Grow Up? Or Wake Up?
Over at the excellent Cogitamus, Sir Charles wrote a post criticizing the critics of the Obama administration for neglecting Obama’s accomplishments and giving ‘aid and comfort’ to the Republicans (“Liberals Should Grow The F*ck Up”).
My response was originally intended as a comment, then as a guest post here, but it subsequently turned into an extended email exchange that I thought worth sharing. —ballgame
I think liberals should wake the f*ck up.
AFAICT, Barack Obama — who I endorsed, BTW — is morally and politically at about the level of Richard Nixon.
No wait, that’s a little harsh … towards Nixon. Nixon didn’t sign off on the transfer of trillions from the middle class to the financial elites. And when it came to stripping the civil liberties from Americans, Nixon operated on a retail level and actually tried to hide the fact that he was criminally violating citizens’ basic rights, while Obama is openly stripping them away, wholesale.
Some may protest that Obama has increased funding for various programs, which is true. But then they’re probably forgetting that it was during Nixon’s administration that OSHA, the Clean Water Act, and the EPA came into being.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, I’m not here to praise Richard Nixon. He was a ratfucker and deserved jail time. Indeed, war crimes trials would have been a reasonable response to the horrors his administration perpetuated against a certain oft-invaded country in Asia. To anyone with the slightest objective understanding of what took place in that region of the world, the award of a Nobel Peace Prize to one of the architects of Nixon’s foreign policy (Kissinger) was something of a sick joke.
I trust the parallels to the current administration aren’t too obscure.
I hesitated before posting this because of the very real issue of voter enthusiasm that Sir Charles raises. I fully concur with his assessment of the prior administration, and the danger of Republican resurgence. No one should doubt the ability of the Republican Party to nominate lunatics who make deftly mendacious politicos like Obama seem preferable by comparison.
But the notion that “Obama is as good a vehicle for moving our agenda as I have seen in my lifetime” seems positively delusional. As Ian wrote just a few days ago (somewhat overstating the case, IMHO), Obama and “the” Dems in Congress are trashing the progressive ‘brand’. (Mason over at FDL makes a similar point, also somewhat overstating the case AFAICT.) It is the corporatist policies being pushed forward by Obama and the Blue Dogs (and the Republicans) which are fueling the rage which is giving rise to the teabaggers. I think it’s essential that progressives forge an identity distinct from the Corporate Caucus currently running Congress and the White House.
Oh yeah, one other Nixon/Obama parallel (which I wasn’t aware of until I started writing this): health care reform.
[Sir Charles responded:]
I think your comment with respect to Obama and Nixon is puerile and ahistorical — the kind of thinking that will, in fact, kill any hopes for a progressive era in politics. …
Please enlighten me as to the wholesale stripping of rights that Obama is engaging in? This is juvenile hyperbole.
I stand by my assessment of Obama’s potentially transformative capabilities. However, no man governs in a vacuum. He is confronted with a set of appalling problems left behind by Bush and a generation of Republican rule. Whether it be the Guantanamo prisoners, the financial meltdown, or Afghanistan and Iraq he had to deal with the world as it is and not how we’d all wish it to be.
Would I prefer a more populist approach on economics — absolutely. But the crisis in the financial markets was real and whatever one thinks of the moves made here (which again were to a large extent put in place by Bernanke and Paulson), an utter debacle was avoided and we may be at the point where the worst has occurred.
I think that you are the one is being delusional here if you think Obama simply had some wide open field in which to impose a liberal wish list. However, if we can help maintain a large enough Senate majority, there is the hope that on climate change, labor law reform, immigration reform, and energy policy we can get legislation enacted that will, in the long term, be game changing.
But that’s really not going to happen if enthusiasm is completely crushed by people on the left suggesting that there is no point in supporting this president.
[My response:]
I have complete respect for you, Sir Charles, and I would fervently like to believe that you are right and that I’m wrong. The world would certainly be less grim if that were the case. Your remark about comments like mine possibly impeding progressive efforts is not one I take lightly.
But as I’ve watched the Obama administration unfold, it’s been impossible for me to come to any conclusion other than: Obama is not a progressive. He’s a corporatist.
The people that ran the economy into the ditch are still in power, and now hundreds of billions of middle class dollars are on the hook for investments that are almost certainly worth a fraction of what they’ve been bought for. The decisions of Geithner, Bernanke, and others have almost always been to cover the asses of their rich friends in the financial world at the expense of the public weal. Oversight has been virtually nonexistent … it’s taking a Congressional investigation to even find out where the money went! These are huge decisions. They will have enormous impact on the standard of living of me and you and the rest of the American middle class. Do you honestly think that if the American middle class implodes, we will still somehow enjoy a “progressive era”?
