The New Republic

I wholeheartedly agree that support of the left for Obama's principled stand on the proposed Islamic Center would be, as Shakespeare might put it: "a consummation devoutly to be wished", but I'm not holding my breath.

- JackR

August 14, 2010 at 9:40am

tnr is exhibiting what has become recently its intellectual and editorial dishonesty by removing all references to Judis' 8/12 post entitled "The Unnecessary Fall". Tanden continues the Carteresque meme of blame Obama's Progressive base for his failures and problems. [Blue Dog now describes Dems outside the House.] Judis' thesis is encapsulated and extended as follows: Obama’s difficulties are largely due to a strategic error he is probably unable to correct: an inability to shape public opinion with a political message and policies that resonate with voters. This error is compounded by a tactical error: an unwillingness to break the filibuster [It could have/can be eliminated at any time with 50 votes + Biden via the nuclear option.] These errors are reflected in his greatest drop in polling numbers since February 2009: voter’s perception of Obama as a “strong leader.” Voters will sometimes tolerate policies they question from presidents like Kennedy or Reagan, whom they regarded as “strong,” but not from Jimmy Carter, whom they regarded as weak. A political policy and campaign slogan of "We're decent folks less insane/inept than Bush and the Republicans" has not proven wildly successful to date. The party in power is expected to do what's necessary to pass its agenda. If it can't, it is held responsible for the failure, not those who stopped them from doing it. This is particularly true when you have a near-supermajority: voters think you are a weak leader and the underdog Republicans are simply "playing politics" better and so deserve to "win." Ironically, if they win -- and the day they need to do so-- the Republicans will break the filibuster via the nuclear option. Saving the filibuster "for good use by Dems later on" is fatally naïve. Obama’s strategic error (inability to articulate a political message to change public opinion) and his tactical error (not breaking the Senate filibuster) have consistently interacted to the detriment of Obama and the Dems. As one example, in large part to avoid in filibuster in March of 09, Obama finally proposed a stimulus between $700 and $800 billion that was widely known as too weak to really stimulate the economy and also included large tax cuts more likely to stimulate saving than consumption–and spending that would be unlikely to produce many jobs until the end of Obama’s first term. To compound his error, in the stimulus’s first year, the administration spent only $17 billion of the $139 billion allocated for infrastructure spending. The failure to get a larger, more effective stimulus has done great damage to the nation, made it look like Keynesian economics is at fault, and reinforced the weak leader meme. The principal culprit in this failure is the (non) leadership of Barack Obama who as a politician has a Carteresque aversion to confrontational politics and a preference for bipartisan or postpartisan policies -- rather than good or effective Progressive policies. Obama and other frightened Senate Democrats think spending is unpopular – but unemployment and an economy moving in the wrong direction is more unpopular. Republicans have these Dems so rattled, they're afraid of the disease and the cure --- and so do next-to-nothing, which is the MOST unpopular solution. As another example, Geithner and Summers repeatedly blocked attempts to get tough on Wall Street on the grounds that doing so would threaten the recovery by upsetting the bankers. This reluctance crippled the administration politically, making it far more difficult for it to get its way with Congress on a second stimulus program that would have boosted the recovery and Democrats’ political prospects. Such bad politics and mushy policies are supported by fewer and fewer. There aren’t enough Blue Dogs in Obama’s preferred base to even outvote the Tea Partiers. Other examples of weak and confused Presidential leadership with poor policy outcome include health care, BP, L’affaire Sherrod, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Don’t ask don’t tell, immigration reform—the list goes on and on. We've seen enough of Obama, Nelson, Lincoln, Baucus, Landrieu, and several other Blue Dogs to know that at best they're confused (whether or not they have IQ's of 180) and are unlikely to change. In most cases (Snowe, Collins may be exceptions), it's MUCH easier to elect better Dems to a given office than change a Rep to a Dem. In fact, probably the only hope for Obama by Progressives is to give him a strong Progressive challenger with a following with whom to exercise his primordial instinct to compromise. [Huey Long did wonders for FDR who was much more Progressive and daring than BHO, and with much less instinct or need to compromise.]. That's a rather weak hope. Without quickly passing bills that really create jobs, reform health care, etc., etc., the Dems are like slowly cooking frogs in a pan. Most Progressives will "not vote Repub", but not enthusiastically support failed weak policies and leaders. Ditto Hispanics. Ditto Blacks. Equally important, if I'm an average Joe low info voter, I see confused and frightened Dems with at best mixed messages timidly delivered versus Repubs who aggressively take flack in opposition. I sure see how Joe low info wants the latter negotiating on his behalf with a Korean "Dear Leader" and other bad guys out there – and also transfer these sentiments domestically to Wall Street and HMOs.

- drofnats1

August 14, 2010 at 8:48pm

Chait: " He defended the core constitutional right of religious freedom." No more so than Palin did. She also agreed they had right to build the mosque. Maybe this is part of the problem: When Obama adopts the positions of Palin and Prejean, isntead of coming unglued, you instead get just tepid and try to spin whatever goodness from it that you can. But your heart isn't in it. drofnats writes: "To compound his error, in the stimulus’s first year, the administration spent only $17 billion of the $139 billion allocated for infrastructure spending." This was due to one of 4 things... 1) Incompetence. Another administration could have got the money flowing faster. 2) Lie. The original assertion that a lot of money could be pumped out quickly was known to be wrong 3) Realizing it wouldn't help that much 4) Impossible. It's just too hard to spend that much money that quickly. My guess is that of the above, #4 is the most likely. It's just too hard to spend that much money that quickly. And if that is true, then doubling, tripling or quadrupling the stimulus wouldn't have changed the outcome of where we are today. Remember when we were told the stimulus was an emergency and the entire thing had to be approved in just a few days? That wasn't true. They could have easily approved the first year of stimulus and said we are going to debate the second and third year a bit more. We were lied to there. Remember all the "shovel ready" projects that supposedly waited? But it's time to consider that other policies could have had a wildly different outcome on our current state. Obama can readily gets folks rallying behind him again, but he needs to fix the economy. And he must acknowledge that certain things he's done have really hurt things there.

