POLITICS NOVEMBER 9, 2010
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More than candidates are defeated in elections. So are ideas. The Democrats’ heavy losses in the midterm elections may now force a reassessment and overhaul of the Barack Obama political experiment. Whether the president has the dexterity and fortitude to navigate through the harsher Washington political environment of the next two years will determine his survival. Clearly, the hopes and dreams that propelled Obama to the White House are in disarray. The social movement politics that some of his most fervent followers ascribed to him—the idea of electing a “post-partisan” president as the leader not of a nation or even of a political party but of a personalized social movement—has failed.
The dream of the Obama presidency based on a movement model of politics was devised by Marshall Ganz, a veteran union organizer and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, hired as an Obama campaign official and charged with training Obama volunteers—and articulated by Ganz’s ally, Peter Dreier, also an Obama adviser, a member of Progressives for Obama, and a politics professor at Occidental College. Ganz was both the theorist and practitioner of the Obama-as-movement-leader notion while Dreier played the role of publicist, heralding the new age in articles in The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, and Dissent. Ganz’s projection of the Obama presidency gained its prestige from the hallowed memories of the civil rights and farmworker union movements, imbued with high moral as well as political purposes. He posed it against the threadbare, craven horse-trading and maneuvering of parties and all previous presidential politics, which Ganz believes were “practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.” The Obama experiment, a movement that arose from the grassroots apart from the Democratic Party, would usher in a purer moral and more effective leadership to the White House. Obama would not merely alter government policy but also transform the very sum and substance of the political system.
As its advocates were thrilled to point out in the aftermath of the 2008 election, their own work had ensured that Obama and his presidential campaign embodied the social movement model—and they insisted that the model was what elected him. The “real key” to Obama’s victory, Dreier wrote, was not the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, the military stalemate in Iraq, George W. Bush’s unpopularity, or even Obama’s then much celebrated charisma. The victory was owed, Dreier wrote, to “grassroots organizing.” For the first time ever, Dreier exulted, Americans had “elected a former community organizer as their President.” And just as the insurgent campaign had been transformative, so would the Obama presidency. As organizer-in-chief, President Obama would rely upon the movement that had elected him in order to reform health care, end global warming, and restore economic prosperity. Freed from the constraints of the status quo by this new political idea, the White House would be able to orchestrate through the movement and inspired through Obama’s oratory the much vaunted “change we can believe in.”
What went wrong?
Two years after touting the movement model of politics, its advocates now have found a culprit for its failure—not the Republican Party, not the filibuster, and certainly not their own notion of “post-partisan” Nirvana, but the once worshipped Barack Obama. Immediately after the midterm elections, Ganz leaped forward to charge that in office the president had lost his organizer’s fire and neglected to deliver the wonderful speeches that would frame the political discourse for the movement. Instead, Obama lamely sought reform, in Ganz’s words, “inside a system structured to resist change,” ignoring and even scorning liberal and leftist advocacy groups. He demobilized the networks generated by MyBarackObama.com that Ganz and Dreier claimed had helped win the Democratic nomination and then the White House. He became “transactional” instead of “transformational.” Now, to salvage his presidency, Ganz contends, Obama must contritely “acknowledge responsibility for his mistakes” and become the community organizer president that the movement advocates want him to be, speaking boldly “for the anxious and marginalized” and leading “in the task of putting Americans to work rebuilding our future.”
But is the social movement model adequate to democratic governing, especially as the basis of a presidency? What Ganz does not consider is that his own theory and practice of the Obama 2008 mobilization, explicitly based on values, emotions, and feelings, disdaining any particular policies or political goals, may have been a dead end once Obama took office—and that it even helped foster an inevitable disillusionment.
Fundamental to the social movement model is a conception of American political history in which movements, and not presidents, are the true instigators for change. Presidents are merely reactive. They are not the main protagonists. Obama himself endorsed this conception constantly on the campaign trail, and has repeated it often as president, proclaiming that “real change comes from the bottom up.” Supposedly, all of our progressive presidents have been preternaturally cautious, self-interested men who originated nothing themselves. Only forceful pressure from outside movements led them to undertake the audacious efforts for which history has wrongly given them credit. Hence, Abraham Lincoln would never have become the Great Emancipator had the abolitionists not pushed him to do so. Hence, pressure from the radical left and organized labor forced FDR into launching the New Deal.
A good example of this way of thinking arose during the 2008 Democratic primaries, when Obama, campaigning in social movement mode, sought to claim the mantle of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by celebrating oratorical force over grubby politics. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, noted that it took a president, Lyndon B. Johnson, to push through Congress the civil rights reforms for which Dr. King had fought, as well as the programs of the Great Society, and she pointed out that the job being contested for was president of the United States, not head of a social movement. For this, she got called a racist. But her deeper transgression was to run afoul of the movement conception of politics, in which the agitators are the true instigators of reform and officeholders the grudging instruments of pressure from worthy masses.
The movement advocates’ idea of change coming from below, of course, is simplistic. It also blinds its followers to the true problems of democratic politics. No one doubts, for example, that the abolitionists were important and some courageous. But Abraham Lincoln did not have to be awoken to the evils of slavery; he hated slavery all his life. Years before he became president, he declared his expectation and hope that, one day, the nation would be entirely rid of human bondage. And had the consummate party man Lincoln—derided by the more radical abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips as a hack and worse, “the slave hound of Illinois”—not helped to form the first explicitly anti-slavery political party in world history; had his democratic election to the presidency not provoked Southern secession; and had he not managed a careful balancing of military and political exigencies, over the furious objection of the more fractious anti-slavery forces, that led to the Emancipation Proclamation, the abolitionists’ agitation would have remained at the margins of American politics. Indeed, in preparing the way for emancipation, Lincoln manipulated the Left of his day far more than he was manipulated, distancing himself from them publicly, while crushing the slaveholders’ rebellion and, finally, issuing the proclamation that spelled slavery’s doom. So it has gone, from the Civil War era through the end of the twentieth century, as presidents who understood the subtleties and intricacies of constitutional government as well as the art of the possible, achieve what social movements can only demand.
