THE STUMP JANUARY 25, 2012
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Ever since last fall, when Obama began honing the more confrontational style he displayed in the State of the Union speech, his advisers have insisted that populism has always been part of the president's political persona, not something he only groped for after two-and-a-half years of Republican intransigence. As David Axelrod told Politico, “The viability of the middle class, and the opportunity to get ahead, has been a central cause of Obama’s life.”
It’s not that statements like this are untrue. It’s that they’re incomplete. Yes, Obama has long been concerned about fairness and equity, and has a record of favoring policies that promote these goals. But populism is more than a set of policies and concerns. It also refers to a harder-edged rhetorical style and a tougher approach to adversaries, and those elements of Obama’s persona are clearly new. (Though let's not kid ourselves--Obama still isn't exactly a fire-breather.)
The more interesting question, which I’m sure we’ll be discussing on and off between now and the election (and maybe for decades to come, depending on how that goes), is why it took so long for the president to make this change despite all the evidence that earnest engagement with Republicans was futile. Some, like Andrew Sullivan and my former colleague Jon Chait, have argued that it was part of the master plan all along: Before breaking out the shiv, which he always intended to do, Obama wanted to persuade any fair-minded observer that he’d made every effort to work with Republicans. That way, the public would blame the other guys and not him for the lack of cooperation.
I think there’s something to this explanation, but I’ve always considered it a little pat. The lengths Obama went to in this regard struck me as more pathological than tactical at times. The view I tease out in my forthcoming book on Obama and the economy (which you can pre-order here) is that Obama’s bipartisanship has roots in his organizing days in Chicago, where he saw the ugly side of political tribalism up close and decided he wanted no part of it.
But there’s still another explanation, which has to do with racial stereotypes and double-standards. Simply put, a little-known African-American politician who dabbles in edgy populism risks alienating certain white voters, who will view his populism through the lens of race. However the candidate actually intends it, these voters will treat his rhetoric as evidence that he plans to take from white people and give to black people, and, needless to say, they’ll be nudged along in this assumption by the right-wing media. (Fox et al was pretty good at fanning these fears even when Obama’s rhetoric was about as far from populist as you can get).
Three years into his term, by contrast, most Americans have a fairly detailed portrait of the president. He’s no longer a black man they don’t know, but a person they have a relatively intimate relationship with, at least as public figures go. Many, if not most, probably don’t even think of the president in racial terms anymore.
Which is to say, Obama may have finally embraced populism because he finally can embrace populism, whereas it simply wasn’t politically possible before.
Update: It was criminally negligent of me not to point out that The Atlantic's Chris Orr, my former neighbor here at TNR, was the first to make this argument back in 2010 ... in response to a piece I'd written about Democrats and populism.
Follow me on twitter: @noamscheiber
11 comments
Couldn't agree more with the analysis. If he would have came in firing from jump, Republicans and even some democrats would have framed it in redistributive racial terms and that picture would have stuck with many voters. He had to establish himself as a non danagerous black man who doesn't want to take your taxes and give it to blacks as reperations. (and believe me I know a lot of open-minded white friends who acknowledge that him really being a radical black President looking for "payback" was a deep seated fear they had)
- Archon
January 25, 2012 at 8:31pm
Good analysis, though I think the last paragraph is too hopeful where it says "most Americans [...] probably don’t even think of the president in racial terms anymore". That may be true for most *sensible* Americans but there remains a large cohort, largely congruent with the Tea Party movement, who see him as a fire-breathing clenched-fist revolutionary despite all evidence to the contrary and probably couldn't pick Obama from a lineup with Al Sharpton, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis. One is hesitant to use the r word, and it's not necessarily exactly racism, but there remain quite a few people who just cannot seem to believe that he's as quiet, sober, thoughtful, mannerly, and just plain small-c conservative as he seems.
- boyski
January 25, 2012 at 9:32pm
Good points all.
- arnon
January 25, 2012 at 11:43pm
Good piece. Obama is a very smart politician and a decent person Let's see if the American electorate is smart enough and decent enough to give him a second term. They were stupid enough and mean enough to give Bush a second term, so I don't trust them as far as I can throw 300 million-or-so Americans.
- magboy47.
