My blogging has been light over the last few days for several reasons. Obviously, I’ve been occupied with holiday and family related activities. But I’ve also been reading David Plouffe’s new book, The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory. In addition, after months of watching Congress struggle to pass health care reform, I just needed a bit of time to decompress and think about other things. And I have a baby on the way, and that involves planning and psychological preparation. So, I’ve been restricting my political junkieism to reliving the 2008 campaign through Plouffe. I’m pretty close to being finished with the book, and I’m glad I chose to read it now because it helped me step back from the daily grind and remember what it was we thought we were trying to do in this presidency. Overall, I’ve found the experience bolstering to my optimism. I do feel like the Obama administration is going through one of its down phases, like many they faced during the interminable path to the White House. But I have been reminded of how they, time and time again, were able to step back and reset their course when they found they had strayed from their strategy and principles during the campaign. It’s makes me feel more confident that they’ll be able to do the same during this first term.
From my perspective, they’ve been swallowed up too much by the Washington culture that they so successfully resisted during the campaign. They came in hoping to change things up, but were met with iron resistance from the Republican Party. Obama wanted to be pragmatic, which meant that his instinct was to forge a new kind of bipartisan compromise. It wasn’t triangulation exactly, because triangulation was an almost wholly cynical enterprise. Obama wanted something more authentic. But that required the other side to provide members of good will. So far, they have been lacking.
The effort to change Washington has failed. The administration now needs to step back and realize that he may not be able to change Washington but that he can lead it. I’ll have more to say on these ideas after I finish Plouffe’s book.
I wish Plouffe was a central player in the administration at the moment.
You forgot to recommend purchasing the book through Powell’s. 🙂
if they were trying to “change Washington”. If Obama had provided an ounce of leadership he could have led the American people.
“Washington” would have been pulled along with the current.
I think a lot of people do not understand the Republican Party’s near-complete conversion into a very radical party, perhaps not even some of the Republican politicians themselves. In part, this is owing to our brain-dead mainstream media’s lazy ‘both parties are extreme’ formulation. There is absolutely nothing radical about today’s Democratic Party. It ends up apologizing and temporizing about even the most modest and necessary reforms.
The Republican Party in its current avatar, on the other hand, has gone well beyond Reagan. It has continued to hew to his free-market ideology even in the face of its visibly catastrophic failure in the Bush Jr. Administration. The facts have not changed their minds one bit. In other words, they have abandoned empiricism for the religion of the unfettered free market. For some, this is an exercise in cynicism: it never mattered how things turn out for the nation, because I got mine. But for those Republican politicians who do genuinely care about the country, it represents either political cowardice or a failure of vision or both.
Karl Rove style politics is all about backing people into corners and restricting their choices. While Democrats have suffered from this, it has been utterly disastrous for the diminishing numbers of rational Republicans. Even if they wished to ignore or repudiate radical right-wing irrationalism, how would they do it? Having ridden the tiger for this long, it is difficult to see how they can safely dismount and still win elections.
To the deep consternation of those of us toward the left, the Democratic Party has come to embrace most of the old Roosevelt Democratic coalition (minus most white Southerners who will always respond better to emotion than to reason) AND much of the Eisenhower Republican coalition. This is not, thus far, an easy mega-coalition to guide, and there is a sense of confusion and disillusion among Democrats. Right now, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” But there is a chance – maybe even a good chance – that if we can be patient and continue to control the middle of the board, that Democrats can not only check Republican excesses even in bad years, but checkmate their extremism and make it stop altogether. I certainly hope so, because failure will mean tyranny.
Its a perfect Christmas gift for number 2 son. If I hurry, I’ll be able to sneak a read before wrapping.
I’m not sure Booman. He’s been President less than a year and he’s failed to change Washington? Wow. Maybe I’m not understanding what you mean but the only President to get this far on healthcare reform, a man who’s in the process of kicking lobbyists off advisory boards in D.C. isn’t what I’d call a failure. Maybe you didn’t realize how difficult Washington was to change, especially after the train wreck that was Bush. Hmmm. Maybe you meant bipartisansip is a failure. I still think that remains to be seen. We are only privy to the blustering of some of the Repubs. We don’t know what’s said behind closed doors. Besides, President Obama isn’t being bipartisan for the sake of being bipartisan. He’s actually trying to show the Repubs constituents that he’s willing to work with their elected reps. I live in Cleveland,Ohio. It’s pretty conservative in spite of the fact that we elected Kucinich and Brown as our reps. And dare I say pretty racist. Boehner represents the southern part of Ohio. I’ve heard from many in his area and in mine that the President is trying to work with the Repubs but the repubs are being ignorant. This from folks who I know personally don’t watch much news and use the “N” word fairly regular. My point is bipartisanship is reaching some folks. Maybe not fast enough for you. I apologize if I don’t understand your post but failure is a bit much. I expected you to understand that governing is ugly and messy. I never thought that you believed in unicorns and fairy tales.
It’s more that Obama has a certain level of idealism that has come up against a rather immovable reality. He would prefer to forge new working relationships from coalitions that defy convention in Washington. It’s not triangulation, because that is an effort to pass Republican priorities and then take all the credit for them. It’s not being moderate for the sake of moderation. Part of the point transcends the particular legislation and goes to transforming the lines of battle. He wants to come up with solutions that don’t look like what comes out of the right and left’s think tanks, or even some hybrid of the two.