As for Obama’s civil liberties moves, I am referring to Glen Greenwald’s careful cataloging of Obama’s appalling legal maneuvers (such as here and here.) Is he indulging in hyperbole? Is he lying when he says that Obama is embracing (even in some cases enlarging) the executive privilege claims of Bush/Cheney (which, as I understand it, far exceeded what Nixon did) that put presidential behavior beyond the scope of law? Even sitting Senators have balked at Obama’s actions.
As for the wholesale stripping of civil rights, I am referring to Obama’s failure to repudiate the intertwined legal fictions of “the war on terror” and “enemy combatants.” He’s dropped the war on terror rhetoric, which is good, but since the people in the prior administration have not faced any legal consequences — indeed, Obama has taken a number of steps to block citizen investigation into their civil rights violations — and the legal mechanisms put into place by Bush et al remain largely undisturbed, our civil liberties remain in peril. “The war on terror” removes the common sense geographical limit on who might be a prisoner of war, while the “enemy combatant” creates a legal fiction that there is a class of persons to whom the Constitution and the Geneva Convention don’t apply. Combined, these remove any legal check on what the federal government can do to its citizens. What good is being a citizen if the government can simply slap a label on you which prevents you from contesting the label in the first place?
Obama’s administration might not be hauling American citizens into camps for indefinite detention using these concepts … but do you doubt that a Palin administration would, given domestic upheaval? And Obama IS creating a judicial structure that WILL keep people imprisoned indefinitely, with no charges and no trial. And he IS vigorously defending extremist legal concepts that place presidential behavior beyond the rule of law, which effectively eviscerates the Constitution and its protections of civil liberties.
I didn’t expect Obama to be able to impose a liberal wish list. I didn’t expect him to try to do much with health care, for example. What I DID expect him to do, though, was reinstate the rule of law and hold the felons from the prior administration to account. THAT was crucial to putting the country back on track. Instead, not only did he fail to do that, he actively interfered with the efforts of others to do it. I also expected him to attempt the infrastructural changes necessary to wean the country off its devastating reliance on energy imports and military Keynesianism.
I fear the country is sliding towards an Argentina-like spasm. Obama’s done virtually nothing to structurally prevent the country’s middle class from eroding. And a middle class in decline will have little appetite for making the urgent changes to its lifestyle needed in the face of peak oil and global warming.
I fully agree with you that progressives should make every effort to put decent people into Congress. But I don’t think progressives should hitch their wagon to Obama. “We” don’t have a Senate majority, and as long as we promote the idea that “we” do, “we” will be held responsible for Obama’s failures, and desperate, delusional working class people will turn to a pied piper Palin as an alternative.
I hope I’m wrong. Your vision is a lot more pleasant.
[Sir Charles responded:]
I have a lot of respect for Greenwald, but he is a purist with little if any concern for political pragmatism. …
Had Obama chosen to go after Cheney and Bush for war crimes, his administration would have been over before it began. … [T]he village would have been on him 24/7, the Congress would have excoriated him, and his agenda would have been dead on arrival.
As to the detainees, … I am in favor of them being granted some form of due process, and where possible to trials in civilian courts. But Obama is also dealing with detainees whose cases may be so tainted by Bush Administration activities that no civilian trial could be held, but where there is also compelling evidence that they are in fact terrorists. I think Greenwald is comfortable with the idea that if that is the case, you simply have to release them — I would suggest that this could be political suicide.
You’re right — we don’t have a majority. We have conditional and situational majorities in the Senate from time to time. If we lose the ability to even assemble those, then little can be accomplished legislatively and Obama will be no more effective than Carter or Clinton were.
Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson all engaged in or acquiesced in activities that I am sure Greenwald would condemn — and in many instances rightly so. Between them though, they created such social democratic institutions that exist in the U.S., while also doing much to advance the cause of worker and minority rights. They were tough, pragmatic, and sometimes amoral in the extreme. But the results of what they did, endure — and in the case of Social Security and Medicare, produced social programs that are now virtually unassailable.
I am interested in results at this point in my life. Obama shares many of these concerns and has the kind of skills that can make them a reality.
Trashing him and ignoring the good things that the stimulus bill has done for the middle and working classes — from the aid to the states that kept police officers, firefighters, and teachers in their jobs, to the extensions of unemployment benefits, the COBRA subsidy, and direct job creation through infrastructure projects — pretending in essence that his policies are the same as Bush’s — is a kind of political nihilism that we can ill afford.
I don’t think you … have any practical strategies for getting done that which needs to be done. One can fulminate and posture, but then what?
