I am pretty even-tempered. I have had enough good fortune in life that I don't have to treat things with deadly seriousness most of the time, and I've approached my very modest involvement in politics the same way. While I try never to forget that politics is, or ought to be, an instrument for the betterment of the world and particularly the improvement of the life-chances of people with lousy life-chances, my day-to-day connection to politics is based on the intellectual interest it holds for me, and the (virtual) social aspect of communities like Daily Kos. Temperamentally, I'm more or less where I want to be.
So I surprised myself on Tuesday night, when in reply to a commenter who linked to CNN.com and USA Today stories about President Obama's Monday meeting with the Republican congressional leadership, I said straight-up that our president is an idiot. Far from waking up refreshed and back to my old self on Wednesday morning, I was and have remained firmly committed to that view. WTF?
First, some history. I was never active in politics (beyond voting, and volunteering as a college student for George McGovern in New Hampshire in 1984) until 2007-2008, when I was seized with enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton's campaign. Yes, that's right: the lumbering Establishment "done deal" campaign roused me. And that was before I was even aware that she had any opponents.
What did I see in Clinton? There was, to be sure, an identity-politics element: I have a daughter and a woman as president would have been very cool for her, every single day. That aside, I liked what many people claimed not to like about her; that she didn’t lead with emotion, that she preferred briefing books to pressing the flesh, that she would do anything to win, that she never apologized and was only one twitch away from reducing her interlocutor to tears. That she never spoke doom and gloom about this country; that she believed all of our problems could, long story short, be solved by government more or less in the old-timey way. That she could eviscerate opponents one moment and laugh about it (with them!) the next.
Thusly summed up, I shouldn't have been surprised that she had opponents! Barack Obama wasn't the complete negation of all that--who doubts that he too would prefer the company of a briefing book to that of 3000 people in the rain?--but he did negate some key parts of it, at least for someone in the same party. For all of the talk of triangulation as a Clintonian disease, Obama offered literal triangulation: while the bulk of Democrats and the bulk of Republicans argued back and forth from points A and B, he offered a transcendent C in both policy and politics. Washington would find new solutions, the solutions of recent Democratic and Republican administrations having been found wanting; and this would happen with a new politics of mutual and patriotic respect, with lobbyists substituted in influence by a gently mobilized populace.
From one candidate, more of the same, just better (and better because more vicious, if need be); from the other candidate, something never before seen, arrived at by means never before tried or even much conceived. I understood and shared Hillary Clinton's frustration--this was like being defeated by the anti-gravity candidate. She was Ray Patterson to Obama's Homer Simpson. (I'm sure you remember that episode.) But defeated she was, in slow motion thanks to how we choose candidates, dragged ever deeper by the most incompetent political henchmen since...well, let's just say it's a good thing "since" means you look backwards rather than forwards. It was excruciating for me in two ways, because losing sucks and because how she lost semi-destroyed my belief in her competence, but Obama was someone that any sensible vanquished Democrat could appreciate as a unique talent and as someone who would certainly win in November. (The non-sensible PUMAs went elsewhere, to a crazy world in which Obama wasn't Democrat enough for them, so they would vote Republican.)
And while Clinton's defeat made me question my adulation, Obama's victory made me question my semi-contempt. Politics starts with winning, and he showed he could win; moreover, his appeal, while lost on me, was oddly compelling to a very wide spectrum of Americans. Between the evident success and the confidence that his advisers inspired vs. Clinton's, it would have been more churlishness than I could manage not to be enthusiastic about him. So I was. I even permitted myself the speculation that Obama's most outlandish claim--that he could demobilize Republicanism without a full frontal assault--might really be true. Maybe he really could change the game, as opposed to demanding a do-over of the old game on better terms. And if that didn't work out, he had Biden and Rahm (for starters) to help him play regular, soul-destroying two-dimensional chess.
I objected to TARP when it was put forward, still under Bush’s watch, but I agree with Matthew Yglesias and some others that it’s been largely vindicated: at least in terms of direct transfers to banks the government got us away from a total systemic collapse (which would have been super-awful for ordinary people) for much less than we had any right to expect. (I don’t have any patience for the tendentious summing of overnight liquidity loans to get "23 trillion dollar bailouts," just so you know.) But where I also agree with Yglesias is that Obama was wrong to pass up a unique moment when it came to calling the Masters of the Universe to account in any meaningful or even symbolic way. This, more than anything else, made a defensible bailout look indefensible, and indeed the White House has done a singularly bad job at defending it. But in the context of a still-imposing President and White House vs. Republicans, this was all forgivable stuff as far as I was concerned. Likewise the government’s useless HAMP program—actually the only recovery program that didn’t even meet its modest goals—was a source of mere annoyance rather than serious disenchantment to me, though for the unusual reason (by Daily Kos standards) that I’m relatively unsympathetic to people in foreclosure trouble. Just so you don’t think I’m just another progressive Obamaphobe!
I thought the stimulus was a wasted opportunity, and it was my first inkling that Obama would actually pass up viable options for thinking outside the box both politically and policy-wise. Even the stripped-down stimulus number McCaskill and Nelson would tolerate was a humongous amount of money, and to the extent that it wasn’t nearly what Krugman or Roubini estimated would be necessary to make a significant dent in our demand and employment crises, it should have been especially important to spend that money in novel ways—ways that would guide our economy towards what we all know it needs to look like in the future. But the shovel-ready fetish, and the involvement of the usual interest groups (of course civil engineers think our decaying roads and bridges are Job #1...so what?), gave us a stimulus that produced employment so expensively as to resemble a Republican parody of Keynesianism, and it didn’t push our economy towards transformation. The emphasis on physical over social infrastructure favored white males over other demographics, and the afterthought nature of subsidies to state and local governments (where most social programs live), such that the McCaskill’s stupid desire to take $100B off (just to say that she could) hit that aspect more than any other, made the stimulus worthless to our most vulnerable people. So that was a big one for me, though it was pointless to criticize it in a sustained way around here.
