Unlike many, I don’t think that diaries praising or criticizing Mr. Obama or his administration are unhealthy or detrimental. To the contrary, they are normal and helpful. The tendency is to write diaries either for or against. I’m hoping to avoid that trap; although you may well find this diary more critical than praising.
The proximate cause of this diary is Phil Sizemore’s fine Defending the Obama Administration's Record from yesterday, where he says:
From the beginning of his administration, there has been a perennial flaring up of tensions between President Obama and the liberal wing of our common party. … I am writing tonight to defend what I consider to be this administration's considerable record of accomplishment.
He goes on to cite ARRA, PPCACA, financial reform, and other outcomes. To this, I have already written a long comment, which got the reply, “If you wanted to post a diary of your own there is a space for that.” Indeed.
I’m going to post that comment below, in its entirety, but first let me say that my opinion of those that are either completely for the President or against him (from the progressive side) are not diminished by what they say about him. They can be, however, considerably diminished by what they say about other members of Daily Kos or the progressive community in general.
Many of the comments I see on these diaries remind me of a wonderful sketch by Monty Python in which a man goes into what is obviously a house of ill repute, where he is abused and finally gets an argument. At length, he complains (more or less, quoting from memory):
This isn’t an argument! An argument is not just the automatic gainsaying of whatever the other person says! And argument is a connected series of statements intended to support A PROPOSITION!!!
At the risk of not having any comments to this diary, please bear that in mind if you reply. Thank you!
In the interest of saving you a lot of reading, here’s a brief synopsis of my points about the Obama Administration and its accomplishments/failures to date:
ARRA: Failure. Did not address the structural problems in the economy, which come from globalization. Included tax cuts, which are bad for the economy and the deficits, and unwarranted.
Rule of Law: Abject failure. Continues the Bush/Cheney policy of attacking democracy. Fails to even attempt to hold prior administration officials accountable for their considerable crimes.
PPACA: Failure, moves in the wrong direction. The only feasible way to get affordable, universal coverage in the U.S. is through some kind of single-payer or an even stronger public plan. Puts money into for-profit healthcare, where the cost structure is too high to ever reach the goal, meanwhile lining the pockets of the people most opposed to reform with money and managing to take away liberty at the same time.
Nuclear arms reduction: Success. Of course, it’s still a plan, but every nuke we put away is one less that can accidentally go off and kill millions or billions of people. If he gets this moved in any substantial degree closer to implementation, he’ll be fully deserving of a second Nobel Peace Prize. (And, you might remember that I think he deserved the first one.)
Financial reform: Success (albeit limited). I have the least expertise here, but from my amateur perspective as merely a consumer of financial services it looks like getting a consumer protection agency for finance is a huge win and a step in the right direction. There remains a lot of criticism (certainly the overall record, which plumped up Goldman Sachs and other reviled institutions, begs to be reversed), but I’m willing to give credit for moving in the right direction. He could still undermine these efforts if he fails to appoint Warran to head that agency, but I agree with Rep. Barney Frank that this is a solid effort, and I think Obama and the Democratic leadership deserve credit for a win here.
There is no penalty to the President for being criticized from the left on his agenda or accomplishments. What are the Republicans going to do? Criticize him for being too liberal?
But my criticisms, such as they are, are not “liberal” or “progressive” criticisms. I’m not a liberal because I like “liberalism”. I’m a liberal because I’ve looked at the issues (sometimes in depth) and the liberal responses are the best responses to the nation’s problems. When I say that the public option is the minimum step necessary to move toward solving the healthcare crisis, I’m not picking a political position. I’m looking at the numbers and the other proposals (tort reform, national competition, and so on) and the only feasible way to get to affordable healthcare on a national basis is to cut out corporate waste and unnecessary administrative costs. That’s not a political position; it’s an economic fact.
The salient problem with the Obama Administration is that it has tried to find political solutions to problems where actual solutions are what’s called for. You may well say that the actual solution (a public option) is not politically feasible, but I will then ask you for proof. And, what can you offer? Nothing. Because it wasn’t tried.
