I was an early critic of Barack Obama but I've been outflanked, or at least out-adjectived, by some left-liberal critics who denounce him in extravagant terms. Their rhetoric matches that of some of his most enthusiastic supporters. Both groups tend to get personal, as if the President were a friend or lover (he betrayed me/I love him) and have a weakness for hyperbole (he's one of the worst presidents ever/he's one of the best presidents ever.)
The truth is that he’s an ordinary Democratic President: on domestic policy he’s more liberal (less conservative) than his Republican opposition but not dramatically so -- not enough to make him liberal, much less great, and he presides -- willingly, by all signs -- over a foreign policy that is militaristic, imperialistic, and brutal. Here, with what I believe are his last published words before he died, Howard Zinn analyzes the President's first year in office:
As far as disappointments, I wasn't terribly disappointed because I didn't expect that much. I expected him to be a traditional Democratic president. On foreign policy, that's hardly any different from a Republican--as nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike. So in that sense, there's no expectation and no disappointment. On domestic policy, traditionally Democratic presidents are more reformist, closer to the labor movement, more willing to pass legislation on behalf of ordinary people--and that's been true of Obama. But Democratic reforms have also been limited, cautious. Obama's no exception. On healthcare, for example, he starts out with a compromise, and when you start out with a compromise, you end with a compromise of a compromise, which is where we are now...
...[P]eople ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president--which means, in our time, a dangerous president--unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.
The "dangerous" is an indictment less of the President than of the system. And Zinn surely doesn't mean that Obama is mediocre in all ways. Of course he isn’t. He has intelligence, grace, and mental toughness to burn. Yet the irony is that for all his personal extraordinariness, the political output of his presidency has been relentlessly ordinary. This was to be expected. We have a system that self-protectively produces presidents unlikely to challenge it. Noam Chomsky made that point in dramatic fashion several weeks ago while discussing the President's failure to embrace the democratic uprising in Egypt.
AMY GOODMAN: If you were president today, what would you do right now, president of the United States?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, if I were—if I had made it to the presidency, meaning with the kind of constituency and support that’s required to be a president in the United States, I’d probably do what Obama’s doing.
Conservatism is unsurprising in presidents, and it's perhaps especially unsurprising in President Obama. This is the man who, thanks to a racist right-wing and a complicit press, felt it necessary two years into his presidency to provide (more) definitive proof that he is, in fact, an American. And you really thought it he might also tackle the corporate-sponsored imperium?
This is not to excuse President Obama's performance; you don't get points for living down to expectations, and it should never be forgotten that he entered the presidency at a time when the monstrousness and criminality of the big banks made an actual liberal revival conceivable. But we should be clear-eyed about the American presidency because doing so will help clarify what our role as liberals and leftists should be.
Before discussing that question, I'd like to linger on President Obama's ordinariness.
There’s just absolutely nothing about Obama’s approach to the presidency that’s in any way exotic or in need of explanation. He’s a guy with an interesting life story and a totally uninteresting approach to governance. And if anything, his unusual life story and exotic origins push him at the margin to an exaggerated banality since there’s less incentive to try to use policy to make himself more interesting.
At this point in history, conventionality in a Democrat means, on economic policy, the Rubinite brand of neoliberalism that Bill Clinton made popular: a basic friendliness to Wall Street, a fixation on balanced budgets at the expense of social programs, a fealty to "free" trade and other manifestations of U.S and corporate-dominated globalization. His signature accomplishment, the health care plan, in its strengthening of corporate power and its reliance on "market-based" solutions (along with his dealing away the public option) is vintage neoliberalism. As is his education reform agenda.
Had President Obama been inclined to push a more liberal domestic agenda, he had clear antecedents to guide him. The New Deal and the Great Society could've inspired the President to try to limit the power of the BANX, focus on job creation, and make the case that economic inequality, not debt, is the central moral issue our our time.
On foreign policy, however, a liberal, anti-imperial model doesn't exist. Despite superior rhetoric, Dwight Eisenhower built up the U.S. nuclear arsenal and relied heavily on covert CIA operations, including the hit on Mossadeq, which haunts the world to this day. Probably the least violent presidency belonged to Jimmy Carter, who also, relatedly, made human rights a pillar (stated, anyway) of his foreign policy, but even Carter basically drove the National Security State as it was designed to be driven. And so is President Obama.