He can change Washington somewhat by lobbying reform, and perhaps that is a prerequisite for his lager vision. But he has not been able to even get started on his pragmatic agenda because he’s forced to use exclusively Democrats. The GOP is determined to force him to appear as a left-wing ideologue. It’s in this sense that his effort has failed. He needs to focus on passing legislation, and forget about how it is passed.
Booman, I felt the same way after reading that fantasic, enlightening book. Another commenter mentioned getting Plouffe involved in the White House and I think that would be a lovely idea. Plouffe, I think, is less likely to give a shit what is nice and knows how to come down hard on the media and other gamers in very clear language. He’s Rahm without the too clever political mind games and horse trading.
And to pick up on what commenter “CrapIsKing” wrote above about what the Republican party really is; that it is so radical beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. In fact, to Obama it’s another reincarnation of Reverend Wright; something he thought he could work with but instead, ends up giving people a very distorted view of him, with the outright lies and hateful rhetoric. How does Obama confront that? Does he need to give a speech about “an imperfect party system” to enlighten the American people to this reality and also offer some suggestions on how we can go forward?
I think he has to do what he often did during the campaign when he found that his effort was stalled. He needs to go back to his core values and reevaluate where he stands and adjust his strategy.
He needs to involve his activists more, and he needs to fire them up, which requires that he take a more political (not-partisan necessarily) tone. He needs to talk to the people directly, without the filter of the media. He’s lost touch with the organization that got him elected because he’s had to do a lot of things that weren’t part of his campaign, like bailing out Detroit and Wall St.
OFA is doing a lot, and it isn’t getting much press, but they need to do more. He’s got to change the game. His movement wasn’t about being a Democrat, so getting boxed in to having to keep the whole party united is throwing him off his game.
I think he should try to build up OFA, get new members, get them activated, get them knocking doors. Keep building the movement, and keep doing it along non-party specific terms. They folded OFA into the DNC, and I think that may be strangling his creation.
But he can’t just sit up there trying to hold the Dem caucus united at 60 to do anything. He’s gotta find a way to apply pressure on the Republicans, and it’s not working right now because the Dem Base is disengaged and increasingly apathetic.
Everything you mention here has merit. But come the first of the year virtually all of Washington, not to mention the media, are going to kick into campaign mode as we roll toward November. I just have a lot of difficulty believing that in that kind of environment Obama is going to be able to regain any momentum to rebuild the movement that got him into the White House. He has certainly had a lot on his plate the first year. But allowing the political machine built during his campaign to essentially rust, whether due to apathy or lack of resources to keep it tended, is going to be quite a hurdle to overcome.
How is he going to be able to “change the game” when he is facing an opposition party that seems to be willing to obstruct one hundred percent of the time, even though it is believed (or just hoped???) by some to be political suicide? The GOP is banking that keeping Washington completely ineffectual will be translated in the minds of the voters as a failure by Obama. And I think that is probably a pretty good bet to make. That, coupled with a continuing rallying of the nutty fringe that is their base and the likelihood of Democratic apathy in the face of what will still be horrible employment figures for the foreseeable future, does not bode well for the kind of political recovery you are hoping for.
I can’t help but think that this is going to be a very bad year for Obama and for Democrats. There is an extremely large arrays of forces lined up who are pushing very hard for Obama to fail. They smell blood in the water. And the media is aiding and abetting these forces in a way that makes it almost impossible to change the narrative in such a way that he can rebound quickly. He is facing a very long and steep hill ahead. He had better have a lot of rabbits in his hat.
I see this:
Not real encouraging right now.
“But he has not been able to even get started on his pragmatic agenda because he’s forced to use exclusively Democrats. The GOP is determined to force him to appear as a left-wing ideologue. It’s in this sense that his effort has failed. He needs to focus on passing legislation, and forget about how it is passed.”
I think the news media are a large part of the problem, or at least the perceived problem. Democratic politicians to an annoying extent still consider the mainstream media to be the voice of the educated and involved citizenry. In fact, they are mostly lazy fucks who “balance the truth with a lie,” to use Edward R. Murrow’s phrase. In my opinion, this leaves an opening for Democrats to do whatever they want legislatively, to swing as far left as their coalition permits them to do. The news media are never going to challenge Republican charges of Democratic left-wing extremism, so why not actually BE as extreme as the Republicans, within the bounds of a big tent?
The good and the bad news is that the bulk of the populace no longer takes what the news media say as gospel. We figured out Vietnam. We figured out Iraq. We figured out Bush, all with virtually no help from the news media. So, if we were to swing left with our legislative program, the news media would continue to talk about polarization, but the timid Republican and independent voters who are noticing in increasing numbers that their party has become institutionally insane could be scared off.
“So, I’ve been restricting my political junkieism to reliving the 2008 campaign through Plouffe.”
Can’t blame ya. It’s a lot more pleasant than living the post-election reality.
When the semester is over I will have to read Mr. Plouffe’s book. Then maybe I will have a better understanding of what you are writing. This is a topic I’d like to revisit.
looking forward to reading your review of the book.
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Has hit the immovable structure of daily realism. It’s nice to retreat in a year gone by, this will not help Obama pass HCR or turn the world events around. The economy was and is a disaster, jobs won’t be available in 2010 and the election will put the Obama administration on the same footing as Clinton in 1994. Time is running out.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."