Let me be extremely clear. I believe a public option was politically feasible. I’ll give you a reason. (“An argument is a connected series of statements…”.) All polls across the country showed that a majority of the American people supported a public option. The President made his deals with the healthcare companies. He tried to make his deals with the Republicans in Congress. He forgot something. He should have been making his deals with the American people. He should have taken the first guy in Congress, R or D, that said he was opposed to the public option (Max Baucus would have been a good candidate) and gone to their district or state (Montana) and talked to the people there. He should have gone right to that guy’s constituents (or gal’s constituents, in the case of Maine) and talked directly to them about why the public option was critical to getting affordable, universal coverage. And, that is exactly how you make something like the public option politically feasible. Because when the Baucus’s of the Senate get that their political survival is contingent on voting for something, they will, in fact, vote for it.
So, in my opinion, he’s missed a huge opportunity in his early administration. And, he’d better start making his deals with the people of the country, not the politicians in Washington.
Do I hate Obama? Not the least. He is still enormously charismatic and he has a lot of stellar qualities I admire and respect. His election was one of the happiest days of my political life, not because of what it said about him, per se, but because of what it said about our country. I was never under the illusion that he was a progressive (let alone a “liberal”), but I did think that he would allow liberal proposals to make their way through if they were really the right solution for the country. It appears I was wrong on that. His administration has turned into what I feared would happen if Hillary Clinton made it to the White House: the second Bill Clinton administration. What I hate is New Democrat politics, which are a rejection of traditional Democratic values. What I particularly hate is his acceptance of a soft dictatorship in this country, something that confirms the worst of the Bush Administration and is a real threat to democracy. Perhaps he isn’t strong enough, or he doesn’t have the backing he needs, or maybe he just doesn’t have the clarity he requires to change those things. But he’d better. The problem isn’t that he isn’t liberal or progressive enough. The problem is that by seeking a middle ground he is objectively missing the policies we need to solve critical problems, some of them existential problems that must be solved for the United States to endure.
In the end, my opinion will not prevail, nor will yours, nor Obama’s, nor that of any other single person. The course will be set by the system. That’s as it should be. The system works well when it’s not undermined or tampered with, and its result is generally wiser than that of any individual person. (George Bush would have done well to have considered that when he made the more-or-less unilateral decision to crush Iraq.) That system functions best when everyone participates. Do not be put off by what I say or what anyone else says. Speak out. Publish your opinion. Stand up for it. That is what will serve our world the best.
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Here’s my comment in reply to Phil Sizemore’s diary:
I think it's only fair to point out that several of the things this administration has pushed are failures. They aren't just a disappointment to "the liberal wing of our common party." They are failures for the country. We could, possibly, forgive him for disappointing us if it were for the good of the country. But, objectively, many of these initiatives simply fail to achieve their objectives or go in the wrong direction.
Let's start with ARRA. It included tax cuts. Tax cuts at this time are extremely bad. One of the chief reasons that we went into such a deep recession was because of the Bush tax cuts. This flattened the tax code, which allowed money to drain out of the working part of the economy. Of course, the recession is cyclic and there are many causes, including an overly greedy financial sector. But, the severity of the recession is due in large part to the tax cuts.
Democrats should never again be stupid enough to stand for tax cuts. Taxes are not too high. Incomes are too low. A huge problem with our economy is that both parties (with the Republicans leading the charge, and Democrats cowering behind) are bottom-line-focused. When you get bottom-line-focused, you get your profits by cutting costs. The natural result of cutting costs is that you eventually have no economy--you've cut it all away. Cutting means failing. The tax cuts were a failure, and any more tax cuts will be a failure.
The other failure in ARRA is that it assumes that the problem is a recession. The Obama Administration tried to address this with a stimulus. It makes sense to treat a recession with a stimulus. But the main problem is not the recession (which is cyclical). It's the lack of wealth-creating jobs. (You can think of manufacturing jobs when I say “wealth-creating jobs”, but many other jobs create wealth. For example, mining and agricultural jobs also create wealth.) You cannot get these back simply with a stimulus. You have to restructure the economy. This is a structural problem. Unless you are prepared to regulate globalization, you cannot bring wealth-creating jobs back to the country. You will always have a lack of manufacturing jobs and other wealth-creating jobs. Unless a country is creating wealth it doesn't have the means to manage and pay off debt, and eventually it becomes impoverished. The Obama Administration doesn't even have the right diagnosis for the problem, so how can they have the right fix?
