I like that Chris Bowers spelled out the reasons why he distrusts the Obama administration. Even better is his self-recognition that a lot of his criticism is dispositional and not “really…a question of analytic and scholastic ability.” He created a meaningful and honest post about how progressives are reacting to the Obama administration. However, I don’t really like his binary framing. Either you trust Obama or you do not. He makes the case for distrusting him and asks us to make the case for trusting him. That doesn’t seem to me to be the best way of looking at the issue. We need a little more nuance.
I could respond by detailing all the reasons I like Barack and Michelle Obama, and the many ways in which I have faith in them (which is not the same thing as trust). I could detail the many good decisions and policies he’s already made or announced. But a laundry list won’t settle the debate. Here’s where I think I really differ from Chris. Barack Obama is the first president in my lifetime and probably ever to represent me. Obama represents the liberal, academic, urban, secularized wing of the Democratic Party. He’s both an achieving Ivy Leaguer (as opposed to a legacy) and a former community organizer for the urban poor. This is a cultural thing. Obama is one of us, and his movement is our movement. To be sure, Obama represents something similar to other groups. Biracial people and the parents of biracial people, blacks, minorities of any type, single mothers, poor people, urban people, all can take pride and comfort in the mere fact that Obama was elected president. But those groups don’t have much of a defined ideology. The liberal, securalized, urban wing of the Democratic Party does have a defined ideology, and Obama largely represents it. These values are multiculturalism, internationalism, science-based policy, tolerance, social justice, and civil rights. Bill Clinton reflected these values fairly well most of the time, but he was very defensive about it. Obama is bold and largely unapologetic about his liberalism. Both Clinton and Obama had to operate in a larger political environment that was tilted to their right, and both will prove to be mere navigators in a larger political stream. For some reason I don’t quite understand, Chris has never seen Obama as rising star out of our movement. But his success or failure will be our success or failure. The country needs him to succeed because he’s the president and leader of the country. But we need him to succeed so that the values of urban, secularized liberalism can succeed.
Yet, the true backdrop of Chris’s post is the economic bailout. He mentions wiretapping, Afghanistan, and other matters, but the source of most of Open Left’s angst has been focused on economics. Chris devotes a whole section on his distrust to Larry Summers. And right up front Chris admits that there are extremely well-credentialed progressive economists on both sides of the issue. Some think the Geithner Plan is a solid step in the right direction and some think is a cynical giveaway to the very people that created the mess. Given that, Chris recognizes that his distrustful disposition is the decisive component of his opposition to the Geithner Plan. It’s actually quite refreshing candor, if you ask me.
I suppose most people would assume that I am a booster of the Geithner Plan considering how much grief I’ve dished out to its critics. But that’s not really the case. I don’t know if the Geithner Plan will work or cost us more money in the long run. I do know that nationalization is guaranteed to cost us hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. I doubt that that can be avoided no matter what we do. What I also know is that the Geithner Plan is the plan. There are no other plans. This is what we’re going with. So, I damn sure hope it works and works better than the alternatives. And, in order for it to work, we need Geithner to be a strong secretary. He needs credibility on the Hill and with the American people. It makes little sense to suggest he’s stealing our money to give it to Banksters unless you really truly believe that’s his motivation. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to persist in yelling at him to nationalize the banks and wipe out the shareholders as a cost-saving measure if there’s little evidence we’ll really save money doing that.
We might want Obama to take this opportunity to roll-back 1990s-era deregulation, break-up the banks, and fulfill a long pre-financial crisis wish-list of progressive reforms. I know that I’d like to see that. Do I trust Obama to do all those things. No. Not really. As Chris points out in his first bullet point, “it isn’t just the Obama administration we are dealing with.” We have to deal with a global banking network and we have to deal with conservative Democrats like Max Baucus and Kent Conrad. Even Chris Dodd’s liberalism becomes suspect when he is dealing with his state’s powerful financial services sector. I have no problem with pushing Obama to enact regulations that are opposed by Congress and Wall Street. I have a problem with expecting him to prevail or to choose every battle or to get it all done in 90 days.
What I know is that we haven’t had a president this progressive since Franklin Roosevelt, that we’ve never had one from our background who instinctively reflects our values, and that we desperately need him to succeed or we won’t only lose the White House to Palinesque thugs, but we’ll lose the internal battle within the Democratic Party. Are we going to be the party of tomorrow, filled with all races, religions, sexual-orientations, based in social justice and international cooperation? Or are we going to be the socially conservative, business-first, hawkish, Third-Way party that was wiped out between 1994 and 2006?