For once, I have to disagree with Steve Benen. There are certain instances where a president actually moves the country onto a long-term trajectory in a left or rightward direction. When Franklin Roosevelt created the SEC, FDIC, FHA, the Fair Labor standards, and Social Security, he moved the country decisively (and in some ways, irrevocably) to the left. When Ronald Reagan appointed conservative Supreme Court Justices, fired the Air Traffic controllers, hired conservatives to run his administration, and rewrote the tax code, he started a thirty-year movement to the right.
There have been other presidents since World War Two, but only Lyndon Johnson can stake a claim to being a transformative president, and his legacy is ambiguous. Arguably, he built on and entrenched the welfare state at the same time that he split the left and provided the momentum that the conservative movement needed to come into power with Reagan. The rest of the post-war presidents haven’t moved things too much in any particular direction, at least not in any enduring way. But Obama is different, and that is what Pete Wehner is worrying about when he says this:
Pete Wehner, a former top official in the George W. Bush administration and a social conservative thinker, described the resistance to Obama as “beyond politics.”
“What we’re having here are debates about first principles,” Wehner said. “A lot of people think he’s trying to transform the country in a liberal direction in the way that Ronald Reagan did in a conservative direction. This is not the normal push and pull of politics. It gets down to the purpose and meaning of America.”
Benen interprets that statement as a kind of double-standard, where it’s okay for the pendulum to move to the right under Reagan, but not okay for it to swing back to the left under a Democratic president. But that’s not what Wehner is getting at. He’s worried that a successful Obama presidency will wipe away all the progress (as he sees it) that the conservatives have made since Reagan took office. It’s not a ridiculous concern. No conservative wants to look around in 2016 and realize that they’re back to square one, circa 1980.
A lot of confusion has arisen because Obama has by instinct and necessity pursued a fairly traditional center-left course. His health care bill, for example, left liberals feeling half-full. His Wall Street reforms didn’t go far enough for their taste. His foreign policies have failed to forcefully challenge the Establishment’s assumptions. But just the health care bill alone has the power to permanently shift the political landscape in Washington in a way not seen since the enactment of Social Security. Liberals like to carp that the bill is similar to the Heritage Foundation’s 1994 counterproposal to HillaryCare. Yet, those liberals forget that that the counterproposal was offered in bad faith. The goal was to scuttle any health care bill while appearing to be reasonable. Obama established the principle that the federal government is responsible for making sure every U.S. citizen has access to health care. From now on, the debate will focus on how to improve services, not on whether or not they should exist. That’s transformation. And that’s what Pete Wehner fears. The health care bill punched a hole through Reagan’s sails, and by the time they get the thing patched up the boat will be headed in a leftward direction.
So, yes, the Republicans freak out any time a Democrat is in the White House. But this isn’t just the push and pull of politics. And the reaction on the right shows that they know this.
That’s why we’re seeing this unprecedented obstruction and open hallucination. They may have held the line on Wall Street reform (although that remains to be seen) and they’re holding steady (for now) on the Supreme Court, but they’ll be damned if they’re going to let the president pass immigration reform or cap and trade because they actually have the power to stop that kind of transformation.
but they’ll be damned if they’re going to let the president pass immigration reform or cap and trade because they actually have the power to stop that kind of transformation.
Problem is, the Republicans have a lot of help from Ben Nelson-type Democrats on both of those.
Well…
~Atrios
I like Atrios and he has pretty amazing credentials but I can’t agree with this line of reasoning. The President’s job is not to do everything possible to ‘big up’ liberalism. It is his job to govern the country, to make the executive branch work in the best manner possible for all constituents and to take the lead in passing laws that help people and solve problems. The President has said consistently that he is not an ideologue and is not driven by any particular ideology one way or another. “We will do what works” was the rallying cry of his inauguration speech. If that doesn’t show liberalism in the best light, so be it.
On the economy, I am not an economist so take this with a pinch of salt, but I find it hard to believe that an extra $600 billion in stimulus (1.4 trillion instead of 800 billion) would have magically solved all the problems that are currently ongoing. Would unemployment be less? I don’t know but I tend to think that it still would be above 9% – i.e. undeniably high.
Let’s face facts, people aren’t disenchanted with liberalism because it hasn’t worked – there is a philosophical and ideological objection to it in terms of a deep deep mistrust of the government and the state. The tea party was almost started by that doofus on cnbc railing against paying for other people’s mortgages etc.
