08.08.11

It didn’t have to be like this

Posted in Around The Nation, Commentary, Election 2012, Had Enough Yet?, jobs, The Economy, Unemployment at 12:09 pm by wcnews

It didn’t have to be like this. Suffice it to say, that thus far, Obama has been a disappointment as President. Not a failure, but there are many things he should have done, and hasn’t, that have caused disappointment. Mainly his capitulation to corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Looking back Obama was a of a blank slate, politically speaking, and that allowed people to project on him their own expectations that had little, if any, basis in fact.

An example is when he said this, “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system”. It sounds good, but he knew he wouldn’t be designing a system from scratch. It was enough, however, to allow people to believe, falsely, that he would fight for a single payer health care system.

I had “hoped” he would govern more like FDR than like Bill Clinton, but wasn’t banking on it. But I certainly didn’t expect him to govern to the right of Richard Nixon. But his biggest failing is what Drew Westen highlighted in an Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday, What happened to Obama?, his inability to tell the story of what happened to the American economy.

When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.

In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes, was a story something like this:

“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again.” A story isn’t a policy. But that simple narrative — and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it — would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.

And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.

But there was no story — and there has been none since.

This is similar to what Rick Perlstein called his Rules of Liberal Political Success. Which shows that Obama can’t be hero without having a villain to defend the people from. Westen then goes on to show how Obama’s middle milquetoast pollitics is playing out.

So where does that leave us?

Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production — two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day. He gives a major speech on immigration reform after deporting a million immigrants in two years, breaking up families at a pace George W. Bush could never rival in all his years as president.

THE real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit. That a large section of the country views him as a socialist while many in his own party are concluding that he does not share their values speaks volumes — but not the volumes his advisers are selling: that if you make both the right and left mad, you must be doing something right. [Emphasis added]

Obama i’s trying to be all things to all people, and in the process winds up looking inept and unprincipled. Westen ends with this.

A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation. [Emphasis added]

But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks.

It became clear early on with his appointments - Rahm Emanuel, Tim Giethner, Tom Daschele, etc.. - that he was going down the corporatist/centrist Democratic path. It’s clear now that he sees his path to reelection as keeping as much of the corporate cash on his side, by trying to turn Wall Street against the Republican/tea party. Which means the American people and their economic plight will not get the attention it deserves unless the economy gets much worse.

But it didn’t have to be like this. He could have told the story of the last 30 plus years, and shown whose fault this mess was. The economic destruction of the middle class that was started under Ronald Reagan, which culminated under George W. Bush. But he decided to work within that system instead of trying to change it and bring the American people to his side by putting them back to work, and changing their lives for the better.

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