After a quarter century of living here, I have a profound feeling for how difficult the job is, and despite his flaws, I think Obama has a pretty good sense of the way forward and a series of goals that if accomplished, will move the political debate significantly to the left. And that is in many respects the real challenge — Reagan pushed the terms of political debate so far to the right, that its premises, particularly the fetishization of the free market, permeate our political discourse in ways people take for granted.
We need to alter that mindset — and the way to do that is to show government meaningfully solving problems. A health care bill (even a flawed one), an effective energy policy, and financial reform (which may also be flawed but meaningful), would be an excellent start in this enterprise. If Obama can get this done and the economy snaps back (which may be starting to happen), I think a progressive resurgence will be possible.
One thing I think we can both agree on is that a resumption of the Republicans in power will be a disaster for us all.
[I think Sir Charles makes many valid points, but I’m going to give the last word to Texas Aggie from a comment at TPM:]
We expected a person who taught Constitutional law to be against the most egregious provisions of the Patriot act, not for them. … We expected transparency, not an expansion of the doctrine that asking the government for information will put us all in danger. We expected a person who values personal liberty to rein in the unauthorized spying, not expand it. We expected a person who has the brains to spell “economy” to realize that having the people responsible for screwing it up shouldn’t be allowed to continue doing the same and we expected that same person to do something to bring the giveaway under control. …
These things I’ve just described didn’t have to go the way they did. You didn’t need the skies to open and a bunch of archangels come down to go the other way. It would have been just as easy to have done it right as to have done it wrong.
[BTW, thanks to Sir Charles for letting me reprint his comments, and thanks to Ian for letting me guest post. I should probably say something about it being an honor to post here, but really I’m just doing it for the fame, the groupies, and the lucrative endorsement contracts. —ballgame]
from → Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Policy
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EU votes to allow US to monitor all its citizens’ bank transactions
http://joshfulton.blogspot.com/2009/12/post-libson-treaty-eu-votes-to-allow-us.html
I vote for “wake up.” While Sir Charles was slumbering:
Sir Charles to these votes: La la la I can’t hear you.
I think the answer is between the two. The last thing I expected from Obama was any resolution or serious improvement on matters of detainee rights. But Obama has delivered at least an opening in the discussion on health care reform that simply did not exist. A sliver, a crack, but between 1994 and 2008 there was absolutely no chance of any discussion of this magnitude at all. The fact that the Single Payer Pony can even be trotted out in public for a moment is an accomplishment—probably unintentional, but an accomplishment.
Lambert,
Enjoy basking in your purity. I hear things loud and clear, which is what prompted my post in the first place.
If folks want to sit on their hands and let the Republicans take power, well I guess they can relish the prospects for “heightening the contradictions” and then no doubt a golden era of progressivism with a far more worthy person than Obama at the helm will emerge. Because that’s happened incredibly frequently in American history.
“BUT…BUT…Clinton was treated SO BADLY *weep*. Also, Favreau.”
By the way, thanks for pointing me to Cogitamus. First time I’ve read it.
Cogitamus has been on the blogroll for months, btw. Check out my blogroll, there are some good blogs on it.
I already read a bunch of them (eg. have been for years a Majikthise regular; love Orcinus but it makes my browser cry) but the ubiquity of blogrolls has inured my eyes to them in general. Crossposted content is way more likely to send me somewhere.
Sir Charles, I don’t think your answer, which is essentially support Obama and the Democratic leadership works any better than thinking a Republican resurgence will lead to some sort of progressive promised land (which I don’t believe is Lambert’s position, but I won’t try to speak for him). Right now, we’re still moving right under Obama and that’s going to continue. So it’s really a question of whether you want to march further towards authoritarianism and corporatism under crazy people (Republicans) or under people who sound sane but tend to follow many of the same damned policies (Democrats). Either way, IMO, leads to the same place – disaster. Indeed, in many ways we’re already there with two losing wars and a failing economy and Democratic leadership doubling down on all of the things that got us here.
The challenge is to break out of the disastrous cycle this country has been in for 30 years where the party might change but the direction we’re going never seems to. I’m not sure how to do this except that I don’t believe continuing the two party dance the way we have been – with a focus on trying to ensure Democrats win no matter how awful they are – is working. I don’t consider myself a purist. I’m not looking for some progressive savior. I’m perfectly willing to compromise in the short run to get somewhere better in the long run. The problem is that every short run compromise is not leading us towards a better future, we’re still moving further and further away from that.
More than that I would argue that whether there’s a GOP resurgence is really beyond liberal’s control at this point. My saying nice things about Obama is not going to put people back to work or restructure the economy or end either of the two expensive, unpopular wars we’re fighting. That’s what’s going to determine Obama’s political future as well as the GOP’s. It’s not my fault that Obama and the Dems are adopting many of the same policies that have left the GOP in the minority and in tatters. That’s on them. What’s more, I see no reason to support horrible, tragic policies just because the person proposing them and implementing them has a D after his name.