So, the ARRA was and is a failure of policy. It shortchanged the American people. It has nothing to do with right or left, conservative or liberal, up or down. It has to do with getting the policy right. The Obama Administration apparently thinks of things as political problems. This blinds them to finding the right solutions because when the right solution comes up (as it did here) from a liberal or progressive proposal, it comes into their blind spot and they don't recognize it for what it is. They discount it and try to reach some sort of compromise. These are real problems that require real solutions, not just political compromises.
You didn't mention his complete and abysmal failure on the rule of law, either. We need to hold officials accountable for their crimes. But the Obama Administration did nothing to challenge the chief architects of some of the most heinous crimes in U.S. history: war crimes, felony federal crimes, and serious breaches of constitutional rights. This is a complete and abject moral failure that cannot be pardoned. It is not a failure against liberals. It's a failure to protect the country from loss of democracy. It hurts everyone, including people in other countries. This isn't a left-right issue. It's simply a place where the Obama Administration has not lived up to its sworn duty to protect the Constitution. It undermines their moral authority across the board. For this, in particular, I give the administration very, very low marks.
Then there's the healthcare debacle. This is also worse than ARRA because not only did they not pick the right policy, they picked a policy that moves the country in the wrong direction.
The stated goal of healthcare reform was "affordable, universal coverage". Obama campaigned on a public option. It was a point of differentiation between him and other Democratic candidates. His election was a mandate from the people of the country to get a public option. The Obama Administration opposed the public option once in office, going back on Obama’s word. The proof of this is that he personally campaigned for Blanche Lincoln in the Democratic primary. It is therefore unequivocal that he was opposed to the public option once he became President.
Why is a public option important? It's not important for political reasons. It's important because it moves us toward fixing the healthcare system. It is the minimum necessary step toward a real solution to the healthcare crisis, and without it (or something stronger) healthcare reform fails.
Why is the public option the right direction? Because it’s the only feasible way to cut costs enough to get an affordable system. Only a single-payer system (or something more radical) will cut costs enough to get you there; and a public option is the minimum step necessary to move in that direction.
We are currently paying about 17.6% of GDP for healthcare, but we need to be paying 15% or less. We have to do that to have a competitive healthcare system, one that can compete with our trading partners. (I use the term "partners" loosely.) They are all paying around 15% (or less). And, healthcare became a political issue when the healthcare sector started soaking up more than 15% of GDP. That's because it starts to take too much money away from other sectors. It puts a damper on the economy because it is pulling in money that would otherwise be going to food, clothing, housing, transportation--you know, essentials.
At the same time, it is largely non-productive money. It's a net expense. When money goes to buy a car, then the consumer feels like they got something for their money, something that improves the quality of their life. When they spend it on healthcare, they feel like they are having something taken away from them. Yes, good health is important, even critical. But spending money on it is just not the same as spending it on a bicycle. When you spend on healthcare and you are healthy, you feel like you’ve just broken even, not gotten ahead.
So, for a variety of cogent reasons, affordable means “spending 15% of GDP on healthcare, or less.”
How do we get to 15% and cover everyone? Well, first you have to cut about $650 billion from current healthcare costs. Because you have to get the per-person costs down to where, if you multiply by 310 million people, you come to 15%. But, you can't do that if you put money into for-profit healthcare. That's because you have to pay for corporate waste. You have to pay that extra (minimum) 15% overhead for profits, excessive executive pay, and really unnecessary marketing costs. (This 15% is now baked into the system with the medical cost ratios. So, in a sense, that’s the best-case scenario for corporate waste. Traditionally, it’s been even worse.) And then you have to pay the 15% for administrative costs, most of which are also unnecessary. Because we know that in a public system we are looking at about 3-4% administrative costs. So, you can also knock off about 12% from the administrative costs if you have a public system instead of a for-profit private one.
The net of this is that the cost structure for for-profit healthcare is too high to get to 15%. In fact, if you just include another 30 million people in for-profit healthcare, where you have at least $10K per person costs, then you jack up the total costs of healthcare in this country another 2%, putting you at roughly 20% of GDP. And that's the direction of PPACA: pushing up costs instead of cutting them (rather drastically) to get a competitive healthcare system--one that can compete with Britain, Germany, France, China and the rest.