Even if movements carried the weight that Ganz and Dreier ascribe to them, it’s hard to see the campaign apparatus Obama mobilized in 2008 having much more force today than it has had. According to Ganz’s theory and practice of the Obama movement, policies and politics were slighted in favor of feelings and values. Supposedly, these emotive spurs would bind participants in a new activist community, devoted to the collective good and not personal gratification, and dedicated to advancing the uniquely inspiring political leader who had sprung from the reliable ranks of community organizing, and not from the precincts of compromised “transactional” politics.
The crucible of the Ganz strategy in 2008 was the numerous “Camp Obamas,” which trained thousands of campaign volunteers. Participants were instructed not to discuss politics and policies in favor of, as the Sacramento Bee reported, “telling potential voters personal stories of political conversion.” The problems facing liberals, by this reckoning, had nothing to do with their ideas or programs, or with the longstanding political divisions in the Democratic Party stemming back to the 1960s. They had to do with a deficit of “values,” which, according to Ganz, the Republicans had in surplus.
As further developed through a labyrinthine analysis that drew on social psychology, brain chemistry, and human transaction theory, Ganz’s model posited that the root of the “values” problem was essentially emotional. “Values are not just concepts, they’re feelings,” Ganz explained knowingly. “That’s what dropped out of Democratic politics sometime in the ‘70s or ‘80s.” Thus, the Obama campaign presented itself as a social movement that was more sentimental than political, pushing gauzy “values,” like “hope” and “change,” while leaving policy concerns to the wonks. Yet the successful movements of the past had more than values; they had specific goals. The civil rights movement’s eyes were on the prizes of desegregation and voting rights. Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, where Ganz learned so much about political organizing, also had its emotive side—summed up in its slogan, “Si, Se Puede,” which the Obama campaign directly appropriated in translation, “Yes, We Can”—but it also had in mind the recognition of organized fieldhands and the negotiation of fair contracts involving wages. The point of the Obama campaign-as-movement was conceived differently: exciting people with the thrill of empowerment, and collective self-empowerment, by electing to the White House a community organizer who believed in “hope” and “change.” Why electing Obama was imperative required no explanation among the faithful; it was enough to get the spirit, share the spirit, and revel in the candidate’s essence, which, by definition, no other candidate possessed. The leader was the program.
Sketchy on specifics, such a movement would have been practically useless after Obama’s election, except as a cult-of-personality mass cheerleading squad to back the president over any decision that he chose to endorse. But then, it was always difficult to imagine exactly how the newly defined role of organizer-in-chief would play out. Even according to the social movement model, movements push reluctant leaders who are skilled in the intricacies of lawmaking, especially the president. How was this supposed to work when the chief executive was the movement leader, though vastly inexperienced in the ways of the White House, let alone of the hazards of Washington? Where was the crafty president who needed to be pushed, the president who would know how and when to use a movement to his advantage?
Obama in office upheld the community organizers’ post-partisan credo, trying to bring together opposing forces and finding common ground, in part under the pressure of the organizer’s own reasonableness. But that was not how it worked in Washington during the past two years; nor had it worked that way for 20 years. A ruthless and right-wing Republican Party spurned talk of common ground as a sign of weakness, and did everything it could to ensure that Obama’s presidency would fail. But oblivious to the long-standing internal dynamics of the Republican Party, Obama continued to vaunt his brand of “post-partisanship.” Now, after the ruins of the midterms, the president must readjust. He can, if he wishes, draw on recent historical experience. After his rocky first two years brought on the Republican tidal wave of 1994, President Clinton, with no illusions about “post-partisanship,” entered a state of day-to-day political trench warfare, co-opting Republican rhetoric about family values to give them Democratic content, winning targeted but crucial legislation on matter such as health care, and risking political capital by endorsing welfare reform that the left wing of his own party lambasted—dogmatically and short-sightedly, it turned out—as the death-knell of liberal reform.
Presidential oratory about beliefs was an important part of the mix—recall Clinton’s effective speech on government and patriotic values following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995—but the grind of political infighting and compromise must always have priority. It could well be that Obama’s survival as an effective political force for the next two years and his prospect for reelection—and any viable future for social movements—will require engaging cleverly and doggedly in what his movement theorists derided as “status quo” politics.
Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday).
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40 comments
I like the piece, but it assumes throughout that Obama isn't (and hasn't always been) a knife-fighter in a movement politician's clothing. That's false, as his successes as a candidate and especially as president clearly demonstrate. This is a guy who passed healthcare AFTER losing Kennedy's seat. Why can't anyone on the left give him the credit he's due? In other words, the article is ultimately incoherent. On the one hand, it belittles Obama's efforts to compromise as symptoms of naivete. But on the other hand, it calls for Clintonian compromises that will allow the White House to reclaim the center of American politics. P and not-P. Can we please have a serious and DESCRIPTIVE assessment of Obama's transformational legislative record? I'd love to have it sitting around for constant reference during tedious Thanksgiving discussions about Obama's "failures" and "naivete." For all of his "faults" he is one hell of a a productive and transformational president. Obama passed the major healthcare bill, but it's Clinton who gets credit for "crucial" healthcare reform success? I don't understand.