Americans actually agree on a lot of things – they’re generally against the wars, want to tax the rich, want true healthcare reform, want jobs instead of bailouts – it’s just that we’ve been trained to hate the other party’s voters (instead of the other party’s leaders) to prevent us from uniting and driving the corporatists out. I don’t know how to do it, but we have to break out of this “left-right”, “Dem/Rep” dynamic and figure out how to unite the 98% of us who got screwed by TARP against the 2% who didn’t and run the country.
Sir Charles:
Enjoy wallowing in the impure filth of your self-satisfaction and vacuous pragmatism while millions are thrown under the bus. The legacy parties — Democratic and Republican working together — are the problem. What people should do is actively seek alternatives, and I’m sure that some in the 40% who’ve turned their backs on the Dems are doing just that. At a minimum, that will get their attention, in the only way possible. At a maximum, we get something much better. As Ian writes here:
Exactly. I know plenty of people out of work, plenty of people facing foreclosure, plenty of people with no health care. And Obama gets the banksters trillions NOW NOW NOW and then waits a year to get round to a jobs summit. It would be hard for McCain to do worse. What I do know is that I’m not investing a thing in the legacy parties from here on out.
Well put, BDBlue.
It’s not clear whether you’re addressing only Lamber or myself as well, Sir Charles. I certainly don’t want the Republicans to come back. I’m not advocating anyone sit on their hands. I’m not saying people should stay at home if the general election is between Obama and nutty Republican. (And to repurpose a Jack Nicholson quote, “Is there any other kind?”) I’m just saying that we should be clear that Obama is not “one of us,” because AFAICT from his actions in office, he’s not.
I’m absolutely not coming from a place of “purity” advocating that people “sit on their hands” (cliches are such a tell for misrepresentation).
I am advocating that the grip of the legacy parties needs to be broken, and that most of our energy needs to be put there. No, I don’t know how it will happen. Yes, we have to find out. The situation we’re in is nuts — as BDBlue puts the matter far more cogently, and politely, than I have:
So, “Look! Over there! Sarah Palin!” really isn’t doing a whole lot for me. Whatever we need to do to leash the Republicans is also what we need to do to leash the Democrats. Better figure that out. The stage set looks real until somebody pokes a hole in the canvas….
Nader 2012!
Ah, but who and what caused the 40% dip? That’s the question that has to be asked.
Look “Sir” Charles,
Booman man is on his knees giving Obama a “Monica Moment” as are many others, Obama is getting the best press any president in history has ever gotten.
This accusation is really wacko:
“Liberals Should Grow The F*ck Up” and “the kind of thinking that will, in fact, kill any hopes for a progressive era” – “Sir” Charles
Surely you are not delusional enough to believe even a significant number of the the disenchanted 40% read these blogs…if you do, could we please see some numbers in support of your argument…K?
Without those blog numbers you’re left with the highly probable likelihood that the 40% [who knows how high it will go] are being chased away by either Obama/”Dem Leadership” embrace of Bush II era policies…or perhaps popular pro-Obama blogs saying Obama’s policies are brilliant.
I want to say more about your accusations that Obama’s problems stem from some kid pointing out the “King has no clothes”, but I can’t do so without pointing to fact that problem isn’t perception…it’s the sad fact that the minions like yourself don’t have the intellectual honesty to tell the prancing peacock he needs to get some clothes on.
Good luck with the “it’s the kid, not the king parading naked” meme. Ten minutes of checking the blog numbers would prove that your head is stuck in the sand.
Lambert,
I’ve spent my entire life working for the labor movement. I have clients now with 50% unemployment and just last week I negotiated a $12 an hour pay cut for one of them (roughly one-third of their economic package.) So I actually have a pretty good sense of what’s going on.
The notion, however, that Obama could simply will the left wing program that you (and oddly enough I) would prefer is wishful thinking.
I’ve misrepresented nothing (and I rarely resort to cliche). Your suggestion that a strategy of breaking the stranglehold of the “legacy parties” is a tell that you either haven’t been around very long or are simply not a very good student of history. Progressive moments in American politics have been exceedingly rare — about 8 years out of the last 90. The few we have achieved have been in times when highly pragmatic leaders (FDR and LBJ) were able to rally broad based coalitions to their cause for a strategic few years.
