I was hooked in by a snappy headline to TIME's "Swampland" site today, where I saw posted a video that I have placed below the fold. In it, President Obama speaks to a bipartisan (though, I often wonder, how bipartisan?) group of students about politics, about accepting compromise, about maturity.
I recognized it as a video offered in response to me earlier this week about something or other, which I didn't take the time to watch. I watched it, came to DKos to check whether anything had been written about it, and found that it was the subject of a heavily commented-upon diary by ThisIsMyTime (courtesy of blackwaterdog's site) this weekend, which I had somehow missed. I thank TiMT for transcribing it; I've included that transcription below the fold (with some editing regarding punctuation, over which reasonable transcribers can disagree), along with the video itself. It's worth discussing -- more today than even last weekend.
It helps me identify what I have been finding disturbing about President Obama.
"If you are only talking to people who you agree with, then politics is going to always going to disappoint you. ... Politics is going to disappoint you. You think about some of the issues we have worked on over the last couple of years, I think the college Republicans here would say that I was pretty liberal President. Right? But if you read the HuffingtonPost (laughter from the students), you would think that I was some Right Wing tool of Wall Street -- right? ... Both things can't be true but I think that what it has to do is, this sense of we have a position and we can't compromise on it.
"And so, one of the challenges of this generation is ... I think ... to understand the nature of our Democracy and the nature of our politics is to marry principle to a political process, that means you don't get a 100% of what you want. You don't get it if you are the majority, you don't get it if you are in the minority and you can be an honorable in politics understanding that you are not going to get 100% of what you want.
"And that has been our history. You think about our greatest Presidents, I mean Abraham Lincoln, here is a guy who did not believe in slavery but his first priority was keeping the Union. I have got the emancipation proclamation hanging in my office and if you read through it turns out that most of the document is those states and areas where the emancipation does not apply because those folks were allies with the Union so they can keep their slaves. Think about that. That is the Emancipation Proclamation ... right. So, here you have a war time President who is making a compromise around probably the greatest moral issue the country ever faced because he understood that right now my job is to win the war and maintain the Union. Well, can you imagine how the HuffingtonPost will report on that. It would have been blistering. Right. Think about it, "Lincoln sells out slaves"....(Laughter) ... There is going to be protests, running a third party guy (more laughter)
"And so I think as you guys talk to your friends about getting involved civically, don't set up a situation where you are guaranteed to be disappointed. That is part of the process of growing up...and that does not mean you are not principled. It does not mean that you are not focused on, driving on a particular position or a particular issue. It means that you are sort of pushing it over at the hill and get it a certain way and other people are pushing and sometime you will slip back."
Lincoln, of course, did receive much that kind of criticism that Obama invokes -- perhaps the most trenchant of it coming from Frederick Douglass, whom I suspect historians of the future might value a bit more than HuffPo. But if you read Lincoln's work, you are struck by two things I'll note here. The first is his anguish -- which included his disappointment at seeing the nation careen towards slaughter. The second is the extent to which he felt hemmed in by events. Those, combined with his stalwart prosecution of the war and his success, are large reasons why Douglass's estimation of his President (as well as History's) were revised so far upwards.
I don't feel President Obama's disappointment about any of this fight over entitlements.
Then again, by his own statement, we should not expect Obama to feel disappointment. It is only if "you are only talking to people who you agree with" that politics disappoints. Frankly, I doubt that. I don't think that Grover Norquist keeps a particularly ecumenical counsel, but I think that he's secretly (or maybe not so secretly) thrilled with how this will end up, if Democrats are confronted with something much like the "Gang of 6" proposal at the last possible minute and given the choice between capitulation and being blamed -- DEMOCRATS being blamed! -- for the prospect of tanking the economy.
What sort of President might -- I acknowledge right now, the proper word is "might" -- do that to his own party? One who, I submit, is not going to be at all disappointed by politics.
I should note up front that I don't know why Obama has been stacking the deck towards the elimination of entitlements, from the composition of the Simpson-Bowles Commission to today. Many people here suspect that he actually prefers the more right-wing policy that came from Simpson and Bowles. Others defend him from that charge. What they can't deny, though, is that people here are reacting to the undeniable presence of substantial ambiguity on this topic -- more than I can ever recall coming from a Democratic President. If we lack confidence in the President's policies in this area at this moment, it's because he has specifically denied us reason for confidence in them.
The President doesn't want his hands tied. I can understand that from Lincoln -- but Obama doesn't face an armed rebellion, he faces a bunch of Republicans who don't want to do what's reasonable, what's customary, and what the American people overwhelmingly want. I understand the need for negotiation, but he's not really negotiating with the Republicans. He's like a man picking up an unconscious opponent from the floor and pretending to wrestle with him so he can justify calling the bout a draw. He has sought this outcome; sought the inferior position we suddenly, amazingly given public opinion, find ourselves in today.