- ralphnelle
November 9, 2010 at 1:17am
I don't think the article is as much about Obama and his successes or failures as it is about the unbelievably naive "movement" ideology that supposedly got him elected. First, I don't think that's what got Obama elected. From what we could tell in my household, he had the ears and support of the Democratic elites. He was a glamorous figure who appeared to have the ability to be transformational, post racial and new - whereas people marketed nutcrackers mocking Hillary Clinton's thighs. Without the backing of Democratic kingmakers, especially the dread Limousine Liberals, I don't think Hope And Change And Inspiration would have prevailed, although the razzmatazz did help turn out the vote. However I think a Democratic poodle could have won considering Bush II's disastrous presidency combined with McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, who scared right-thinking Republicans to the point that many of them voted for Obama and probably would have supported Hillary. That said I'd have preferred a more experienced person, like Hillary, for the simple reason that I am just not dumb enough to believe that wishful thinking runs nations and for that reason I'm honestly shocked by this piece. So excuse me for being cynical but I'm finding it hard to believe that well-educated people, professors even, honestly believe that community organization and "feelings" could really run a country like the US? If this is true, then no wonder people are disillusioned by Obama. After all he isn't Moses, he is a capable and highly intelligent person trying to solve problems in an absurdly difficult environment. That should be enough. He deserves support and because of a lack of support, apparently including from people who were too disillusioned to vote because Obama isn't Moses, and/or because young people are too lazy to go out and vote, we lost a ton of Democratic congresspeople and I'm afraid to think how many on the state level. Indeed some real extremists on the Right got a lot of votes. Look at Tancredo in Colorado not to mention how Reid nearly got unseated - etc. And - if people didn't come out to vote last week because they didn't get enough touchy-feely stuff from Obama's presidency then they deserve the people who got elected. Unfortunately, they've trapped the rest of us.
- Sophia
November 9, 2010 at 2:12am
Sophia, the article is about Obama: the campaign he ran, the way he governed, and the way he should govern if he wants to recover some political capital. And the argument is incoherent: Obama was naive to compromise and be so reasonable; therefore, he should compromise and be more reasonable. Bleh. It's also out of touch with the facts of Obama's presidency. He hasn't failed. Why do people on the left keep accepting and restating this false premise?
- ralphnelle
November 9, 2010 at 2:51am
Raphnelle. Obama has failed to effectively utilize the most political capital enjoyed by a Democratic president in terms of legislative majorities in both houses since LBJ... who failed quickly and dramatically because of a failure in forign policy. Obama did not pass health care reform-- He had the Congress pass some insurance reform that may or may not survive for long. He failed in part because he tried to be post-partisan in a partisan world, did not push to remove the filibuster, slept too frequently with those who would destroy his presidency--- and has seemingly learned no lessons, nor have his acolytes, many of who write or blog at tnr. While Obama has attempted much domestically, he has had no obvious domestic policy successes to the average Joe-low-info voter.. 9.5% unemployment that might have been 12-14% without an inadequate stimulus package is no success. An adequate stimulus package putting unemployment at 5-7% would have reversed the results of the midterms--but Obama never tried and the results were predicted by many Keynesian economists (the equivalent of being a round-earth gerographer in 1500--- not all the data were in, but there were enough testable data for a rational scientific choice to be made. Like Climate Science in 1995). Obama has failed to date because most of his domestic policies are basically incoherent compromises that do not solve or address the problems they purport to solve Google: stimulus compromise and Obama's support thereof as the solution. (Yes, there are coherent compromises.) The as-yet unrecognized failure yet to come is an LBJ-style failure in foreign policy. It's spelled Afghanistan.. There is now an international conviction that he’s terminally hesitant, indecisive, and incoherent. Obama has a Groucho Marx "Hello, I Must be Going!" plan, a brief reinforcement to be reversed in time for the 2012 campaign. Good Luck with that. Ironically, those batshit crazy Republican critics who call Obama a Marxist may yet be correct They just refer to the wrong Marx -- and that will be his final undoing. Dems better look for a replacement candidate for 2012. Like the Republicans should have in 1932. Obama, like Hoover or Neville Chamberlain, is a reformer, a basically decent guy who is too weak and/or holds a political philosophy unsuited to his times. Obama does not understand, or is too weak to advocate, Keynesian economics domestically or coherent, winning, foreign policies. Enough data is in to make the call.
- drofnats1
November 9, 2010 at 4:23am
The main reason the Obama movement has supposedly failed is due to a 24/7 smear campaign of propaganda generated by the conservatives, Fox "News" and big business, and the first two are just subcategories of the third. It's impossible to legitimize the reasons for voting against the Dems/Obama when, according to polls, most of these people believe taxes have been raised, trillions have been given to corporations wily nily and that Obama is a Muslim on a secret mission to destroy the US through Communism before turning America into an Islamic ally of Iran. But then what do you expect when Goober Pyle was elected not once but twice?
- pdougherty
November 9, 2010 at 6:15am
Drofnats, while lately I've largely come around to your way of thinking about BHO (although not as to the wisdom of seeking a replacement for 2012), but I do believe you undersell the importance of health reform. Health reform as passed is, as Biden said at the time, a big fucking deal. It will improve the lives of millions of Americans, and it will result in a significant--and sorely needed--shift of wealth down the socioeconomic ladder. Getting reform of any kind passed was far from easy and success was never guaranteed. Obama is due real credit for getting it done. That said, on other levels, Obama has failed. His failures have been failures of understanding. He failed to understand that however useful a campaign tool it may have been, his vision of a post-partisan world of cooperation was a dangerous fantasy. He also failed to understand the magnitude of the economic crisis and/or failed to understand that half-measures with respect to the economy would earn neither him nor his party any credit whatsoever. And finally, his most overarching failure has been his failure to recognize that the true power of the presidency, at least with respect to making policy, lies in the president's ability to leverage public opinion. Health care reform should have been much easier than it was and probably would have been if the White House had made any attempt whatsoever to mount even a rudimentary public relations campaign. And while passage of a meaningfully larger fiscal stimulus might--underline 'might'--have been impossible, at the very least, Obama should have been able to score partisan points, painting the Republicans as standing steadfastly opposed to jobs creation. Obama's presidency is by no means a total failure, and I predict that barring some unforeseen catastrophe he will win reelection in 2012 albeit by a significantly reduced margin. Drofnats, I just can't see how the Dems can replace BHO without it being Jonestown redux. (Talk about drinking the Koolaid...) Although the thought has just occurred to me that there is another way: What if Obama stood down, a la LBJ? I can somehow see it happening. Obama doesn't look to me like he's having any fun, and he IS of the generation that things fun is among the most important considerations of all.