Given the structure of the U.S. Senate, we are going to need the broadest possible set of allies not a “foco” of the pure hearted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foco
And BdBlue,
If you think 98% of the people will rally to left wing politics because they have been screwed you really understand nothing about the American body politic. At least 40% of our fellow citizens would happily let our corporate leaders cut off one of their arms as long as they promised that blacks, gays and hispanics would have both arms cut off.
Well Mandos,
You certainly got me with this.
“But Obama has delivered at least an opening in the discussion on health care reform that simply did not exist. A sliver, a crack, but between 1994 and 2008 there was absolutely no chance of any discussion of this magnitude at all. The fact that the Single Payer Pony can even be trotted out in public for a moment is an accomplishment—probably unintentional, but an accomplishment.” – Mandos
One of us must be delusional, I am sure you would say it’s me…but perhaps other readers will recall that of all the Candidates in the Democratic Party, Obama was the last…and very late at that…to come up with a healthcare policy. He avoided talking about “his” healthcare policy, instead he atacked others who did talk about what they were doing. He personaly castigated others for having mandates…uhm…whatever. He ran Harry and Louise ads…
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/obama-does-harry-and-louise-again/
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=health_care_debate_mandates_as
http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/03/a-detailed-anal.html
Giving him credit for “opening…the discussion on health care reform that simply did not exist.” is putting the cart before the horse, but my historical recollection has criticized by many Obama supporters as being Orwellian version so I am sure those links above are fabrications as well.
Sir Charles,
in fact, Obama could have enacted an economic program which would have left your clients much better off. He chose not to even try. The stimulus bill was far less effective than it should have been, the lack of real financial sector reform has been crippling (lending is down, not up). In the first few months when he had a real mandate he could have done a great deal. He did not even try.
In fact, the problem is that he has demoralized his own coalition. When 40% of your own party won’t vote and you control both houses of Congress and the Presidency, well, the only people who can be blamed for that are Democrats.
So yes, 2010 is going to be a bad year, and probably 2012. I don’t see any way around that. Until Democrats understand that kicking the base is counterproductive, they will will not win elections, instead Republicans will lose elections and Democrats will back into power.
Obama betrayed your people. He didn’t put through an effective economic policy (and much of one would not require Congress’s approval, though parts would, but again, at the beginning of the year, I simply don’t believe he couldn’t have put through a better stimulus bill.) And he did not make EFCA one of his priorities.
Unions did not get the key things they needed from Obama, and they aren’t going to get them.
And Obama’s leadership has lead to a decline in support for both stimuli and health care reform. Doing policy badly has real consequences. This is something that Dems don’t seem to get.
Yes! Exactly! Anyone who has been paying the slightest amount of attention even over just the past 20 years knows that the American left has been there, and done that.
The question is, what do these apparent johnnie-come-latelies bring to the table that makes them any more likely to succeed than the long history of attempts to break the strangehold of “legacy parties”. Aside from a propensity to coin rather twee catch-phrases, I’ll give them that!
There can only be two explanations for this phenomenon. Either they are complete scales-fallen-from-eyes naïfs, or they are hypocrites. Either way, good reason to be wary.
“Anyone who has been paying the slightest amount of attention even over just the past 20 years knows that the American left has been there, and done that.” – Mandos
I haven’t seen the American left do anything in the last twenty years…Mandos you are watching too much Fox News…switch channels..better yet, turn the damned thing off and do some reading! There has not been a single piece of left legislation since the the 70′s.
To quote Ian, “lol”. I don’t even own a TV, let alone watch TV news.
The American left has not done anything legislatively because it has not really been in the legislature… The populist left, believe it or not, has been quite active otherwise, just not in the legislature. Now, why is that?
*BOOP*
Ian,
With all due respect (and affection), where was Obama going to get the 60 votes for a bigger and better stimulus? They simply weren’t there. He had to rely on the tepid twins from Maine to put him over the top and they, along with Ben Nelson and his ilk, simply weren’t going to give him the bill we all would have wanted.
I don’t really understand your contention that Obama didn’t need congressional approval for a better economic policy — the appropriation of money is the exclusive province of Congress. The powers of the presidency simply aren’t that broad.
As for EFCA, I seriously doubt that we’ve got the 60 votes there either, but more importantly, it would not be the kind of immeidate help that my clients need. Organizing, even under a better legal regime, is going to necessarily be a long term strategy. The unemployment that my clients are facing is due to the collapse of the commercial real estate market. I would certainly like to see some more direct spending (possibly with TARP funds) to try and get more people working. I still think that this is a distinct possiblity.
I think the notion that 40% of Democrats won’t vote in 2010 is highly unlikely and I think the 2012 election will go just fine if employment numbers have bounced back. (For a suggestive comparison check Reagan’s poll numbers in 1982 (quite a bit lower than Obama’s)when unemployment hit 10.8% and see how he fared in 1984.)