January 26, 2012 at 12:27am
Obama's populism included a naive but hopeful desire to "end the politics of division", and convince the Republicans to work with the Democrats. He hoped a moderate approach would convince moderate Republicans to join with the Democrats to achieve policies that moderate Republicans had advocated. Policies like RomneyCare, ending the wars, restoring sufficient financial oversight to prevent CDO-Crisis-II. Instead, he found to his astonishment, that there WERE no moderate Republicans anymore. His consensus approach was used by the Republicans to get compromises from him, which were then rejected, and even spun as "not compromises" at all. Then he lost the 2010 mid-terms, to a group of Tea-Party Republicans more intransigent than before. He's finally concluded hat he needs a more progressive, confrontational tone, willing to move forward DESPITE Republican opposition to everything he proposes whether THEY once liked it or not. This is appropriate NOW, because for three years the Republicans have been demonstrating their uniform opposition. It would not have been appropriate to come out of the gate in January 2009 assuming uniform Republican opposition, because that had not been demonstrated at that time. It's appropriate now (perhaps quite late) because Republicans HAVE clearly demonstrated that's what they're going to do, unless they're kicked out of office. If America is going to continue to move forward, that's what has to happen. And Obama needs to present to America a clear case that Republican intransigence is damaging our recovery, so America can make a clear choice in November.
- AllanL5
January 26, 2012 at 8:45am
A very good piece, and a great job of compressing a complex argument into a very short format. I agree with boyski that sensible voters can now look beyond Obama's race and don't buy into the caricature of him as Stokely Carmichael, while the Tea Party types can't be disabused of that notion no matter what Obama says or does (it is not a coincidence that the bulk of Tea Partiers are between 50 and 80, which means that they came of age during the racial turbulence of the era between Brown v. Board of Education and Watergate). However, those voters don't have the numbers to decide Presidential elections on their own -- as 2008 showed, those voters can't even come close to deciding Presidential elections by themselves. On the other hand, even many sensible voters would have been put off by an Obama who turned populist from the start, as it would have lent credence or at least plausibility to the right-wing caricature before those voters got to know him and his style. This is something that leftish commentators somehow always miss about Obama and his lack of populism until now -- in their circles, a black politician from the big city who castigates wealthy plutocrats and obstructionist Southern politicians is doing God's work and they are proud to support him. In the circles in which most other voters move -- including the bulk of Democrats, Democrat-aligned independents and other voters who can be persuaded to vote for a Democrat, especially a black one from the big city -- this language carries a whiff of the old racial mau-mauing, Jesse Jackson-style demands for income redistribution to minority groups and the racial spoils system of big-city government. A black Democrat on the national stage has to fight back against the legacy of the post-Civil Rights Era political structure of urban America; for better or for worse, he (or she) has to earn the trust that is granted to a similarly situated white politician.
- wildboy
January 26, 2012 at 9:42am
I agree with your point about race. I've been pondering for a while the effect you describe in this article--a gradual national desensitization to the president's race. I don't know if it's real. Some of the vitriol coming out of the red states makes that notion seem naive. However, perhaps the fact that the sky didn't fall--as a result of a black president and his policies--has reshaped people's attitudes about Barack Obama. Certainly not overnight. I find it frustrating that the media and our political discourse refuse to discuss President Obama's race. In doing so, we at times legitimize the president's detractors most hypocritical and senseless criticisms. Republican politicians and pundits now oppose policies they once supported simply because Obama proposes them. Why is that? In other words, the only atmospheric shift has been the election of a black Democrat to the presidency. Furthermore, as we learned with the Beer Summit, President Obama is basically barred from having any opinion whatsoever on race-related issues. To even hint that race influences Obama's critics--in conservative and liberal circles (see Melissa Harris-Perry's article for The Nation)--draws immediate accusations of playing the race card. And yet, it's irrational and unrealistic to suggest that racism plays absolutely no role in people's opposition to (or high expectations of) President Obama. Though it may sound trite, I'll be interested to see how the history books will describe the issue of race in Obama's presidency. We no longer have the superficial marks of institutional racism that we had during segregation and the Jim Crow era. It's not like people will look at pictures of 2012 and think that it was a really racist time (except for some Tea Party rallies, maybe). But, despite that, will Jim DeMint be regarded as a backward redneck who didn't want to see a black president succeed? Or will they just say that DeMint justifiably disagreed with every single one of Obama's policies? Who knows.
