Ezra Klein recently wrote a piece imagining President Obama
going Bulworth, including this pretend exchange:
Q: Sir, you've been criticized in recent weeks for being overly passive. And as you say here, it's your view the government isn't doing enough on the problems facing the American people. Isn't it up to you to lead?
OBAMA: Let me be clear. This kind of question right here is the problem. You have no idea what it actually is that you're asking. If you did, you wouldn't use the word "lead." You'd be specific. You'd say, shouldn't I be putting forward a budget that includes serious compromises on entitlement spending to show I'll meet the Republicans halfway. But I did that. You'd say shouldn't you be reaching out more to the Hill, trying to build some personal relationships with more congressional Republicans, maybe invite Paul Ryan to lunch? But I did that. [...] [Emphasis supplied.]
President Obama did indeed "do that." In fact, his entire tenure has been marked by him "doing that." How many Republican votes did any of his initiatives receive as a result? Let me save you trouble, none. Zero. Zilch. Folks like
Greg Sargent complain about the Green Lantern theory of "leadership" that permeates the Media:
At today's press conference, President Obama spent a fair amount of time pushing back on what some of us are calling the "Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power." This theory—which seems to hold broad sway over many in the press—holds that presidents should be able to bend Congress to their will, and any failure to do so proves their weakness and perhaps even their irrelevance.
But what Sargent and most of those complaining about the persistence of the Green Lantern theory seem to be forgetting is that it was in fact a key part of his political pitch in his 2008 Democratic presidential primary run, what I dubbed
the Post-Partisan Unity Schtick. In competition with Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton ridiculed the Green Lantern Theory of Change in the clip that tops this post. Prior to that, I was critical of the Green Lantern Theory of Change. Here is
an example from February 2008:
[T]he question is do they really believe a President Obama will be able to wave a magic wand and make the Republicans play nice? And if not, how exactly do they expect a President Obama to achieve change?
Five years later, we now all know there is no magic wand, there was no breaking of the "fever," there was no "coming together." Or in Hillary Clinton's words, "the skies did not open." Did Obama believe he could persuade Republicans to meet him halfway? I don't think so, but I do think he thought could persuade the Media to take his side and declare, as so many say, that Obama was the adult in the room. On this point, I believe Obama badly miscalculated.
So what could the president have done? Of course, the results of an alternate path can never be tested, but on the flip I'll lay out my views.
In the summer of 2006, before then Senator Obama had declared his candidacy for the presidency, I critiqued his political style in a post titled "What Barack Obama Needs To Learn From Richard Hofstadter, Abraham Lincoln and FDR":
Obama acknowledges the divide, acknowledges the Republican exploitation of this "status resentment" and chooses to respond by embracing it and "apologizing," so to speak, on behalf of Democrats. [...] Obama has learned nothing from Lincoln and nothing from Hofstadter. As wonderfully talented a politician he is, until he does, he will not best serve the interests of progressives and the Democratic Party.
[...] How did FDR do it and can Democrats defend FDR liberalism today? Maybe not by calling it FDR liberalism but they surely can and do when they have the courage of their convictions. The most prominent of these instances was the fight to save Social Security. Faced with Media hostility, Republican demagogy and flat out lies, Democrats rallied to the FDR liberalism banner and crushed the Republican attempts to roll back the clock. FDR would have been proud of Democrats in that fight. No triangulation. Good old-fashioned political populism won the day.
And that is FDR's lesson for Obama. Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle.
The obvious retort is FDR had the votes. Setting aside the issue of
how FDR got the votes, I think the most cogent point now is that future legislative achievements are not going to happen. No one is asking President Obama to match FDR, but rather to fight now to protect the achievements and ideals of FDR and the Great Society (and Obama's signature achievement, ACA.) To do this, I posit, President Obama needs, and needed, to understand that he was (and is) in a battle to define the middle.
It is here that President Obama seriously miscalculated. He assumed, and as recently as his 2013 budget proposal, continued to assume, that he could define his proposals as "the middle," the "balanced approach," to coin a phrase. He thought the Post-Partisan Unity Schtick could allow him to define the middle. But all he succeeded in doing was defining the middle further to the right.
What was intended (and this happened repeatedly) as a public relations move to rally support around his compromised positions, turned into pre-concessions, over and over again. Instead of defining his position as the middle, President Obama moved the discussion further to the right.
Earlier this year, Ryan Lizza wrote:
[T]he fact that Barack Obama now so appreciates the limits of his office and his lack of Jedi powers is rich with irony. As I've written about before, the premise of Obamaism—from his famous convention speech in 2004, through his primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, in 2008, right up until the later half of his first term—was that Obama was a politician uniquely suited to transform American politics by breaking through the polarization in Washington and bringing the two parties together.
Obama's theme of post-partisanship and unity as a substitute for political ideology has always had its critics. Sean Wilentz, writing in The New Republic, in 2011, noted that:
Obama had arrived on the national stage, after all, with his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 proclaiming that there was "not a liberal America and a conservative America—there's the United States of America."
As president, Obama would not only reach across the aisle, listen to the Republicans, and credit their good ideas, but also demonstrate that the division between the parties was exaggerated if not false, as many Americans, younger voters above all, fervently believed. Divisive and hot-tempered partisanship would give way to healing and temperate leadership, not least by means of Obama's eloquence, rational policies, and good faith.
Needless to say, that didn't happen. In reviewing the history of the politics of post-partisanship, Wilentz argues that Presidents who have used post-partisanship as merely a rhetorical device have been more successful than those who truly believed in the idea.
The irony of the complaints from folks like Greg Sargent about the Media's Green Lantern theory is that it was Obama himself who launched it and in fact appeared to follow the idea for much of his presidency.
I think the illusion of further legislative achievement (I suppose there might be some slim hope of immigration reform but I suggest you not hold your breath and as for the Grand Bargain, thank gawd that looks dead and buried now) is now finished. Which leaves the President with the power to define the political debate and exercise his Executive Branch powers. These are no small things.
But to make this power meaningful, the hard lessons of the failure of the Post-Partisan Unity Schtick must be absorbed.