Sir Charles,
in the beginning of the year, I believe that if he had started with a much more left wing (and effective) package he could have compromised to a better bill, as opposed to pre-compromising. This is negotiation 101. Don’t pre-compromise. (Well, actually I don’t think he pre-compromised, he put out the bill he wanted.)
A lot of economic policy is run through the Fed and the Treasury. The Fed was pretty much doing what the president wanted, and Bernanke wants to keep his job. There are trillions of dollars worth of facilities keeping specific large companies afloat. Specific large companies which lobbied against various policies. Those facilities give you a ton of leverage if you are willing to use them. Likewise the FDIC could have (and still could, but won’t) take over any major bank it wants. They were all bankrupt if you actually forced them to acknowledge their losses. You take them over, use the Fed to feed them funds and allow them to print money (remember, the Fed can effectively print as much money as it wants, and has printed trillions) and have them lend for the things you want them to lend for at the rates you desire. Of course, this requires you force shareholders and bondholders to take a bath, but believe it or not, that too would be good for the economy, not immediately, but certainly within a couple years.
A couple examples are made, and other banks understand they better lend. Banks that don’t play, get taken over. This is entirely fair, again, because they were all bankrupt. You force bondholders and so on to take a haircut.
There are various other things you can do (for example, Freddie and Fannie by that point were under Federal control, meaning you had control of most of the country’s mortgage market). The idea that Congress controls spending is half fictional. The Fed has its own ability to spend money. Bernanke would have done what he was told to, and if he refused, you publicly ask him to step down, and have Congress remove him if necessary. He was not respected or well liked by Congress. At all. And again, the Fed has basically been taking direction from Treasury for some time now.
There are also quite a few things treasury can do directly even without the Fed.
The president also has a lot of specific powers under various war acts, and the US is at war. Those powers would have allowed him to forcefully reduce oil consumption, which people wouldn’t have liked, but they would have liked the economic consequences, because right now oil prices are a trap the US is in. Devaluing the US dollar, and any economic growth, just leads to higher oil prices. Slightly under $80 oil is not conducive to a healthy US economy. The US has to reduce its oil dependence significantly and fast. Some of that requires Congress, but much of it can be done by the executive. (Oh, and ending both wars would reduce oil consumption massively, and that’s completely under the President’s control.)
And so on.
There was a ton of stuff that could have been done. The choice was made not to do those things, but instead to try and reboot the system and go back to the old status quo, but at a lower level of economic activity.
There will be a recovery, but as a result of decisions made by the President, Fed, FDIC and Congress, it is unlikely employment will recover to pre-recession levels in the next generation, literally. The late Clinton economy is going to be the best economy most of us ever saw in our working lifetimes.
That wasn’t necessary, and while I didn’t expect much of Obama, I am still very disappointed in him and I think most people should be, because his failures are going to impoverish a lot of people and make a lot of other people’s lives very miserable. This especially includes unionized workers.
On the politics, I think the economy is not going to recover as Reagan’s did, as noted above. However, I’ll admit my record on political prediction is far worse than on economic prediction. Maybe Obama can squeeze out a victory in 2012. Maybe. But that won’t change what he did, and more importantly, didn’t do economically, and what that means for ordinary Americans.
(Oh, also, the way employment is calculated has changed since 82. I’m not sure what the comparison should be, but Obama’s unemployment #s would be worse if measured the way they did then. And this recession has now lost more jobs as a percentage of people employed than any other post WWII recession, that much I know for a fact. This is a worse recession than the early eighties one as measured by percentage of people losing jobs and how long they have remained unemployed.)
I love being lectured about how much I don’t know about politics. I’m well aware of the failings of the left. I’m well aware of how much some of the Democrats in Congress suck. But I don’t believe simply saying “well, then, let’s go along with lousy policy and tell everyone getting screwed they really aren’t that bad and, hey, be sure to vote Democratic in November!”
What I know is this – the economy is much, much worse than it’s been at any time in my lifetime and I was born during the Johnson Administration. My hometown had an unemployment rate of 25% in the 1980s and this recession is worse. People who worked their asses off to send their kids to college so that they wouldn’t have to try to scrounge for work as the factories close, now watch those college educated kids make $7 an hour at Walmart. Something has got to give. We can’t go on like this indefinitely (although I grant you we may go on for another decade or so). If the left doesn’t at least try to get its act together to address the populist anger rising, then we really are screwed because you can bet others will – and already are – rushing to fill that void.