As opposed to single-payer or some form of publicly-funded healthcare. Which avoids the corporate overhead and reduces administrative costs, perhaps getting us that $650 billion of cuts to current costs we would need to be able to provide coverage for everyone. The direction of PPACA is clear: toward for-profit healthcare and away from a single public healthcare system; and therefore away from affordable, universal coverage and toward corporate waste. It’s a financial failure. And, in failing, it sucks money out of the parts of the economy that provide essentials, thus holding back economic growth. It’s anti-competitive, on an international level.
And that is just the financial side. On the financial side we see we are headed in the wrong direction. The right direction is some kind of single-payer plan. Remember this question: "Why is a public option important?" The answer is because it moves you toward a single-payer plan. A single-payer plan is a way to cut out corporate waste and get the cost structure down to where we can achieve 15% of GDP and cover everyone. In other words, a single-payer plan gets you to the solution, but what the Obama Administration did was move us further away from a solution. And, to top it off, because they are pumping billions more dollars into for-profit healthcare, they are lining the pockets of the people who have every incentive to avoid further reform. By doing it this way, they literally made it harder to get to a proper solution.
And, on top of that, they abused the Constitution to do it. They built it all on individual mandates. They claim that this is a power granted by the Commerce Clause. That's just hokum. Think about it. If you are not participating in commerce, how does the Commerce Clause mandate that you get insurance? (Clearly, it doesn't.)
Yeah, I know. There are plenty of people (even lawyers and members of Congress) that will swear on a stack of Bibles that there is a precedent and that it's all proper. But, when you go look at that precedent, what you find is that it was a stretch even to get to it. (For what it's worth, the precedent said that farmers that grew crops prohibited under federal law were subject to the law, even though they said they did not intend to sell their crops on the market. The significant difference between this and a person being forced to buy healthcare insurance is that the farmers arguably took an action that made them part of commerce, whereas individuals are taking no action when they don't buy insurance. Realistically, though, the farming decision was just made because we were in a depression and a decision the other way would have caused major economic hardships. That’s not true for healthcare. There are plenty of other ways for the government to get everyone coverage. Individual mandates are not necessary to get the objective.)
This is not an issue to be taken lightly. This is a clear expansion of government power into our private lives. It is anti-democratic. It's bad for the American people, not just liberals or progressives. People that support the President on this should perhaps do a little soul searching to see if they like the idea of having more of their individual liberties taken away from them before they support this policy.
So, on the record, ARRA is not the right solution and PPACA is a bad idea that moves us in the wrong direction.
That said, there are things to like about both of these initiatives. (So, now, finally, I come to the good part, I suppose.) A stimulus was necessary because we had and have a recession. We need more stimulus, in fact. But, we definitively do not need tax cuts as part of it. And, it should be part of a larger package that addresses the structural economic problem. In particular, we need something that will regulate globalization and stop job losses in critical wealth-creating jobs. I suggest an international minimum wage as a necessary part of that. I do not suggest a return to tariffs or other restrictive measures. We need to manage globalization, not try to stop it (a futile idea, in any case).
Same for PPACA. There's a lot to like. The community healthcare clinics, for example. The exchanges. Money for Medicaid. Ends to rescissions and discrimination on pre-existing conditions. Many etcs. Get rid of the bad part and keep the good part. Create a public option.
Now, what has Obama's administration done that's worth praise? I would put his efforts to rein in nuclear weapons at the top of the list. As I've said before, this is a huge step that is completely underrated by the media. It could mean that your life has already been spared from annihilation because of changes this brings about, either directly or indirectly.
The financial reform package also is worth praise. It isn't the be-all and end-all of financial reform, but it is a healthy step in the right direction. Obama could, of course, blow it by appointing someone other than Elizabeth Warren to head the consumer protection agency. But, even with that, at least this was a step in the right direction.
I would love to be able to say, "Well, Obama has his faults, but he's moving us in the right direction." I'd love to be able to support him and praise him. But, quite frankly, his failures are substantial and real. I can't back a President that I don't feel is moving the country in the right direction. I can suffer him not doing things the way I think they should be done. What I cannot suffer is when he objectively fails the country on matters of extreme national importance. If you look at his record on the rule of law and on healthcare, in particular, then you can see how far off this administration is.
And if they can't get these more-or-less domestic issues correct, how on earth will they deal with something like climate change? Well, the record on that's pretty clear, too. And, I'm not impressed.