There’s plenty more I could say about actual policies—Afghanistan, the BP spill, the lack of any sustained review of obnoxious Bush-era regulations (something that Clinton, knowing what she knew about the importance of those regulations, promised to do from Day One), and so on. In the interests of time and space and reader stamina I’ll skip ahead to taxes, because that’s key for me. In that regard the Republicans and I have a lot in common. Taxes are people’s money, and as Danny DeVito memorably noted, "everyone loves money—that’s why they call it money." But taxes are the #1 symbolic and substantive statement of what government is for; yes, even more than what government spends on, because spending is refracted through all sorts of inefficiencies unless you’re talking direct benefits payments, while taxes are (again, as Republicans correctly claim) a "taking." Any suggestion that the White House would extend tax breaks for the super-wealthy is a deal-breaker for me because it’s a concrete statement that Obama values giving the marginal dollar to the super-wealthy over giving it to the unemployed or a hundred other categories of people who have a superior moral claim. And, of course, a superior macroeconomic claim since they’d put it into demand while the super-wealthy would not. I’m open to raising the $250K threshold as high as a million, and I’m open to incrementalism in how we treat incomes around the threshold. But the idea that, in a context of huge deficits and huge public needs, there should be no progressivity in how we deal with tax breaks is too vile to contemplate.
But even here, on this most important issue (for me), there’s policy and there’s politics, and it’s the political failure of the White House that fills me with dread and exasperation in a way no isolated policy failure could. President Obama, unlike the President Clinton we had and the other President Clinton we rejected, sees bipartisanship and compromise as good in themselves rather than as tools to be deployed towards policy goals, and only as much as required. Granted, none of the three see things as starkly as most of us since, bottom line, they’re substantively closer to Republicans on these issues than we are. (For instance, Obama isn’t as viscerally opposed to tax cuts for the super-wealthy as we are.) But when you compare Obama’s visible notion of compromise to Bill Clinton’s it’s clear, at least to me, that Clinton sized up his situation first and compromised second, because compromise was a tool for him rather than a value; whereas Obama gives up his position first, and then keeps on giving, because he genuinely values 10% of a loaf achieved that way vs. 20% or 50% achieved the old-fashioned way. Why he believes this is a mystery to me, and it could well be that I’m giving him too much credit—he could just be, generically, an extremely untalented politician—but that’s how it looks to me without benefit of any privileged information.
It’s one thing to try this approach, even trying it past the point where most people would assess their results and give it up. Someone’s got to be more persistent than the median, after all. But it’s quite another thing to keep with it in the face not only of clear evidence that it doesn’t work, but explicit statements from Republican leaders that it won’t work. In a perverse way, Obama’s bipartisanship premised on respect for his Republican interlocutors doesn’t even do them the courtesy of taking their words at face value. Bill Clinton was comfortable with the notion of politics as a game, a stylized activity in which people did things for effect and no bad vibe was more than a smile and a cigar from being undone. This is what rubbed many people the wrong way about Clintonism, the fact that neither Clinton felt antagonism in their bones. But now we have Obama, who resists the notion that it’s a game, who wants congruence between politics and life, and therefore approaches politics with kid gloves because he can’t contemplate a world of extreme personal hostility between political actors. It’s fascinating, or at least I could bask in how fascinating it was if it weren’t so damaging.
To me the immediate question, on Obama’s end, is how ingrained this view of politics really is. If it’s just one more bad day or week from falling away like the proverbial scales from his eyes, that would be awesome and I’d gladly pretend none of this ever happened. (No harm done, except to 60 current or would-be Democratic members of Congress and I hated half of them anyway.) I buried my primary-era animosity towards him, I can do it again and I suspect most of us can. But if this view of politics is the real, immutable Obama, I don’t see how any of us can stick with him, even if we’re policy centrists. This is something I tried to get at with my previous diary, a fantasia about Obama running for re-election as an independent in 2012. What he’s doing is, at best, good strategy for a president as isolated individual and if that’s what floats his boat, he should do it without dragging our party down to despair and irrelevance. And let’s face it, that way he can do what he seems to have relished back in 2008, when as a candidate he could indulge the isolated-individual fantasy: trashing Democrats and Republicans more or less equally.
You can see I'm going back and forth here, and you can also see (by its absence) that I consider it way too early to think about what we'd do in late 2011 and early 2012 if we keep getting the Bad Obama. I'm optimistic by nature and that optimism still feebly extends to Obama because I have seen that he and his team have the political skills to persuade, to cajole, to threaten, and (yes, dear readers) even to defame and sabotage. They just need a political, even philosophical, reorientation to remind them that it's OK. Whether continued failure, or maybe a mold-breaking success (like Pelosi and Reid forcing through a plutocrat-free extension of the tax breaks), or some other kind of epiphany does the trick, I don't really care. If Grijalva and Ellison want to do something absolutely vital over the next couple of weeks, that's the intervention we need to have and they're probably the only people who are both willing to say it and able to demand a hearing.