mood of the public today is anti-incumbent, and the president and
his party are the incumbents du jour to be anti against. They have
exacerbated their problem by failing to take the steps sufficient to
really solve problems, and by focusing on problems other than the one
absolutely at the top of the public’s list right now – jobs and more
jobs.
Most of all, though, this president has almost completely lost control
of the communications high ground. For a president in the American
system of distributed power – especially one who, unlike George W.
Bush, is unwilling the toss the Constitution and its separation of
powers into the garbage can – communications mastery is everything. You
can only win by skilled use of the bully pulpit. Obama, on the other
hand, has allowed himself to be defined by others, not least of which
including a now revived and revanchist Republican Party, blood dripping
from its fangs, a very hungry look gleaming in its eye.
So, for example, most Americans now think Obama is a liberal, despite
the fact that he is actually quite conservative (except if you count as
liberal spending a ton of money to clean up the regressive right’s
multifarious messes).
And most Americans do not consider themselves liberal.
Neither of these outcomes was necessary. A skilled and gutsy and bold
President Obama would have staked out an agenda clearly in the public
interest, identified just as clearly the opponents to that agenda and
their motives, hammered home his relentless sales pitch to the public,
twisted arms right out of their sockets in Congress, and forged a new
progressive majority in America over sensible policies, leaving the
minority of old white male crackers out there foaming at the mouth,
forming the core of the Republican Party. Tony Blair was the model
here. He aggressively painted – quite accurately – the British
Conservative Party of Thatcher and Major as the source of the country’s
woes, and he never stopped reminding people of their disastrous reign.
Meanwhile, Blair did nothing much in office, signed up for the Iraq war
– totally in opposition of public sentiment, lying all the way – and
helped to bring on a vicious recession. And he still bought the Labour
Party more than a dozen years in office, just by reminding the public
of how bad the Tories had been.
Obama is, instead, taking himself down and – in as cruel a twist as
history can muster – the progressive values he long ago walked away
from, along with him.
Where we go from here could be very, very ugly. The GOP right now is in
the process of alienating and crushing every last scrap of moderately
sensible politics from within its ranks. That means that American
voters will very likely have the following choice in 2010 and 2012: On
the one hand, a discredited do-nothing Democratic Party that promised
change and didn’t deliver; and on the other, a rabid, ultra-regressive
GOP that is itself promising change from the failed former would-be
change-providers.
Before you guess who would win that contest, bear in mind that this is
likely to be happening under still dire economic conditions and a
shrinking national standard of living.
You may be forgiven for thinking that that scenario is all too
reminiscent of a certain European country in the 1930s.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions
to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net ), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net