- AaronW
November 9, 2010 at 6:19am
Neither the article nor the comments wish to face the fact that a legitimate issue here is that President Obama's policies appear not to have worked. Unemployment is 9.6% and we are newly in debt to the tune of $5 trillion dollars. The argument that things would have been worse is a hard sell. The health care bill was and is opposed by about 60% of the American people. The attitude among movement types and at the White House seems to be that the American people are stupid (after all, they elected Goober twice), don't know what's good for them, and/or have been bamboozled by Fox News. So we don't have to care what they think. That's a loser, politically. In the "Ground Zero Mosque" issue, Obama's position was and is opposed by 70% of the American people. You can argue he was standing up for principle, but I'm talking about a political fact. And the Movement Democrats are now opposed by another movement, also from the grassroots--the Tea Party. But Movement folks refuse to give it any authenticity, claim it's "astroturf" not grassroots. And so they missed its enormous power, just as Hilary missed the Barack movement's enormous power. My wife and I supported Obama, gave money (for the first time to any political campaign), argued with friends who supported Hillary. My conclusion is that we were wrong. Hillary would have made a better President, one who listened more, and one who did less damage to the Democratic Party. The disaster of Nov. 2 speaks for itself. And yet the President still seems not to have gotten the message. He doesn't see any problem with his attitude, and is condescending when he says he didn't explain his policies enough, or well enough.
- ProfEthan
November 9, 2010 at 7:18am
Obama didn't change; circumstances changed. That Obama wouldn't change, couldn't change, says all that needs to be said. During the campaign all the talk about a transformative president was fine, but when the financial system collapsed, the country didn't care about transformative; the country cared about fixing blame and fixing what had failed. But when Obama arrived in Washington with the same advisors as before the collapse, economic advisors and the rest, political failure was cast in stone. What happened to Obama after the campaign? Nothing. And that's the problem.
- rayward
November 9, 2010 at 7:20am
... I can somehow see it happening. Obama doesn't look to me like he's having any fun... This strikes an intuitive chord with me but I can't see it happening. I intuit, though, that a not inconsiderable part of him thinks "I should've been careful about what I wished for." But my call, worthless though it is, is he won't quit and won't give any sign of considering the possibility. And I hope he doesn't.
- basman
November 9, 2010 at 9:44am
The Tea Party is the new movement politics, overwhelmingly so because they actually remain involved in the political process. They participate, and don't put too much into their leaders-instead they constantly challenge leaders. As Marco Rubio said when he won Florida's senate seat "this election is not an embrace of the Republican party." They have the two tools that make power possible-organized people and organized money. Obama won with the same two tools, outside of the democratic party at first. But then OFA became a wing of the DNC, and all hail the downfall of OFA. Where are their organizers now? And how do you cultivate the base that came out in droves on election day 2008? By railing against the "professional left?" Look what that did you, the new base didn't vote (young people, minorities, etc.) !! Which is another funny thing. The tea party is still Sarah Palin, which means its still very unpopular. The young like the democrats, minorities like the democrats. Unemployment had a devastating effect on these two demographics--google "black unemployment rate 2010" and read about one of the most harrowing phenomenons of our time. But, when Republicans get their arse handed them in 2008, they reboot and get serious, and fight fight fight. Democrats spend hours assessing blame and feeling more discouraged, and evidence by the 2010 turnout, they tune out. As Nader said, "if your not turned onto politics, politics will turn on you." The GOP rules the House, and nearly every state legislature and almost control the Senate (Sens Nelson, Manchin and Lieberman could easily switch caucuses). The base needs to quit crying, start organizing and STAY INVOLVED. And get money, donate money, and use money. So let's go!!!
- RedState
November 9, 2010 at 10:23am
ProfEthan says "Neither the article nor the comments wish to face the fact that a legitimate issue here is that President Obama's policies appear not to have worked." But then he goes on to criticize Obama's policies for being unpopular without claiming that any have failed to work. So which polices haven't worked?
- subterran
November 9, 2010 at 11:02am
There is indeed a certain coherence in this piece. It is coherent with virtually everything else Mr. Wilentz has written about Obama since before the 2008 Election, in that he has been consistently dismissive of both Obama and the movement that propelled him to the presidency. This article and its tone was expected.
- josephf
November 9, 2010 at 11:10am
Remember this one: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/race-man
- subterran
November 9, 2010 at 11:56am
AaronW. the problem with health care reform is that it hasn't happened yet. There is now some insrance reform re not dropping for preconditions. What else can Joe-low-info voter see?? And that he may not see unless he is affected. and maybe his premiums were raised-- that's ALL he sees. The rest is in the future-- and very iffy. May or may not happen. That's little to show in 2010-- or 2011 for a LOT of political bruhaha. Didn't have to be that way.
