Barack Obama – Page 27

Mandates and the meaning of change

I mentioned a short column by Robert Novak that attempts to redefine Barack Obama’s rather sizable victory as something short of a mandate — a meme that is being pushed now by the very same conservative and centrist writers and commentators that viewed George Bush’s 2004 election victory as just that.

The folks who inhabit the alley of political conventional wisdom refuse to let go of their long-held belief that we live in a center-right nation. But the results should demonstrate that their alley is too narrow. We are a nation of pragmatists more than anything else. As pragmatists, we are interested in things that work and make our lives better. Pragmatically, that means we are moving to the left, toward becoming once again a center-left nation.

Don’t believe me? Consider What E.J. Dionne Jr. had to say yesterday:

In choosing Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress, the country put a definitive end to a conservative era rooted in three myths: that a party could govern successfully while constantly denigrating government’s role; that Americans were divided in an irrepressible moral conflict pitting a “real America” against some pale imitation; and that market capitalism could succeed without an active government regulating it in the public interest and modestly redistributing income to temper inequalities.

The GOP — and the media — failed to realize that

a substantial majority rather likes spreading the wealth if doing so means health coverage, pensions and college opportunities for all, or asking the wealthy to bear a slightly larger share of the tax burden.

“John McCain calls this socialism,” Obama said at a Pittsburgh rally last week. “I call it opportunity.” So did the voters.

Obama, he writes, altered the political landscape by refusing to be cowed by the right.

Obama exploded the old framework. He explicitly rejected the idea that Americans were choosing between “more” or “less” government, “big” or “small” government.

He cast the choice differently. “Our government should work for us, not against us,” he would say. “It should help us, not hurt us.” Obama ran as a progressive, not a conservative, but also as a pragmatist, not an ideologue. That combination will define his presidency.

For some reason, however, the conventional-wisdom crowd — what David Sirota calls the “sail-trimmers, bet-hedgers, and expectation-downplayers” — continues to resist the notion that we have witnessed a political transformation. The “Punditburo,” he says, began “taking to newspaper columns and the airwaves” well before the election in a pre-emptive strike to maintain the fiction that “America remains more conservative than it has ever been.”

Once Tuesday delivered a huge progressive landslide, that pre-election hysteria has turned into a full-on panic – suggesting that even the most arrogant let-them-eat-cakers inside the Beltway are genuinely afraid that there has been a paradigm shift in American politics – one that threatens the current Establishment’s very relevance and authority. And so the Mandate Manipulation Unit has gone into a reactive overdrive with everyone around Obama (and aspiring for a White House job) delivering a “nothing to see here, folks!” message. That’s right, after “the most important election of our lifetime” we should expect to see nothing exponentially different from our government come 2009.

There are two sides to Obama — as Dionne notes and as I’ve written before. He has very strong progressive/liberal instincts but also can be pragmatic to a fault and overly cautious. How he governs — which part of his political personality wins — will come down to who shouts the loudest, the “Mandate Maniuplation Unit” or the progressive grassroots.

What is different than in the recent past, as Sirota says, is that

the progressive movement that worked closely with Obama now has its own capacity to counter the mandate manipulators and crystallize the real message of the 2008 campaign. Indeed, this is a new and critical development. From the Campaign for America’s Future, to labor unions, to the Progressive States Network, to Public Citizen, to blogs, to high-profile congressional spokespeople, we have our own collective microphone and infrastructure.

But we need to use it. I agree with Barack Obama that he needs to reach out to Republicans and include them in the discussion, but I don’t think that he can let them — or the rightwing of his own party — dictate how he governs.

This debate over whether the election represents a mandate gets back to something that Matt Yglesias wrote last week. Obama, he said before the election was

running on a platform that promises universal preschool, dramatic cuts in carbon emissions and investments in clean energy infrastructure, health insurance that would be affordable for all, comprehensive immigration reform, substantial labor law reform, large new spending on K-12 initiatives, and tax reform to make the federal code much more progressive overall. Is it as left-wing as what John Edwards ran on in the primaries in 2008? No. But it’s much more robustly progressive than what John Kerry offered in 2004, what Al Gore offered in 2000, or what Bill Clinton offered in 1996, and somewhat more ambitious than the Clinton ‘92 program.

