David Roberts has everything right. He has everything right except for his understanding of Obama’s strategy and his explanation for how American politics work.
We do, indeed, live in a post-truth environment. It’s true that the Republicans’ haven’t moved right so much substantively as tactically. It’s true that we no longer have any effective referees to fairly arbitrate factual disputes between the two parties. Roberts pretty much nails the current situation exactly. But, here is where he goes too far.
On policy after policy, Obama began with grand, magnanimous concessions (see: offshore drilling) and waited in vain for reciprocation. He adopted center-right policies … and was attacked as a radical secular socialist Muslim babykiller. Every Dem proposal, no matter how mild, has been a government takeover complete with confiscatory taxes, death panels, and incipient tyranny. The fusillade of lies began early and has continued unabated.
Now, on the naive, positivist view, the media and other elite referees of public debate should have called a foul. Republicans should have been penalized for opposing and maligning policies that they’d supported not long ago, for brazenly lying, and for rejecting all attempts at compromise. They chose the strategy; the strategy should have been explained plainly to the public.
But the crucial fact of post-truth politics is that there are no more referees. There are only players. The right has its own media, its own facts, its own world. In that world, the climate isn’t warming, domestic drilling can solve the energy crisis, and Obama is a socialist Kenyan. (Did you see Obama’s birth certificate yet? If he had that much trouble convincing people he was born in the country, how did he expect to convince them he’s a reasonable moderate?) Obama can back centrist policies all day, but there is no mechanism to convey that centrism to the broad voting public. There is no judge settling disputes or awarding points. His strategy — achieve political advantage through policy concessions — has failed.
Everything about this is correct except for the last sentence. Obama’s strategy is to get bills passed that move the ball in a progressive direction. On some bills, like the Cap and Trade climate bill, he failed. On others, like the historic Affordable Care Act, he succeeded. But the strategy is not aimed at winning political advantage. It’s aimed at passing legislation. And Roberts does recognize the problem with passing legislation in our modern Congress. He lays it out beautifully.
The policy, the motive force among conservative elites, is a defense of America’s oligarchic status quo and a redistribution of wealth upward. It is those voices that speak in the ears of our political class and that agenda that commands the assent of one and a half of America’s two parties. It’s not hard to see why: our political system is choked with veto points, vulnerable to motivated minorities, insulated from public opinion, and flooded with money.
It is genuinely difficult to say what, if anything, can rally the left’s diverse constituencies into a political force capable of counterbalancing the influence of the country’s oligarchy.
One of those “veto points” is the U.S. Senate. We’ve been over this before, but even when Obama had 59 (and, briefly, 60) senators in the Democratic caucus, he had to deal with the fact some of those senators are very conservative, or represent states that did not vote for Obama. Those senators have to face the dominance of Republican talk radio and the ubiquitous presence of Fox News in their home states, and the need to raise buttloads of cash from poor, rural, and lightly-populated regions. That’s why senators like Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, and Blanche Lincoln weren’t signing off on any public option. That’s why Joe Manchin is joking around about destroying the country’s credit rating.
The veto of the oligarchy is a fact. It is a plain reality. It is not something that Obama can overcome through pretty rhetoric or through angry and frustrated complaint. His strategy is not to create this reality, or to take credit for it. His strategy is to make progress within its limitations.
His “only adult in the room” positioning is, indeed, designed to place him above the partisan bickering. But any president is required to do some of this symbolic separation from their own party. It allows them to be seen as the president of the whole country, not as a mere prime minister who can be tossed out as soon as his party’s policies grow unpopular. But however he does the optics, he spent his first two years constrained by the fact that nothing could pass through Congress that didn’t have either Olympia Snowe or Ben Nelson’s consent. He couldn’t lose the vote of Jay Rockefeller on a climate bill and he couldn’t lose Joe Lieberman on an insurance bill. This is why his policies have a less-than-satisfying flavor to them.
But the president has to be a pitchman for his policies and his accomplishments. He can’t go around saying that he’s powerless and his legislation is weak-tea. He has to take credit for his accomplishments, and he has had many accomplishments.
This is why progressive anger at the president has been misplaced from the beginning. At least in the legislative field, where he is completely shackled, the anger should have been placed at the people and media and laws and rules that have constrained him.
Much has been said about his negotiating style. Why offer any concessions up front? Perhaps Obama could wring more out of the system with a more combative style. But we are talking about the margins here. The fossil fuel industry is protected. The insurance industry is protected. The outcome is certain, only the details are in dispute.
The system is what it is. Changing it is a long-term project, and not the responsibility of the person charged with running the day-to-day operations of the government.
It’s beyond frustrating, but two things should focus the mind.
First, imagine what Obama’s record would look like if every bill crafted in the House over the last two years had not had to be designed to at least have a shot of passing in the Senate. And imagine that all of it passed and was signed by the president. How would Obama’s progressive credentials look then?
Second, imagine what would happen if the House Republicans could pass any bill they wanted and have it signed by the president. Imagine what would be left of our social safety net, our treasury, and the rights of women and minorities. Imagine their product on education and research and development and foreign aid and funding for women’s health and public broadcasting. Imagine the foreign policies of John McCain and Sarah Palin during the recent uprising in the Middle East.
When you keep those two things in your mind, things begin to take on a different perspective. Don’t you think?