[I]n many ways, we are not really living through Bush's third term, but the 16th term of the National Security State that was founded by secret presidential directives during Harry Truman's second term. Beginning with the ur-document, NSC-68, these directives mandated a thoroughgoing militarization of the American state, complete with vast secret forces specifically designed to carry out criminal actions – subversion, coups, "black ops," break-ins, kidnappings, torture, assassination programs, gruesome medical experiments: "the dark side, if you will." Not that things were all peaches and cream before then, of course; just ask the Filipinos (or the Cherokee, or the slaves, etc.) But in 1951, the new National Security State raised the war machine budget by 400 percent in a single year. And it has never looked back, not even after the collapse of the Soviet Union – the ostensible reason for devouring the lifeblood and seed-corn of the nation and giving it to war profiteers.
I basically agree with Floyd's forumlation, although it somewhat overlooks the horror of what Bush did. Ostensibly in response to 9-11, he created a worldwide, perpetual, and self-perpetuating war that intensified some of the worst elements of the National Security State. Intensified them permanently, it now seems. The GWOT can't be won and it can't be lost. Its horror lies largely in its undefined scope and indefinite end. For all the horror of, say, FDR's imprisoning Japanese-Americans, it had foreseeable end, a return to "normalcy." The possibility of a return to any kind of pre-9-11 normalcy is remote, thanks to President Obama's continuation (and vindication) of Bush's War of Terror.
But this, too, is what presidents do: use the power they have. So in the name of fighting terrorism, President Obama has escalated the insane war in Afghanistan, detained people indefinitely without trial, ordered assassinations on American citizens, expanded the secret special ops war in dozens of countries, intensified our dirty wars in Yemen and Pakistan, and increased U.S. use of predator drones, which have a nasty habit of killing civilians.
The GWOT also represents an expansion of the National Security State in that it entails a number of abuses related to surveillance. Jack Balkin calls it the National Surveillance State:
Obama has played the same role with respect to the National Surveillance State that Eisenhower played with respect to the New Deal and the administrative state, and Nixon played with respect to the Great Society and the welfare state. Each President established a bi-partisan consensus and gave bi-partisan legitimation to certain features of national state building.
After the Obama presidency, opponents of a vigorous national surveillance state will be outliers in American politics; they will have no home in either major political party. Their views will be, to use one of my favorite theoretical terms, "off the wall."
Nor should this be surprising. The causes that led to the rise of the National Surveillance State and the bureaucratic interests that led to its continuation and expansion, have continued unabated.
Yet, one might hope that the Obama version of the National Surveillance State might turn out to be more benign and friendly to civil liberties than the Bush/Cheney version. To a certain extent this is true, but not by as much as you might think. On several fronts, Obama has continued Bush era policies of preventive detention, surveillance, and protection of state secrets. And in other respects, he has gone further.
That's the cold hard truth. What do we do with this information?
I maintain that it exposes the bankruptcy of supporting President Obama in any sweeping sense, of trying to cast his bad acts in a positive light as opposed to holding them up to the light. We are not and should not be his goddamn election team. (And no, this is not a call to vote against him; unlike some of my ideological fellow travelers, I have little hesitation voting for the major party that doesn't proudly embrace racists, misogynists, and homophobes.) We should be oppositional; to be more precise, we should be principled advocates -- a stance that will often bring us into opposition with the President, whoever he or she is.
President Obama is mediocre, but even if he were much better, it would still be our proper role to promote not the President but principles and policies. Whether he's closer to Hoover or FDR, our basic stance should be the same. The view I'm expressing was uncontroversial in the earlier years of the netroots; but in 2007, a certain appealing candidate emerged and proceeded over the next couple of years to de-fang much of the opposition on the left. Ken Silverstein's 2008 post now looks prescient.
I still can’t muster much enthusiasm for either of the Democratic candidates. There’s a lot to admire in Barack Obama and the excitement he has generated on the campaign trail is genuinely stirring. On the other hand I still don’t know what he really stands for and fear that he’d be a cautious, middle-of-the-road president who’d disappoint his followers. Hillary Clinton is meaner and tougher and that in some ways seems preferable to Obama’s naïve calls for bipartisanship. Also, you know from the get-go what Hillary is all about. Hence, it’s possible to skip the phases of betrayal and disillusionment and go straight to opposition, which is almost always the best place to be in American politics.
Forget the Hillary v. Obama question; Siliverstein's main point, and mine, is that the left should be a check on the establishment. Because of a well-intentioned but misguided desire to support the president (or in some cases a less well-intentioned desire to have access to power), too many of the left have abandoned their rightful role as principled advocates. It should not be our job to apologize for and defend this President's or any president's bad acts.
Anger over the President's performance is understandable. But ahistorical criticism that exaggerates his awfulness or imputes to him unusually dark motives discredits critics and, more importantly, minimizes the work that needs to be done. In case you missed the point of this post, let me stress: it has little to do with President Obama; it's about what the left should be. Barack Obama is an American president, doing his thing. We need to do ours.