It is his job to govern the country, to make the executive branch work in the best manner possible for all constituents and to take the lead in passing laws that help people and solve problems.
This isn’t Utopia. I believe Atrios, and a few others, said HAMP would be a failure the moment it was introduced. Mainly because it did nothing to reduce principal on underwater houses.
I’m certainly not saying that this is utopia (in fact the opposite) – and I’m not commenting on whether HAMP should have been done – I agree that it hasn’t worked. What I am saying is that it is not the President’s job to make liberalism attractive – that may be a by-product of what he does or doesn’t do, but that’s not his focus, nor should it be.
I believe strongly that for everything the government tries to do in terms of actual solutions, you will always always find people who disagree who later turn out either to be foresighted geniuses or deputy downers. The reality is that there are just so many competing opinions on a vast array of matters and the President and his administration have to decide which one is the best (or least worse) in the circumstances. Sometimes they’ll make an incorrect decision and then the foresighted geniuses can say “i told you so” – that’s fine. But I would be horrified (and here, I’m speaking as a liberal, you understand) if any part of the decision making process involved a consideration of whether this or that decision was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for liberal ideology.
Except it’s a problem when even bloggers point out that the policy(HAMP) isn’t as advertised. In fact, even Treasury now admits that HAMP was/is just another back-door method of propping up the banksters.
I see this as precisely backwards. This is not only the job of the president it is his OVERARCHING job.
99 times of out a hundred a liberal ideal works better than a conservative idea. We have seen that borne out over and over and over again. Making liberals attractive and making sure it is successful is the best way to govern bar none. And that one time a conservative idea proves better? Who cares. Your liberal ideas have already made the country better and the next time the conservatives are in power let THEM worry about the conservative idea.
I understand the gist of reality based politics given that 90 percent of our elected officials really don’t give two shits about people who can’t afford to give them contributions.
What gives me pause here isn’t the usual left bleating about compromises. It’s the lack of leadership shown to those who care but aren’t seeing it in return. Its now serious election season and the president hasn’t shown me any serious chops about saving seats. If he looses the house, what will happen? What even uglier compromises will he have to do?
The man has the bully pulpit put isn’t using it very effectively ( at least in my little corner of PA-08 ) Here, the net effect of republican framing and what appears to be a basic lack of public intestinal fortitude has been demoralizing. He may be good in the smoke filled rooms but how can I pitch him when he keeps Geithner and Summers? It especially sucks that the cat food commission is a concept of democrats and Pelosi promised a vote on their recommendations about Social Security and such.
To your point about the Republicans going apeshit about transformational moments. Yes they have. However, their strategy seems to be paying off. Around here people have forgotten that the TARP was the last grab of cash that the Bushies did, they think it was Obama. Talk about a theft in plain site. If they do win the house, they will kill health care by not funding it. Then what?
I just hope Mr Obama’s chops will show up soon, or it is going to get real ugly next year. Will Darrel Issa issue 2K or 3K subpoenas before he is done?
–Bille ( sorry to ramble its late on a sunday )
ps remember the republicans don’t care about people they only want cheap labor. Anything that helps people they are opposed. This also makes the cat food commission royally suck.
This is an old argument, but… as much as you might dislike Geithner, the current obstructionist Senate will not confirm anyone that you would like, or even anyone marginally more progressive, to Treasury. Maybe Summers can be replaced – I don’t think he needs to be confirmed – but (probably) a big reason Geithner is still there is because he is literally irreplaceable.
It’s an interesting task to look at the biographies of every Treasury Secretary in our history. I did it one day during the transition. It convinced me that it would be basically unprecedented to nominate someone to the position who isn’t intimately familiar with Wall Street and basically a peer of the fat cats. It’s an open question whether someone can be an effective Treasury Secretary at the same time that they are a stranger and basically hostile to Wall Street. Maybe the right kind of personality with the right kind of backing from the president could pull it off, but we’ve never seen it attempted.
Kennedy’s choice of C. Douglas Dillon seems to be the beau ideal — Wall Street, and from the opposition party.
FDR did it right. Someone from Main Street.
