If you have the stamina, you should read Eric Alterman’s long opus on the state of progressive politics in this county. It’s actually about the state of all politics in this country, but it seeks to explain why progressive policies cannot be enacted despite large Democratic majorities in Congress and a president that is (or has been) rhetorically committed to them.
I have a few quibbles with Alterman’s recitation of the facts, but I want to praise his overall effort. My biggest criticism is that he fails to critique progressives. Everyone else comes in for harsh treatment, but progressives are given a pass. I think that is a mistake, but it’s interesting to think about why progressives deserve criticism. It’s largely because progressives are not familiar enough with the obstacles to progressive change that Alterman exhaustively lays out.
Alterman and I see eye-to-eye when it comes to Obama’s heart.
Personally, I tend more toward the view expressed by the young, conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, that Obama is “a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.” Or as one of Obama’s early Chicago mentors, Denny Jacobs, explained to his biographer David Remnick, Obama is a pol who learned early that “sometimes you can’t get the whole hog, so you take the ham sandwich.”
But the truth, dear reader, is that it does not much matter who is right about what Barack Obama dreams of in his political imagination…
…What’s more, one hypothesis—one I’m tempted to share—for the Obama administration’s willingness to compromise so extensively on the promises that candidate Obama made during the 2008 campaign would be that as president, he is playing for time. Obama is taking the best deal on the table today, but hopes and expects that once he is re-elected in 2012—a pretty strong bet, I’d say—he will build on the foundations laid during his first term to bring on the fundamental “change” that is not possible in today’s environment. This would be consistent with FDR’s strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010.
I wouldn’t have put it in exactly those terms, but that’s basically how I feel about Obama. I am not personally disappointed in the man, despite Alterman’s opening insistence that I should be.
Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment.
I am not disappointed for all the reasons that Alterman goes on to spell out in painful detail. I am disappointed that Obama has not been able to deliver on all campaign promises but since Alterman provides me with more than a dozen systemic villains to choose from to blame for this disappointment, I don’t need to point my disappointment at the man who proffered that agenda in the first place. Moreover, my recollection from the campaign was that all the major candidates (Clinton, Edwards, and Obama) were criticized from the left for not offering a progressive agenda. Yet, Alterman characterizes Obama’s platform as if it were the second-coming of the New Deal. He never promised that. What happened is that economic conditions changed and required Obama to respond much as FDR had to respond, with bold rescues and sweeping reforms. He didn’t have a mandate for that because the economic collapse came less than two months before the election.
I think it’s myopic to act as though the people elected Obama because of his promises on how to rescue the economy, but it’s equally short-sighted to behave as though an historic economic collapse shouldn’t have re-shuffled his campaign promises and priorities. That’s exactly what key advisers like Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel argued when they said Obama should drop health care to focus on jobs. Obama stuck to his guns on health care, but it was inevitable that other promises would slip. And understanding that is just as important as understanding all the other obstacles in Obama’s path.
If you thought electing Obama would guarantee that all of his promises would become law inside of two years, you are going to be disappointed. I’m not. I’m extremely happy with the president and nearly at my wit’s end with pretty much everyone else in this country. No faction frustrates me more than my own, and I’m grateful for Alterman for starting this conversation. I just wish he’d shine a mirror on himself and our movement. We need to hear about our shortcomings, too. Our biggest shortcoming is not understanding what Alterman has written and what it means for how we should feel about this administration. As I’ve said, this present Congress is the most productive and progressive Congress since 1965-66 and this president is the most successful and progressive since LBJ, and too many of us are focused on our disappointments and not focused on the right-wing threat that lurks out there with all its institutional advantages, just waiting to destroy this country, for good.