Given the last 30 years, the odds on the left getting itself together isn’t great. In fact, it’s terrible. But I refuse to give up simply because that’s what all the savvy people say we should do. Hey, I wouldn’t want to look naive or, you know, bad for thinking we should push for policies that would better this country and oppose policies that would make it worse. It’s, IMO, the only shot we have of trying to pull this country back from collapse. Otherwise, we’re just lemmings marching over the edge of the cliff. We may march more slowly than the right, but the march ends the same way.
And, for the record, I’m no purist. But, as Ian said, Obama hasn’t even tried to enact policies that would help the average American and, in may places, he could do that without Congressional approval or with simply not “pre-compromising” everything. I use quotes for “pre-compromise” because given of what I’ve seen of the Fed and Treasury under Obama, I’m not at all convinced he’s wanted better policies than he’s gotten.
I meant to add that my support for exploring third parties or trying to build a movement outside of the main two political parties does not mean that I somehow think some amazing third party candidate is going to sweep to the WH in 2012 or that the third party is going to be viable in national elections generally. Hell, I’m not sure we could even get a Eugene McCarthy anymore. I’m looking more for a third party in local contests that moves the Democrats left or for individual Democratic candidates that do the same thing. There is a long history in this country of outsider parties having that effect on the main parties as they seek to co-opt the supporters of the third party. That didn’t happen after 2000 nationally, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen or hasn’t happened in the past.
I really do believe the only hope at this point is local. We have to start there, in organizing and elections, because that’s the basis for everything else and it’s the only place small numbers of people have any influence. What’s more, the President is really only a small part of the problem. It’s the entire structure around him that’s the true problem. That structure is too large and well funded for me and others like me to take on directly. You have to chip away at it. Continuing to give resources to it, IMO, isn’t going to do it.
Sir Charles:
As BDBlue writes:
So with the net the same, you recommend:
And we’re supposed to be the cock-eyed, lunatic, “pure hearted” optimists. The Presidency, the House, and the Senate, nada, and we’re supposed to do what? Give even more money to more and better Democrats?
Do note that “broadest possible set of allies” says nothing about outcomes whatever. Sure, in your original post you give a laundry list of minor incremental changes that you’d expect from a sane government, and proceed to insult those who ask how it all nets out — negative, with token help on housing, token help on jobs, bigger banks, no rollback of Bush’s authoritarianism, and health care reform that turned into an insurance company bailout — the disciples of Che Guevara. What a hoot!
Assume I just fell off the turnip truck and am ignorant of history, as you aver. You write:
And that means the time is not ripe for one now, why, exactly? I think BDBlue is right. The legacy parties — and parties do die, you know, like the Whigs, the Federalists… — are going to net out the same. So there’s no point investing time or effort in either of them; and they’ve got quite enough money of their own anyhow. So why not try something new?
BDBlue,
I don’t mean to lecture, but the third party pie in the sky bullshit is only conducive to that kind of response. It’s not a serious proposal, it’s posing.
Our problems are with the Senators in places like Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Indiana, and Montana. What exactly will a third party challenge due in those kinds of places except insure the election of Republicans? I am not averse to primary challenges against someone like Lieberman where by all rights we should have a better senator. I am also not opposed to pulling the plugs on some of the useless blue dogs in the House, where a bare majority can make things happen.
But the major parties have been undisturbed now for 150 years. In that time they have withstood the challnges of the People’s Party, the Progressives, the Socialists, the Dixiecrats, and the Wallace and Perot movements. In an era in which television and money rule supreme, I have a hard time seeing how conditions for such a challenge are more favorable.
You can ignore the quality of the opposition party all you want, but again, this is the kind of self-indulgent posturing that led us to the pretense that no meaningful difference existed between Gore and Bush, so why the hell not vote for Nader. After those eight disastrous years I would expect a little bit more sobriety on our side.
Ian,
I am not a huge fan of what the Federal Reserve or Treasury did in many respects. Having said that, Bernanke injected massive amounts of liquidity into the system (hardly the most conservative course) and in the process averted a disaster that a neo-Hoooverite approach would have caused.
Just FTR, I’d like to repeat that I am NOT calling for a third party approach to our problems. I am simply saying that we should be honest with ourselves about what our situation really is, what Obama is really doing about it, and who he really represents. In general, I don’t think self-delusion is a recipe for political success.
Well, we agree on something.
Charles: what he did, actually, was Japanify the society. The baseline pessimistic scenario from people who had been relatively accurate (aka: the IMF) was that without bailouts and without the stimulus, we’d be about where we are now anyway (ie. all the stimulus did was make up for Japanifying). I will argue that in fact Bernanke’s approach did more harm than good. Banks are lending less now than they were a year ago, unemployment is as high as it would have been without Bernanke’s actions, etc… I know this is not the mainstream view, but since the mainstream view has long had a negative correlation with reality and a horrible predictive record I feel no particular need to kow-tow towards it.