It would be, he says, “the most dramatic shift in national policy since the high tide of the Great Society.” He admits that it’s unlikely that Obama will be successful in making everything happen. But ceding the argument to the right and allowing it to paint the nation as more conservative than it is can only lead to abject failure. A “key element” in teh right wing’s efforts to stymie Obama and the progressives “will be the effort to argue … that, eh, he didn’t really run on a bold progressive agenda.”

Under the circumstances, I think it’s important to argue that, yes, he in fact did run on strong progressive agenda and members of congress need to hear that if he wins, that signifies the political viability of a strong progressive agenda.

That’s essentially the point Sirota is making, as well, in arguing the mandate question. Why is it important? he asks:

Simply put, because it sets the parameters of the political debate for the next four years. How the mandate is depicted – and distorted – impacts what the next president will have the political capital to do, and not do. Political capital, after all, is really an intangible matter of perception. If the president is perceived to have an electoral mandate for far-reaching change, then he will have a lot of capital to reach for that change (especially if we successfully pressure him). But if the president is perceived to have an electoral mandate merely for small-bore incrementalism (as the Mandate Manipulators always insist), then he will be under enormous pressure to reach only for incremental reform.

This is why conservatives were so adamant about claiming a mandate in 1980 and in 2004 – they understood its critical connection to policy. This is also why Establishment voices are so adamant about downplaying a mandate today – because the empirical data from the election suggests that 2008 provided an overwhelmingly anti-Establishment mandate on everything from financial regulation, to trade, to health care to the Iraq War. If that mandate is permitted to be recognized, acknowledged and appreciated in the public debate, it might force significant policy change on those issues. That’s the kind of change we all voted for this week – but as Obama himself said in his victory speech, “This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change.” Helping Obama turn that chance into something more is now our charge in the months ahead.

The hard work is only beginning

I was listening to Bill Moyers’ show, Bill Moyers’ Journal, on a podcast as I ran this morning and was struck by something that Glenn Loury said. Loury, a professor of social sciences and economics at Brown University, was talking about the impact of race on the election when he pointed out that many of the ugliest moments in this campaign are likely to have a life “after the election.” Ads — like one distorting Barack Obama’s position on immigration — are “going to echo and resonate after the election.”

Should Obama win, now you have a president of the United States who a lot of people think is illegitimate as a person who consorts with murderers, as a person who’s sympathetic to terrorists. It’s de-legitimating of the president of the United States. It’s poisoning the well in a certain way.

You do what you have to do to win an election. But then after the election the person has to govern. And now what has been said about that person continues to echo in the minds of citizens. And I’m worried that in this case the suggestion that Obama is somehow going to get in the White House and, you know, sell out the country will hurt all of us should he win and need to govern.

It’s a legitimate concern.

Consider this Republican Trust PAC ad designed to recast Obama into a dangerous stereotype, which has been running since last week:

The group also has run ads distorting Obama’s position on immigration and has called Obama — through a letter from Scott Wheeler, the organization’s executive director — “one of the most radical political figures ever to be nominated by a major party” who “promises to change America forever.”

Basically, if Obama does win, he will have to contend with the fallout from this kind of attack — same as Bill Clinton had to refight the 1960s during his administration. Clinton, of course, embodied his decade in some ways but was really a different kind of Democrat. But the constant attack from the right had its desired effect, hamstringing Clinton and leaving him far less effective than he otherwise might have been.

I know that we have this romantic memory of the ’90s now, but the reality is that the Clinton years were anything but a respite from conservative rule. I would argue, in fact, that his biggest accomplishments — the “end of welfare as we know it,” a crime bill that expanded the federal use of the death penalty — used to be the kind of policies we expected from moderate Republicans.