I can't give President Obama the credit he clearly wants for political courage at this bleak moment, because he seems very likely to get what he wants. His obstacles to getting what he wants are not so much Eric Cantor and Jim DeMint as Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders. Put the Democrats in a bad enough spot, where only their -- I hate this term right now -- "being reasonable" stands between us and default, and they probably will do the patriotic thing and fold. That's all the Republicans have to know in planning their strategy for the carnage of the next two weeks. They don't have to negotiate. Obama will cry for mercy (and "adulthood") and bail them out.
I do blame President Obama for this situation because it is one of his making. We could have, by most accounts, gotten the straight-up vote on a debt limit that Reagan got 18 times during his Presidency, and perhaps we still will. Obama has left enough ambiguity in what he wants, though, that progressives cannot have faith in his good faith. That ambiguity isn't a natural force; it's what he wants us to have. As with the health care debate, we still have no idea what he really wants -- or what really disappoints him. His desires, except for re-election (and, no doubt, his place in history) are ambiguous. He is not a "man of the middle" -- he is amorphous. A man of the middle is capable of disappointment by either extreme. But what truly disappoints President Obama? I don't know.
Is he disappointed by the inability to close Guantanamo? I don't really know. He is to some degree, I suspect -- but maybe it's mostly because he knows that it makes his look bad. Is he disappointed that we are going to try people outside of the civilian court system? He thinks it's a bad policy. That's not the same as disappointment. That's not Lincoln contemplating the dissolution of the union.
Is he disappointed that he had to (or "had to") back off of his stand on withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan? Maybe a little -- but in some ways, I get the sense that he's happy to be able to show people that he's "grown up" enough to do what he doesn't think is right because his advisors feel so strongly about it. He may be a little ruefully satisfied at demonstrating the limits of his power to be as progressive as we might like. His disappointment, if any, sounds perfunctory.
Is he disappointed at not getting much done to combat global heating? Have you heard much emotion in his voice? Because I hear emotion in that videotape -- contempt, disdain, frustration with those who don't accept the "self-evident" truth that they can't get what they want. Where have we seen that emotion deployed for progressive ends?
He's proud, of course, of his Supreme Court appointments and his achievements on gay rights -- and, in historical terms, he should be. But what he's really set to be proud of is going down in history as a deficit hawk -- as the man who turned back the huge national debt, as the emphatic rebuttal to the slanted and selective caricature of African-American Democrats as big spenders. (Compared to Republicans? Get real.) He seems to want that reputation badly. And it looks like he shall have it -- badly. His only real disappointment would be if progressives won -- or if reactionaries won in a way he can't claim as his de facto victory for prudence. Then, I suspect, we might see some emotion from the man.
I could write the likely negative reactions to this diary in my sleep. "We don't yet know what the President wants to do." (Indeed.) Or "President Obama sees Republicans and their interests (including those, such as Wall Street, that are also his interests) as so powerful and uncaring that they must be bought off for the good of the nation."
OK, let's consider that one. Here's my question to President Obama:
If the Republican demand were that you resign the Presidency as a condition of their agreement to raise the debt ceiling, would you do it?
The answer, of course, is "no." That's crazy talk! You talked about the prospect of this fight destroying your Presidency, but you didn't really mean it; you believe full well that mouthing such self-sacrificial intent only makes you look better. You would not appease our Republican terrorists by resigning the Presidency to save the economy. Good for you, too! But that logic applies elsewhere equally well.
Should we accept losing our party's brand -- defense of Social Security, Medicare, and (to the extent possible) Medicaid -- with more equanimity that you'd face the prospect of resigning the Presidency? Should we face the deaths -- and let's not kid ourselves, that's what we're talking about -- of countless elderly and the bankruptcy of more with less agitation than you would contemplate having to give up the Presidency?
I don't favor you giving up your Presidency -- although I think it would be interesting to see your reaction if the Republicans did ask for it -- or accepting the pain and humiliation that capitulation here would bring. I think that we have to face down the Republicans and stop negotiating with these people to give them a huge win if they can scrape together the brain cells required for them to take it.
I know that resigning the Presidency to get this deal would disappoint you gravely. Why can't you see that the sacrifices you would ask us to make -- sacrifices on the altar of allowing the Republicans to continue to act as unreasonable, petulant, spoiled brats -- would disappoint us no less?
"If you are only talking to people who you agree with then politics is going to always going to disappoint you." I'm sure that you're talking to a few people who disagree with your inclination towards a "big deal" that leaves our party in the lurch -- so you're not disappointed. That may be the difference between talking and listening.