- maxhencke
January 26, 2012 at 10:12am
I don't think Obama's race has a lot to do with the uniform opposition of the entire Republican party. Sure, there's some racist idiots in the Tea-Party willing to play that card. But that's only a minor part of the opposition. The major part of the opposition comes from Fox-News/Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck/Tea-Party propaganda concepts of the Democratic Party and Socialism and Supply-Side Economics and the role of the Federal Government. From that point of view, anything that raises taxes at all is evil. Anything that maintains the role of the Federal Government in anything but the Military is evil. Anything that maintains the social safety net is evil. It's a morally corrupt argument, that demonizes its opponents as evil, almost regardless of what their policies are. And 40% of America gets their news from Fox News and believes it. This is not racist. This is the culmination of the Republicans desperately trying to make their anti-Progressive agenda sound like a good idea, and using blatant propaganda to do so. And as the Tea-Party demonstrates, increasingly marginalizing themselves as they do so.
- AllanL5
January 26, 2012 at 1:27pm
Remember Sarah Palin? (If you don't, stop reading here and go count your blessings and keep taking you meds, or "meds," if you get my drift.) When it became apparent that she was monstrously unqualified to get anywhere near the White House, even as visitor, and liberals pointed this out, conservatives rose as one to say that liberals weren't really worried about her qualifications for office, but instead disliked her because she was a heartland Christian Mom who didn't abort her special needs baby (as, of course, any self-respecting liberal would have done). She was "persecuted," which Continetti was able to spin into a whole book, and a victim of snobbery, as J Rubin contended in a few posts eviscerated here by good old Jon Chait. Okay. If this is the standard (a Weekly Standard, if you will), then a substantial amount of criticism directed at Obama has to be because of his race, not a reasonable reaction to his presidency or his policies. Right? What else could it be? Particularly if we view them in the worst light possible, which is the only way that conservatives ever view anything liberals say or do. That said, like a lot of liberals, I'm not sure it gets us anywhere to determine how much of the irrational hatred of Obama is due to race and not some other irrational reason or reasons. I'd love an election where the "r" word was never spoken, even in response to obvious provocations, because I don't think it's ever very helpful. It would be even better if the right dropped their culture war crap, but of course, that's not going to happen.
- GeoffG
January 26, 2012 at 2:29pm
Very good piece, Noam, even though I don't totally agree with it...if I fully understand it. That is, if you're saying that Obama intended to go justifiably populist all along, but couldn't do so until recently because of his race, I disagree. The reasons for his caution in taking on the Republicans certainly included how Americans would perceive an aggressive black man talking very tough, but also flowed from his conciliatory personality, his resulting approach to governance, the strategic mistakes he made regarding the budget stimulus and financial reform (owing largely to his poor choice of advisers on these fronts), similar mistakes regarding health care reform, etc. If on the other hand you're simply saying that the racial issue was one of the many factors involved in charting his first term, I'm wholly on board. I do think that he could have taken a Reaganesque approach to the opposition by being very firm in substance while genial in style, and that his presidency has suffered by being excessively conciliatory in both style and substance. AllanL makes a good point re Fox/Limbaugh/etc. going after Obama simply because he's a Democrat rather than because of his race. Sure, they exploit his race in attacking him, but they'd be attacking Hillary or any other Democratic president (including decorated veteran Wesley Clark if he'd won in 2004) at least as harshly. One thing to be said for Obama's approach is that, as bad as the venomous attacks are, he deflects them somewhat by being so conciliatory. That's why his personal popularity ratings remain higher than his job performance ones.
- Thunderroad
January 26, 2012 at 3:05pm
I'm not saying that race is the only reason why Republicans oppose Obama. Certainly not. My point is that we're not allowed to say that race has "anything" to do with opposition to Obama; people get defensive immediately. We look for policy-based explanations at all times. We try to say that Republicans and Democrats just have immense policy differences--and that's all. That's why they can't support President Obama and the Democrats' agenda. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich surges in the polls and actually wins in South Carolina for, in part, calling President Obama the "biggest food stamp president in history." No, my point isn't to say that race is the entire reason--or even most of the reason why Obama has faced nonstop intransigence and obstruction. But I do think it's crazy that we're so tense over the issue of the president's race--and perhaps race in general--that we have to constantly pretend it's a practically non-existent element in the political atmosphere. That's just absurd.
- maxhencke
January 26, 2012 at 4:05pm