- drofnats1
November 9, 2010 at 1:18pm
Basman. Rayward. let's grant that your analyses/positions are correct. so what do you recommend doing??? Nothing?? Krugman got it right the other day"even when people have a clear vision of the problem, they lose their nerve when it comes to proposing solutions that actually address that problem. It’s this kind of diffidence that doomed us to inadequate policies when Obama might have had the ability to get stuff through; and now we’re stuck, with little hope of recovery for many years to come." What Krugman, Chait, Cohn, and most tnr bloggers have been avoiding in the solution: Obama must go. The sooner he is seriously challenged by Progressives , the better for the Dems and the country. Sticking with BHO is the equivalent of sticking with Carter, Chamberlain, Buchanan, or Fillmore. Many did-- and the consequences were disasterous.
- drofnats1
November 9, 2010 at 1:22pm
drofnats1: What a great idea. Maybe Ralph Nader could be approached. That worked out so well in the past. But seriously, Fillmore? Obama's accomplishments the last (not quite) 2 years are more that most could hope for in 4. No, nothing has been perfect. It never could be. But a start to health care reform after how many decades of trying? subterran: Right, that's what first burned his name into my mind, and left the bad taste in my mouth.
- josephf
November 9, 2010 at 1:49pm
“Si, Se Puede,” which the Obama campaign directly appropriated in translation, “Yes, We Can” Um...no, Si, Se Puede is more like Yes, it can be done, if you are talking about direct translation. And what the hell does directly appropriated in translation mean anyhow? How do you indirectly appropriate something in translate, from Spanish to German to English? As to this article, I agree it is rubbish, just Wilentz still licking his wounds because Hillary didn't win. He had to bring up that old whine about LBJ 2 years later. Get over it, you old fool, Hillary won't be President. The past 2 years have seen the most significant legislative achievements since LBJ. Obama has passed the vast majority of his agenda, and the only 2 areas he failed, in immigration reform and in global warming, there was no one going to get this done. As to immigration, we will muddle along for another generation until Hispanics become too big of a constituency that they will muscle something through, and as to global warming, whatever we do won't be enough anyhow, but when the earth screws us over it will be the Republican party that will pay the price. If Hillary had won she would have caved, there would have been no health care reform, and no way in hell was her stimulus plan going to be bigger, maybe Democrats would have lost less at the mid terms, but who the hell cares? You win to get things done and he did. Would it have been better if Obama staked it all on a bigger stimulus. Sure, but that would have been only a temporary fix, as to how to bring back the Middle class, there aren't any easy answers for that.
- blackton
November 9, 2010 at 1:50pm
Subterran: almost a trillion dollars, which is pure debt, spent on the stimulus program--and unemployment is 9.6%. I wrote this already in my first entry as what you wished--an example of a failure of policy. I also noted that one can argue that it would've been worse without the stimulus, but this is a tough sell to the populace. I think I've been proven correct. As for Obamacare, at the moment all that is happening in terms of events on the ground is that companies are dropping health care, and premiums are going up quickly. This was not supposed to happen. The whole program was shoved down the throats of the people, and the argument was, don't worry, once it starts they'll like it. They don't, and the reason is that so far it is a failure in what it has promised. It may eventually be a success but it is not a success as of now.
- ProfEthan
November 9, 2010 at 2:00pm
If this article more accurately described what I understand to be Marshall Ganz's approach, I would be considerably more inclined to trust its analysis and conclusions. As it stands, it draws incorrect conclusions from a faulty critique of a misleading caricature of Ganz's position. It is, sadly, all too apparent that Obama's performance in office, perhaps under the influence of Rahm Emanuel's "transactional" approach to politics, perhaps as an understandable if unfortunate response to the unanticipated emergency circumstances facing the new Administration at the outset of its term, reflects the abandonment of the "transformational" approach that Obama's campaign employed to rouse unparalleled enthusiasm and active participation in electoral politics by millions of new voters, and to deepen the commitments of many progressives who had largely lost heart after decades of electoral disappointments. Obama also sacrificed, in the service of wheeling, dealing, and compromising on his policy objectives, his greatest gift as a campaigner--his rhetorical ability to educate, to inspire, to mobilize, and to lead. Given the deeply compromised nature of the all-too-ugly legislative processes and products in key areas--an inadequate and poorly structured stimulus proposal, a Republican-lite health plan that largely abandoned opportunities for quality improvements and necessary structural changes in the delivery (as well as financing) of health care in order to buy off private health insurers and Big Pharma, and a financial reform package that left gaping loopholes for continuing Wall Street abuses, Obama was unable to present and defend his legislative achievements in any coherent and convincing fashion. Nor were these partial legislative victories the only occasions on which Obama let down his more idealistic followers. His incoherent approach to pursuing a failing war in Afghanistan, the financial policies that rewarded the banks while largely abandoning those losing their jobs and homes, also could not be defended in any persuasive fashion, even by one as rhetorically gifted as Obama. It is thus no surprise that those who worked their hearts out to bring "change we can believe in" to our national government, those who would have supported the building of "new foundations" for our governing and economic institutions, largely lost heart as the new President followed second-term Bush strategies in all too many respects (military, legal, civil liberties), rehabilitated personnel and policies from the Clinton Administration significantly responsible for the anti-regulatory and bubble-promoting economic strategies that ultimately led to disaster under Bush, and all too quickly was pulled under by the undertow of traditional (and all too often corrupt) Washington practices. I do not mean to slight the contribution of the Republican Congressional and other political leadership, who contrary to this week's pious intoning of their dedication to the people's (2010) mandate decided in 2008 that Obama's popular mandate be damned, their first and only priority was to bring Obama down, whatever the costs to the country and people they purported to serve. It is this disgusting, perhaps treasonous, strategy that was just rewarded by those who bestirred themselves to vote in the 2010 campaign (with, of course, the anonymous campaign donations facilitated by an out-of-control, right-wing activist Supreme Court, which in 2000, and again for this campaign with its Citizens United decision, set itself up as the arbiter of our once, sort-of, democratic system). It is hard to see at this pained political moment that anything less than a deep and broad political movement might have the capacity to rescue our polity from its political and judicial efforts to return us to a pre-New Deal (let alone Great Society) vision akin to that of 1920s America, providing for us a bridge to the 19th Century. Alan Jay Weisbard, Madison, WI (blogging as "The Wise Bard")
