I think his point is important here. Liberals these days seem to measure the President more by what he hasn't done, rather than by what he has. Then they give, if a bit left-handed, credit to the Republicans for getting what they want.
But what Kevin Drum points out here is that people like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, are doing the easiest, not the best job. They can just say no, again and again. They don't have to come up with a real vision of how to govern, or how to carry out real change.
But Obama? Though his compromises have driven some of us up the wall, he's managed to do much, despite the feckless, dangerous obstruction of the Republicans, and has often put Republicans in a position where they end up dividing against themselves. The reality is that Obama has had one of the most difficult jobs of any recent president in memory.
Which is not to say that he has done a perfect job. But people who say he's not trying aren't looking at the things he's done and achieved.
They're failing to see that very often, it's how you compromise that matters, not whether you compromise.
And what has he got during his time in office?
On the specific issue of the debt ceiling, the obvious thing Obama could have done differently was to insist that it be included as part of the lame duck deal last year. But for all the grief he's gotten over this, it's worth keeping in mind that Obama got a helluva lot out of that deal. In the end, he got a food safety bill, passage of the START treaty, a stimulus package, repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, and a 9/11 first responders bill. Maybe it would have been worth risking all that over inclusion of a debt ceiling increase, but that's hardly an open-and-shut case.
What's more, Obama also won passage during his first two years of a stimulus bill, a landmark healthcare bill that Democrats had been trying to pass for the better part of a century, a financial reform bill, and much needed reform of student loans. And more: a firm end to the Bush torture regime, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a hate crimes bill, a successful rescue of the American car industry, and resuscitation of the NLRB. Oh, and he killed Osama bin Laden too.
The thing I would say is that the world tends towards entropy. It's always easiest to be the idiot knocking other people down, saying now, stubbornly refusing to do anything, with the threat of destroying what other people value.
Put simply, the Republicans can pull this trick because they've gotten so nihilistic. Matching their nihilism, though, would ultimately be a defeat for us. First, it justifies the nihilism from the other side. If we take the Debt ceiling hostage, too, when the time comes, don't we confirm it as a legitimate tactic? And if we confirm it, doesn't it become standard practice?
The hostage taking of the nation's full faith and credit?
Ah, you say, but why pass up all that wonderful power to extort results from our enemies? Because we don't need the crap it would inflict on our nation and our economy. It's sort of like threatening to burndown the house you live in with your brother because of a disagreement over who gets what rooms. Sure, you might win sometimes, but the neighbors are going to visit less when they hear of or see these fights, and one day, somebody's going to say "Fuck it, I'm burning things down."
We need a better kind of politics than that. Trouble is, that better kind of politics doesn't have entropy on its side, it's not as easy as falling off a log. It's real trouble, a real ordeal to create new order, to purify our government of corruption, to undo a system that permits torture and human rights abuses, that plays on people's fears and emotional reactions, rather than dealing with them on the basis of reason. Our way of government is inherently harder, takes more committment, more political creativity, more political courage.
We can't win using their tactics, their ruthless behavior, because at a basic level, it conflicts with how we wish to govern. I know it's the natural impulse, given the results they can get, but what are their results? The debt battle's not made Congress or its current majority more popular, seem more reasonable. It's made that Congress look more dangerous, less deserving of its power.
We should be the ones for punishing that kind of use of power, that cynical abductor's tactic of taking the people's needs for ransom to extort political victories. We should be saying that this is anti-democracy, that this is the tool of cowards and extremists.
Jed Lewison, on the front page, praised Senator McConnell, saying, after a report said that he was cold and calculating:
In other words, Mitch McConnell did his job. Democrats could learn a thing or two from him.
But did he do his job? Is his job merely to manuever for political advantage, or is it to work for the advantage of the Americans who elected him and everybody else? That man, supposedly doing his job, according to Lewison nearly crashed the American economy, and the world financial system with it.
Why, for fuck's sake, are we defining THAT as doing his job? He was certainly playing the game in a very productive way for his side, but that would only be admirable if his actions weren't hurting people.
Sociopaths can often seem very powerful, and it can seem like there's no way to beat them unless we get just as divorced from our scruples as they get. But there's a little secret that most people don't get about such people. As ruthless as they are, they are also reckless. They overstep. They alienate people, after their actions overwhelm their superficial charm.
At the end of the day, people looking between Obama and McConnell will understand that one of them would look out for them, while the other would not, that one would make the hard decisions necessary to wring the best outcome out of a bad situation, while the other would make it worse for his opponents.
Yes, McConnell can get results, but what are they? The blockage of critical legislation? The failure for appointments by the President to get through? The general dysfunction of Congress, and the harsh consequences of that in our economy and our daily lives? This man's results, it should be noted, are precisely the problems so many of us blame Obama for, the gridlock, the dysfunction of government, our inability to get people to the bench, and folks like Elizabeth Warren where we want them.
He's the one people should be blaming for much of what they blame Obama for, because much of the frustration they've experience is about Obama's deal-making, his horse-trading. Essentially, all the things he's done to get things through the Senate in the last Congress. But without the scorched-earth campaign of McConnell, none of that would have been necessary.
McConnell's way of doing business is something we have to defeat, not reward by copying it and legitimizing it. American cannot afford years more of dysfunction. It needs more of what Obama's been doing, more of his care and concern for what happens to people.