Even if you think Bernanke did avert a great depression, his way was the worst way to do it. It has made another crisis absolutely inevitable. I am not alone in thinking this, many of the people who called the crisis correctly long in advance agree with me. And virtually everyone who didn’t call the crisis correctly (aka. Bernanke, Geithner, Summers) disagrees with me.
I’ll take those odds.
Sort of a “conditional due process” doctrine, eh? Such that if the defendant is known [watch out for passive voice. --ed] to be guilty, then the original requirements of due process are no longer inalienable, and justice demands that they be limited or perhaps even withheld altogether? Like when the prosecution has evidence which is dispositive-but-inadmissible, either the burden of proof, or the venue, or something, must be adjusted [by whom? --ed] in order to allow that evidence to be taken into account for purposes of determining guilt or innocence? Even though the evidence itself may still not be presented directly in court?
Oh, sorry, looks like there’s another sentence. I had a little trouble reading it because some bits of my exploded brain were obscuring the screen.
Now I get it! Your conditional due process proposal is nowhere near as broad as I thought.
In fact it’s downright reasonable. The administration should refuse due process not because the defendants in question are known [grr. --ed] to be guilty, but because it “could be political suicide” to grant it. The doctrine wouldn’t apply to any and all defendants who are known [dammit! --ed] to be guilty, but only to those defendants whom it could be “political suicide” not to convict.
I’m with you now, Sir Charles. Forcing a prosecutor to provide due process even when it means political suicide would be an “irreparable harm” not just to the prosecutor but to the Republic as a whole, since our fortunes are inextricably tied to the individual fortunes of the agents who enforce our laws (particularly the fortunes of the Cop-in-Chief, who also happens to head the military). The prosecution’s right not to be forced into political suicide surely needs to be weighed against the defendant’s right, er privilege that is, of due process…
I’m glad we got that sorted out. For a minute there you were sounding just a wee bit radical.
I trust it was a small explosion.
Sir Charles, I think you undervalue some of the results of those third parties. You presume I suggest third party politics as a way of winning elections, I don’t. I see them as a way of trying to express public anger at the two ruling parties in ways that might influence them, generally at the local or state level rather than national level and through that pressure the national parties. There is a long history of policies that were eventually adopted by Democrats (and Republicans) that started out as ideas promoted by third parties. Forty-hour work weeks, women’s suffrage, social security, and many other progressive ideas didn’t start with Democrats or Republicans, they entered the country’s bloodstream through third parties (primarily the socialists and populists). That, to me, is the benefit of third parties, especially when combined with social movements. And while the recent history isn’t so good on the liberal side – I’d argue the Dixiecrats had a big affect on GOP strategies as the Republicans moved to win over the disaffected white Southern Democrats – I also don’t think we’ve had the kind of conditions we have now. Again, not the conditions for big third party wins, but the conditions that permit social movements to grow into political movements that have an effect regardless of winning. In fact, I’d argue that too often liberals count “winning” solely in terms of elections, which causes us to shy away from “losing” causes even if those causes in the long run are more likely to yield policy wins. Single payer comes to mind as a recent example.
BDBlue,
I agree that third parties have at times been a good vehicle to drive issues. However, I think that history shows that only when those parties have been co-opted into the major parties have the issues that drove them been enacted into law.
I favor single payer (or some variation on the French or German systems), but I don’t think we could have mustered a bare majority in the Senate. I’d like to see something done for the tens of millions without insurance sooner rather than later.
Very droll, Sir Charles. Thanks for making your position clear.
Sir Charles,
You’ve indicated that you have a handle just about everything under the sun, so could you explain the remark below?
The French and German systems are very different? One is single payer [government insurance], the other a private insurance system that features a government intrusion resulting an extremely regulated environment which even controls pay of doctors.
“I favor single payer, or some variation on the French or German systems” – “Sir” Charles
“As Ian wrote just a few days ago (somewhat overstating the case, IMHO), Obama and “the” Dems in Congress are trashing the progressive ‘brand’.”
Not overstating, misrepresenting. The idiots that still support and rationalize Obama are trashing the progressive band, by needlessly hitching it to a crew of elected stooges worthy of steering the Titanic during its final hour.
“Please enlighten me as to the wholesale stripping of rights that Obama is engaging in?”
This statement exposes such an glaring level of ignorance of Obama public positions on warrentless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, torture, military tribunals, defiance of court orders, secret evidence, “sovereign immunity”(!), Bagram, Balad, Gitmo still, that any other emission shot forth from this source ought to be seriously questioned as to weather it is actually based in reality.