- weisbardaj
November 9, 2010 at 2:01pm
Subterran: almost a trillion dollars, which is pure debt, spent on the stimulus program--and unemployment is 9.6%. I wrote this already in my first entry as what you wished--an example of a failure of policy. This is not a failure of policy when you acknowledge in your next statement that the Unemployment rate would have been much higher. The money was spent on a combination of tax cuts, transfer payments, and infrastructure building, the borrowing has not caused interest rates to rise at all (which was the greatest danger, that and inflation, neither of which happened) It would be positively deranged to state that 800 billion (how the hell is 800 close to a trillion? Is 200 billion close to zero?) had no effect on the economy. Would it have been better had it been 2 trillion, with much of it going to retain state and local government employees? Absolutely. But tell me where the hell Obama was going to get the votes for that? Remember at the time Franken had not been seated and Specter was a Republican, and who knew what Lieberman would do. "As for Obamacare, at the moment all that is happening in terms of events on the ground is that companies are dropping health care, and premiums are going up quickly. This was not supposed to happen. The whole program was shoved down the throats of the people" Sorry, but enacting legislation via the Democratic process is not shoving anything down peoples throats. And give me a Goddamn break, now all of a sudden health care in America was perfect until the damned demmycrats came up and messed it up. The mountain of stupidity out there is astounding. Companies were dropping health care at record rates, in Texas, that paragon of Conservatism 26% of people are without insurance, and it has been terrible for years. Texas has stopped accepting applications for Children into their state run health care program. Yes, if you are a poor child in Texas you should just up and fucking die if you get sick. And now we got cosmetology professors weighing in on things. Hey, Redstate is on the other side of the aisle, take your trollish ways over there.
- blackton
November 9, 2010 at 2:30pm
Another silly hit piece on Obama by Sean Wilenz. This guy is not much of a historian. The poor economy makes Obama look like an ineffectual idiot. A great economy would make him look like a political genius. I'm not saying he can't change and adjust a bit, but these pieces that try to make broad sweeping pronouncements are just stupid. He also once wrote that: Obama is guilty of "the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states' rights" and (after Obama won the nomination): "Liberal intellectuals actually could have aided their candidate, while also doing their professional duty, by pressing him on his patently evasive accounts about various matters, such as his connections with the convicted wheeler-dealer Tony Rezko, or his more-than-informal ties to the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers …"
- Virginia Centrist
November 9, 2010 at 2:31pm
Not to pile into ProfEthan, but every economist on the left and the right agreed that demand needed to be stimulated in 2009 or things would cycle out of control. Obama got as much as he could out of the Senate and passed it. Pelosi/Obey really screwed up when they allowed the Democratic caucus to insert every pet project they've wanted over the last 10 years, but the reality is that this was a small percentage of the bill. Again - every economist on both sides of the political isle knew that we needed to stimulate demand. Every economist on both sides will say that the stimulus helped save jobs and create economic growth. Almost every economist believed that we needed a larger stimulus. This is macro econ 101....no wonder the business community and Wall Street reacted favorably to the passage of the stimulus. Are we really debating this? I don't mean to be patronizing, but no one who has any understanding of economics can possibly say that we didn't need government intervention to prop up demand or the economy would have spiraled out of control into a major depression...also - water is wet. Only conservative pseudo scientists are arguing that tax cuts on the rich will spur investment. But you won't find and conservative economists who believe that either. We've been priming the supply side for investment for 30 straight years, and there isn't much more we can do to drastically alter the behavior of the rich. Their taxes are pretty low. The capital gains tax is 15%. It's the demand side where we've had problems over the last decade. The only thing that kept the economy (and consumer spending) afloat in the 2000s was money from worthless houses. We haven't done anything to stimulate the demand side in a really long time (until the stimulus). The expansion of the EITC in the 90s was a big step, but it accompanied TANF cuts so it's hard to really count that. And the result is a middle class that's not seeing any gains while the rich become super rich. I hate playing the class warfare game, but it's pretty much true. We're rapidly becoming like Argentina...
- Virginia Centrist
November 9, 2010 at 2:44pm
ProfEthan, says "one can argue that it would've been worse without the stimulus, but this is a tough sell to the populace. I think I've been proven correct." Whether or not something is a "tough sell to the populace" has little or nothing to do with whether it is true. I've think you've proven yourself a bit of a fool
- subterran
November 9, 2010 at 3:13pm
From a political perspective, by far Obama's mistake is that, once TARP was passed, then Healthcare Reform, he effectively stopped leading. Instead, with the rest of the country he simply waited for the anticipated positive results. And waited, and waited, and waited, all year long. Unbelievably, he is still waiting. What I would like to know is what the hell is he waiting for! TARP passed, and was a success. How many really know that? I didn't know until yesterday. Obama and his entire administration should have informed us weeks ago, at least. In a loud, unanimous voice! Meanwhile, Obama should long ago have begun to build the case and garner popular support for a second stimulus package. By early summer at the latest. If unemployment then dropped significantly by mid-summer, the stimulus could be scaled back. When unemployment didn't drop by early summer, Obama kept waiting for it to fall. Likewise with health care reform, selling it should never have let up. I'm shocked to find out that the bill won't really take full effect until 2014. I should have known this for sure by mid-summer if it was true from day one. I should have also seen that the Administration was addressing the problems that would remain for people to ease their healthcare burden meanwhile. Even if it wasn't true, politically I should have not a doubt that it was. Obama hasn't succeeded like FDR because he hasn't lead as FDR did. I still wonder when Obama might get the message. By today it should be obvious that he has. He says he has, but talk is cheap. Obama should show his leadership by visibly and palpably acting. Doesn't he realize his job, too, depends on it. As a nation, it should never be seen that we aren't taking the initiative. That the President hasn't done so in any way shape or form, is mystifying. It is also infuriating!