- seattleeng

August 15, 2010 at 12:14pm

The difference is, seattle, that Palin's "defense" of a core right was simply the required camoflage for an attempt to make a New York municipal decision a club to beat Democrats with. If Palin was now on record as recognizing/respecting the president's extended explanation of their shared position, I'd be more inclined to see your point. Indeed, if she was on record as both recognizing the core constitutional right of Muslim communities in TN and WI and their intention to open their mosques (as the 9-11 argument hardly holds water in Murfreesboro), I'd be more inclined to see your point. But as she isn't, I'm not.

- ironyroad

August 15, 2010 at 8:00pm

1. The Tea Party Movement was a response to Obama's inauguration, not any particular action on his part --it arose barely a month after he took office, following Limbaugh's "I hope he fails" remark and the decision on the part of the Right to call this middle-of-the-road politician a socialist. 2. If the "mosque" remarks were Obama displaying fire in the belly, he is in no danger of heartburn. 3. You can blame progressives all you want. The fact is, Obama appears to have lost the confidence of those who put him in office. What's more, he seems either not to understand this, or not to care. Probably the latter: he may have settled on the notion of being a one-termer who would try to govern from the actual center (as opposed to what the Right thinks of as the Center). Nice try. He will be known as the guy who introduced half-measures when he had a veto-proof majority on which he wasn't willing to enforce discipline, after winning by the largest margin in decades, which majority he squandered by ignoring what it was (not) doing. 4. The ineffectiveness of the Democrats to take the big steps that were available (on health care, on financial reform, on foreign wars) indicates that they are either ineffective or co-opted by the corporate world. Obama fits in well with the Democrats in Congress on this score, in particular with his reliance on the same old approaches and the same old advisers (the Citigroup crowd to tell him how to reform Citigroup, the military on whether we should expand a war --when have they ever said "no?"-- the drug companies on how to reform health care). 5. Yes, we kinda can, maybe.

- awalters

August 16, 2010 at 3:55pm

You would think that the Left would idolize a president who succeeded in passing legislation for a national health care system, after more than 60 years of prior failed attempts, AND substantial financial reform legislation, AND negotiated a new arms control treaty. Perhaps the endless bellyaching on the Left about Obama's concessions and compromises tells us something about the Left. First, that it does not understand (or perhaps approve of?) the practise of representative government. Maybe this explains why "progressives" of 62 years ago formed a Progressive Party to run against Harry Truman, based solely on his offense in not smothering Stalin and the USSR with love and kisses. That exercize luckily failed to deliver the White House to the Republican Party in 1948; but a similar exercize in 2000, by those seers who could not divine any difference between Al Gore and George Bush, manged to do just that. The present colicky, whiny mood amongst what should be President Obama's base constituency, like their exploits in Florida and New Hampshire in the 2000 election, reveals precisely why the US Left has failed so consistently: it has a death-wish.

- jgallant

August 16, 2010 at 7:03pm

The author has penned yet another article bashed the Progressives and demonstrated a clear Corporatist bias. It is right in line with another saboteur of Progressive agenda Lannie Davis -- who drips with Corporate servility in every sentence -- all the while claiming to be a Progressive. By the way folding in to watch 200,000 Americans to die needlessly waiting for the major benefits to go into effect in 2014 and letting Rahm Emanuel apply mafia style pressure to shame 100 Progressive Congressmen to break their written pledges is not about not fighting hard it is downright selling out the American Public to Corporate Shylocks. To quote Anthony Weiner the pressure from the Administration was akin to someone holding a gun to his head. Same kind of Corporate cave in was in the FIN Reform Bill. Instead of shilling without any study of the issue please take a look at http://bit.ly/NoMrP, an appeal to the President and http://bit.ly/PushMrP about how best to support the President. http://j.mp/ObamaGOTV attempts to capture the dilemma about the upcoming elections faced by many a Progressive.

- doubleaseven

August 17, 2010 at 2:49am

The problem with "the left" right now is that it consists primarily of relatively well-off upper middle class elites disconnected from the life experience of the working and lower middle class (those who are truly at risk in this economy and without health care, etc.) and from the corrective and influence of an active and even "militant" organized labor movement. As such, this "cadre" of elite (what Gibbs refers to as "professional" leftists is disconnected from the harshest realities and is relatively clueless. It deals at arms length, and mostly in theory, with politics and the struggle for democracy and rights. This left hardly deals at all with the real, hard and sometimes dirty practice of not just winning elections, but of governing. While there are a few thoughtful elite professional leftists, powerful and relevant progressive thinking and action seems unlikely to re-emerge until the head-in-the-clouds elitist left is pulled back to earth and forced to work with the realities of blue-collar, no-collar, and out-of-work people and hopefully, some day, organized labor worthy of the name.

- jonsax

August 17, 2010 at 7:53am