From the depths of the Great Depression in March 1933 the poet Robert Sherwood posed a fundamental question to the new President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of the American people:
"Are we sure that you have fixed your eyes on
A goal beyond the politician’s ken?
Have you the will to reach the far horizon
Where rest the hopes of men?"
After Tuesday's loss in Massachusetts, at this crucial historical juncture, the American people need to pose this same query to President Obama and the Democratic leadership:
Have you the will to reach the far horizon where rest the hopes of the people?
The loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to a Republican for the first time since the 1950s underlines a fundamental consequence of the Democrats' sleepwalking through 2009. And the resulting message to Democrats is this: Either wake up to the need for a fundamental transformation of strategy (into one that is more assertively progressive and populist, and committed to the fight!) Or get ready to become a lame-duck party on the way to a one-term Obama Presidency.
During the four long months between the election of 1932 and Roosevelt’s inauguration in March of 1933, President Hoover did everything he could to try to tempt Roosevelt into abandoning his ambitions for the New Deal. As Arthur Schlesinger observed about this moment in The Crisis of the Old Order: "In the name of ‘cooperation,’ Hoover proposed that Roosevelt repudiate" most of the major policies that would make up the New Deal.
In response, President Elect Roosevelt made clear that he was not interested in this kind of "cooperation." After a firm repudiation of Republican appeals, with his Inauguration Roosevelt launched the greatest hundred days of institutional reform legislation this country has ever seen, and thereby laid the foundation for the New Deal.
President Obama’s first year, on the other hand, raises serious questions about how much of the potential for significant reform (and hopes inspired for a second New Deal) may have been surrendered in the months before his Inauguration by two parallel forms of compromise: (1) his decision to recruit for his economic/financial team representatives of the very financial elite that had set us up for the 2008 financial crisis and recession; and (2) his willingness to seek "cooperation" with a Republican party that had no interest in any constructive work with the Democratic leadership.
Instead of accepting the political reality of Republican intransigence and beginning day one of his administration with a clear plan to counter and reverse the terrible damage done by eight years of Republican misrule under the Bush administration, the Obama team seemed to have no clear plan for its first year in office beyond a moderate course of economic stimulus to correct the most severe aspects of the financial debacle, a commitment to health reform—without any clear will to fight for a public plan, and a rather bizarre commitment to seeking bipartisan cooperation with a Party that had brought the country to the brink of ruin, and was showing no desire to change its ways.
In a situation where the Democrats had won the most resounding political victory of a generation, and a clear progressive mandate for reversing the horrendous damage done by eight years of Republican misrule, the Obama team seemed more interested in establishing a tone of reconciliation than in fighting to build on the tremendous popular achievement of the Obama victory of 2008.
And because the Obama team so quickly surrendered the tremendous potential of the political victory it had achieved, his team soon found--to its apparent surprise--that the populist anger and energy it had spurned was instead being harnessed by the Republicans—against the middle-of-the-road Obama agenda.
Many inspired by the Obama candidacy had hope his election would bring about a movement for the restoration of a democratic government of, by, and for the people instead of the corporations and banks. But we were all quickly confronted with the reality of a President who had placed into leadership many of the financial whizzes responsible for the financial meltdown, and who appeared to be more interested in appealing to the good graces of a Republican party committed to his failure, than in fighting for a progressive populist agenda that included a strong public health plan.
Instead of launching his Presidency with a strong critique of the last eight years of Republican policy error and misrule, and offering a strong alternative agenda of policies that would reestablish the fundamental principles of a government of the people; & instead of using the historic victory of 2008 to establish a clear progressive agenda for a second New Deal, the Obama team’s somnambulant agenda of 2009 allowed most of the energy and hope of 2008 to be dissipated.
Instead of harnessing the transformative energies he inspired in the American people to fight for a progressive agenda in 2009, the administration allowed these energies to decay into a free floating anger and anxiety that could be harnessed by others for anti-progressive purposes.
While obviously not intended, the consequences of this somnambulant Democratic politics in 2009 are already beginning to manifest—in the victory of Scott Brown. Democratic sleepwalking has allowed the populists on the right to step into the gap and scoop up the vast energies and anger in the country against the deep economic and political inequalities evident to all, in ways that have set the stage for these libertarian-right populists to become the insurgent force for the election year of 2010!
Only a sleepwalking Democratic Party could have squandered, in one year, the great opportunity for progressive populist renewal offered by the Obama victory of 2008.
Now the only question remains: Will the Obama administration and the Democratic Party awaken from its sleepwalking?!
After his victory Tuesday night, Senator Elect Scott Brown summed up a nightmare scenario for Democrats in 2010: "What happened here [in Mass.] tonight can happen all over America."
If the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress do not quickly wake up and develop a progressive spine for taking the battle to the Republicans, rather than continuing to allow the Republicans to run all over them, they will convert Senator Scott Brown into a prophet, and pave their own way to lame-duck status by the end of this year. And they will then be forced to limp through 2011 and 2012 on the way to a one-term Obama presidency--a presidency that will come to be viewed by history as more like the Hoover than the Roosevelt presidency.
But this sorrowful history has not yet been written, and we are not yet condemned to this "Obama as Hoover II" historical trajectory. Everything now depends on how the Obama administration and Democratic leadership respond to the dramatic loss in Massachusetts.
Will the Democrats in Congress become even more cowardly, and lay down to die, as some (Bayh) already seem willing to do? Or will the Obama administration and the rest of the Democratic leadership see the writing on the wall, and transform themselves into a Party of progressive FIGHTERS willing to struggle FOR the people who elected Obama to lead us in a new direction?
President Obama and Democratic leaders, in the words of the poet, the American people now ask you:
[Can we trust] that you have fixed your eyes on
A goal beyond the politician’s ken?
Have you the will to reach the far horizon
Where rest the hopes of your country's people?
Our hope has not yet completely died, but it withers a bit more every day...