- Tgossard
November 9, 2010 at 5:11pm
In politics, perception is paramount. It is also elementary. I knew that by the end of Introduction to Political Science, at Occidental College. Barry should learned that, too, by the end of his two-year stay at Oxy. Was he not listening then either. I actually like and admire Obama for his ideals and his standards, and I gave an out-of-proportion amount of money to his campaign, campaigned for him every step of the way, and of course voted for him. I don't know if I could support him as enthusiastically next time around. I want to, but he has underperformed politically, to say the least and if he is beaten I doubt I could shed a tear.
- Tgossard
November 9, 2010 at 5:28pm
There is no way to know what would have happened if the stimulus had been bigger, or smaller: that is why it is a tough sell to argue that things would have been worse. People can't feel the "worse", they can feel the failure now. What is certain is that the program as is has been a failure in terms of what was promised on unemployment. People wanted to know from me where there was a failed program, not just Obama taking positions which a majority of the public rejects (as in health care, or the "mosque"), in order to account for the Democratic disaster at the polls a week ago. The stimulus is a failed program in terms of what was promised the American people--and a giant failed program, to boot. And one funded by hugely increased debt. The meme last week was that the main problem behind the Democratic disaster was the economy; everyone said it, and it is exactly my point.
- ProfEthan
November 9, 2010 at 6:50pm
I'd just like to comment on the idea that the Republican opposition offered BHO absolutely no quarter b/c to do so would have been seen as weakness. It is true, and it angers me, and it is what I cling to when I feel that I'll never completely understand why Conservatives have no heart. And I didn't vote last week for the 1st time in 18 years. Point Conservatives. Ralph mentioned that we talk about the ACA as if it doesn't exist, or that it is no big deal. (Joe Ba wouldn't say that) But for some reason, no one wants to admit that. No one can admit that we hold our Presidents up to impossible standards (and I'm not talking morality), and then tear them limb from with glee. The difference as I see it, is that Liberals only think that Conservatives are intellectually lazy, Conservatives think that Liberals are intellectually evil. And yet, when BHO falters, we watch him get trampled instead of try to help. And we treat his victories - including those that I honestly didn't think were possible in my lifetime - we treat those like cheap toys tossed in our toy chest. Nope, he sure as hell doesn't walk on water. But he's apparently on his own.
- jmarshall
November 9, 2010 at 7:09pm
"There is no way to know what would have happened if the stimulus had been bigger, or smaller" That is silly. Of course we know. We can't be sure to the exact amount but if you spend a trillion on infrastructure you can get a general idea how many people you will hire. The Obama administration wasn't aware (but I agree they should have been) just how big the hole was, and if they were they should have leveled with the American people. Even if they had I don't think they would have passed a 2 trillion dollar stimulus since Republicans would have never gone for it. No, the main problem behind the Democratic disaster is that far too many Americans are stupid. They want results yesterday and for it to cost nothing, and they want a tax cut with their additional services.
- blackton
November 9, 2010 at 8:48pm
blackton "No, the main problem behind the Democratic disaster is that far too many Americans are stupid. They want results yesterday and for it to cost nothing, and they want a tax cut with their additional services." Exactly right, and that's why they are receptive to all the propaganda aimed at them from the far right.
- jdyer
November 9, 2010 at 9:45pm
I see now. It's not that unemployment is at 9.6%. It's that the American people are stupid, and don't recognize a successful program to keep unemployment at 8% when they see one. We're not debating Keynsian economics in general. It's better to face the fact that Obama's political problem is specific economic policies that have not worked, rather than poor communication-skills.
- ProfEthan
November 9, 2010 at 10:08pm
OK, poor communication skills might be a problem and so is a perception that Obama isn't home, so to speak. I think some people feel that and possibly feel alienated and threatened by a global vision that seems to alienate traditional allies, though it does make sense to try and make friends with people who don't understand our culture, and/or who are great trading partners (India for example; outreach to Muslims). But, there were so many lame speeches and a sense of being absent. That I think is fair to suggest. I was especially upset during the BP oil spill which has miraculously vanished from the political "to-do" list along with other environmental issues apparently. But I doubt the problems have been solved: carbon emissions, global warming, unsafe drilling, and undue power vested in the extraction and energy sector. Nevertheless, others above have posted comments about the determined, focused and often shameless abuse Obama and the Left have been taking from the right wing machine ever since the election. I think that's a huge factor not only in political sphere but possibly has been depressing the economy. Add that to flash crashes and banks foreclosing like mad rather than trying to work with borrowers - in some cases they've foreclosed on homes with no mortgages - and people are uneasy. At the same time employers are overworking people (aka "productivity"). My dentist mentioned this - he gets last minute cancellations because employers won't let people off for a couple of hours to get their teeth fixed. Of course that affects his bottom line too - Anyhow, I've worked in some high pressure environments but the companies did manage to survive for two hours every six months without me - so one wonders just how overstretched workers are right now and how much of our unemployment problem is actually due to business owners maximizing profits. Enough of these people acting like a group could conceivably affect the economy nationwide by artificially depressing employment opportunities, thus economic growth and a sense of security.