It’s a cliche that politics is war by other means. But it’s a cliche because it’s true. Now that the post-war consensus on economic/social/foreign policy issues is breaking or broken, the stakes of the conflict between liberals and conservatives have been greatly intensified. No longer is the American ship of state heading in the same general direction no matter who is in charge. Now, the struggle for power is literally a matter of life and death, and Wehner is absolutely correct that the struggle comes down to the purpose and meaning of America. Over the past 30 years, conservatives became complacent that they had permanently defined this meaning (just as liberals made the same mistake during the previous era – such are human nature and human cognitive biases). The outcome of the current struggle for definition is unknown, but with the first-term Obama reforms conservatives sense they are already losing.
Personally, I am very confident that the conservative argument will lose in the long run. But the question of how they lose, and how much collateral damage they cause to the country in the process of losing, remains to be seen.
And war is politics by other mean.
And war is education (McLuhan), as in “That’ll larn ya, darn ya”.
And education has become war. As Texans can tell you.
I’m probably being overly serious for a Monday morning, but I think the distinction between war and politics is underrated.
Military historian John Keegan (in “A History of Warfare”) argues against our understanding of Clausewitz’ “war is the continuation of policy (or politics) by other means”. Keegan says, in effect that “war is the continuation of culture by other means”. He means that human societies fight wars in ways that are consistent with their underlying culture.
It’s more helpful (IMHO) to think of war as what happens when politics fails. Among other things, this is why war analogies tend to work badly in non-war settings (e.g., the War on Drugs, culture wars, etc.).
War is the form of politics that happens when parties to the negotiation (and all politics is some form of negotiation) decide that the use of force will gain them the upper hand instead of continuing to negotiate. Most often, this decision is dramatically wrong even if it at first appears to succeed.
What we call normal politics is the negotiations that happen within a framework of a legal contract of some sort, a framework whose purpose is to prevent war and most especially a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Which is why leaders try to cloak the going to war in some form of legal mumbo-jumbo.
Interesting comments, both. I suppose looking at war as a form of politics can actually give one a reason for optimism about our current situation: things are bad, but not nearly as bad as they could be. Negotiations haven’t completely collapsed, and red states aren’t literally fighting blue states, as they did just a few generations ago.
By not passing cap-and-trade, Republicans ensure that the way the US will deal with global greenhouse gases is through regulation and and direct or underwritten government investment at the federal or state level.
By not dealing with immigration comprehensively, Republicans ensure that the same rotten system continues indefinitely, robbing them of a political future.
And the next wedge issue on the horizon — China. Richard Burr is already cranking up the fear machine. If Republicans can screw up our relationship with China, they can ensure that China starts putting pressure on the US for payment of debt. I frankly think the Chinese are too smart to bite on this one but one never knows.
Good governance is really about balance. It’s not as if a Republican is incapable of having any good ideas. But they went way, way too far in their favored direction – so far that they nearly destroyed this country. They would have gone farther had they had the chance. They have no brakes, no sense of balance. I think most Americans recognize this.
So yes, some Americans are very upset that their prize creation will be significantly dismantled. Well tough, it’s either that or the nation.
They are no doubt the same people that think that FDR destroyed this great country of ours. But most people would say he saved it.
Yes. I think it has been a revelation in the past couple years to many liberals of just how angry so many conservatives still are about FDR’s reforms. They still see that era as one of the worst disasters in the country’s history, much worse than liberals’ opinion of the 30-yr Reagan Revolution.
Assume Obama is serious when he says he wants to be a transformational president like Reagan. Now assume that conservatives take him at his word. Next, assume that conservatives recognize the demographic tide is running against them. No wonder we’re seeing what Booman aptly calls “unprecedented obstruction and open hallucination”.
Obama’s strategy, as best I can tell, is to aim for progressive goals while signaling to centrists and conservatives that he will include them and their ideas in his administration.
It’s a multi-year, multi-term, even multi-adminstration strategy. Just as liberals, thrown off balance, divided and defeated by the Bush administration’s post-9/11 strategy slowly and steadily reorganized and rebuilt their power from 2003 to 2008 to retake control of Congress and the White House, Obama’s strategy requires the same kind of steady reorganizing and rebuilding of power to enact a progressive agenda over the next decade or more.
It would be a strategic error to respond to short-term setbacks (like losing seats in Congress 10 weeks from now) by adopting the frenetic, reactive, media-driven tactics of the tea partiers.