- Sophia
November 9, 2010 at 10:35pm
I think one of the most obvious elements -- and here I agree with Sophia -- in this crisis is that there's no real sense that business is on the same page as the administration in trying to get the economy going again.
- ironyroad
November 9, 2010 at 10:55pm
ProfEthan - The 8% prediction was (stupidly) released before Obama's team had a chance to see the extent of the hole we were in....giving a specific target (that ended up being based on old assumptoins) is a political failure, not a policy failure.
- Virginia Centrist
November 10, 2010 at 12:47pm
Sophia: the BP situation is quite an interesting case. Here we have a major failure of a public multinational, partly attributed to lax regulatory oversight, and partly the result of the said multinational's corner-cutting. Certainly, unlike the case of Katrina, there was no issue of the US Government having any sort of expertise in handling the spill - and I say unlike Katrina because the barriers around New Orleans had been built and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers, and managing population evacuation, unlike capping a gushing oil well at 7000 feet underwater, is a uniquely government responsibility. After considerable damage, some likely permanent, to both the environment and the region's economy, what do we have? Obama extracted, without protracted litigation, $25 billion out of BP. His Republican opponents, instead of thanking him for saving the region and the American taxpayer years of litigation, dumped on him for having engineered a "shakedown". Obama gave the speeches, and made the rounds ... only to be pilloried and vilified for saying "British Petroleum" when he had said nothing of the kind ... and suddenly, the Right became the biggest fans of Imperial Britain this side of Churchill in Ladysmith. The failure was that of business, and in some measure of lax regulatory oversight. The Republicans blamed ... the Sierra Club. And so on. I have been involved in resolving regulatory issues and trying to negotiate damages over the past three years, and I can say with considerable confidence that what Obama did in respect of the $25 billion fund was nothing short of a public policy triumph - and one in which both the Republicans and the Democrats should have had pride. This was one of the most responsible acts of post-trauma management I have seen in twenty years of studying this sort of thing. And yet ... all Republicans could say was that this was Obama's Katrina - after having denied, of course, for years that Katrina was a failure of any sort. And then you have this oik - Wilentz - writing on Obama's "failures" ... makes one wonder.
- icarusr
November 10, 2010 at 2:44pm
VCentrist, the problem is that the expectations we both cite of 8% unemployment were the basis of support for a hugely-expensive stimulus program that was funded by almost a trillion dollars in new public debt. The economy remains bad, and while it's fine to argue that it could or would have been far worse without this scale of stimulus, the unknown is a hard sell to make--especially to people who do not see government action affecting their actual difficult daily lives. It's a policy failure, one way or another. When even Turkey has a nice growth rate this year, not to mention Germany where jobs are going begging, there is a policy failure somewhere, and this failure--not bad communications--explains the outcome of the elections.
- ProfEthan
November 10, 2010 at 3:01pm
that was funded by almost a trillion dollars in new public debt. Again with the lies. less than 800 billions is not almost a trillion. why don't you give me 200 billion, since according to your logic that is almost nothing. These freaking trolls here with the outright lying. What, did someone give you a TNR subscription as a gag gift?
- blackton
November 11, 2010 at 11:01am
Don't be picky blackie. When we're talking political perception, 800 billion IS "nearly a trillion". That's the problem. The Prof is right on the perception issue. Not only does it appear ineffective, the numbers are so big it's intoxicating. The popular perception in my view is that we have a government that is expanding at a scary rate (33% of GDP in 2000; 35% in 2005; 44% in 2010), and the major benefits seem to be skimmed off by an oligarchy associated with both parties. And I think it's accurate. We need to agree on some basic fairness issues and the rest falls into place: means-testing for EVERYTHING, including home mortgages, Medicare, all subsidies including agriculture and energy; a drastically simplified tax code; and a draconian program of attacking fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicare/Medicaid. Then we can talk about cuts.
- Robert Powell
November 11, 2010 at 11:29am
You do realize, Robert Powell, that GDP is not a constant figure, and measuring Government against it in terms of percentages is fundamentally misleading. It's interesting to note, of course, in your figures that the big jump is not 33% to 35% from 2000 to 2005, (i.e. from one time of Great economic prosperity to a time of relative prosperity) but from 2005 to 2010, from a good economy to a crippling recession. If you have a recession, and GDP declines 5%, while Government doesn't (and shouldn't, unless you want to exacerbate a depression), suddenly Government by your measurement is much much bigger. Government didn't expand; the Economy contracted. Much of the heated rhetoric over the necessity of austerity and deep cuts flows from this flawed logic.
- Crock1701
November 11, 2010 at 4:49pm
In addition, if you go to www.bea.gov and look at the figures, your numbers don't ad up. Simple GDP figures for the Country, Annual GDP in Constant 2005 dollars (billions): 2000: 11,226 2005: 12,638.4 2009: 12880.6 At the same time, the "Government consumption expenditures and gross investment" that includes Federal, State and Local: (Still 2005 dollars, in the Billions) 2000: 2097.8 2005: 2369.9 2010: 2542.6 Now, as percentages of the GDP: 2000: 18.68% 2005: 18.75% 2009: 19.74% In other words, nowhere close to 33, 35, or 44%. Where do you get those numbers?
- Crock1701
November 11, 2010 at 4:58pm
"Obama in office upheld the community organizers’ post-partisan credo, trying to bring together opposing forces and finding common ground..." Really? I'm not sure what community organisers Sean knows, but this doesn't describe any I've known. In consequence, too much work is being done by the 'movement' theme here. It may be true that Obama used that riff too much. But it doesn't work as an all-purpose epxlanation of his fialures.
- dburchell
November 15, 2010 at 1:21am