Obama, too, is a different kind of Democrat — as I’ve written, his liberal and pragmatic instincts seem to be in constant battle, and how he governs will depend a great deal on which side of his political nature is most emboldened. I’d like to think that a strong liberal push would convince him to reinvigorate the government and to abandon what has been called Clinton’s cautious incrementalism. But the kinds of attacks that have been leveled as this campaign draws to a close raise the question, as Loury says, that we will have a president who lacks legitimacy among some large subset of the population, even if he manages to wrack up a large electoral majority.

So while hope appears to be in the air, it must be tempered by an understanding that the last two years have just been a prelude to the difficult work that will follow.

Obama, Clinton and the future

David Sirota comments on something that I think is going to become an issue come January — something that ties into the concerns I raised yesterday about Barack Obama and progressivism.

Basically, Sirota raised concerns about Bill Clinton’s potential impact on an Obama presidency, given some comments that Clinton made yesterday that had Fox and some conservatives talking about Obama as offering a third Clinton term. (I’m not sure that Clinton was implying that, but impressions are everything in politics.)

Sirota, who spoke on Fox about the Clinton speech, rightly concludes that “Clinton’s entire narrative is the starting gun of what will be a very intense effort by the larger pool of Clintonites to infiltrate an Obama administration.” That, were it to happen, it would undercut Obama’s argument of change and populist economics.

If we can step back and look honestly at the economic situation, then we have to admit (as I admitted on Fox) that Clinton officials had a hand in the key deregulatory policies that led to the financial meltdown, and the key free-market fundamentalist policies (rigged trade deals, corporate tax loopholes, etc.) that are hollowing out the economy. These same people are now going to try to use an Obama presidency to reassume the posts they had in a Clinton administration. And the fact that, according to Bill Clinton, Obama is already potentially letting them – well, that’s really disturbing (if unsurprising).

The hope is with a big enough election mandate, Obama will feel more empowered to sweep out the Clintonites and start fresh – both in terms of personnel, and in terms of ideology. Because if he doesn’t, not only could it stunt his policy agenda, it could also create political problems for him. The media – and especially outlets like Fox News – are going to be looking for weak points that allow them to tar and feather an Obama presidency as just “more of the same.”

Obama, in winning the primaries and potentially the general electon, will have taken control of the Democratic Party — and, by extension, will have relegated Bill Clinton to the history books.

But , as I wrote yesterday, there is a tension apparent in Obama’s political makeup that has him shifting between the progressive/liberal and Clinton wings of the party. Which is why, as I wrote yesterday and as Sirota writes today

it’s important for progressives to start laying down markers about what we should and should not cheer on – what we should and should not expect from an Obama adminstration. In my opinion, it doesn’t help Obama win the election, nor will it help his administration, to be painted as a mere second act for the last Democratic administration.

Making the Obama presidency the third term of Bill Clinton’s presidency is both substantively inappropriate to the times, and politically dangerous/tone deaf. I hope that’s not the path a President Obama takes, should he win the White House.

And it’s a path we shouldn’t allow him to take.

Pushing Obama to the leftand keeping him there

I’ve been having an interesting conversation — via e-mail — with Seth Goldberg, a Cranbury resident who seems to share my political views and who like me was slow to jump on the Obama bandwagon. Readers of this blog know that, through much of the early going of the 2008 presidential race, I had been looking at Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards, preferring the Ohio congressman but viewing Edwards and his antipoverty agenda as someone more likely to alter the Democratic debate. I viewed Obama as a decent third or fourth choice, having started to read The Audacity of Hope, getting a couple of chapters in and then tossing it aside in frustration at its flaccid unwillingness to actually offer anything of political substance.

I felt that the presidential primary here in New Jersey in February, when I outlined my reasons for backing Obama over Hillary Clinton, which came down to this:

In the end, I’ll be voting for Obama for two reason: Iraq and Iran. While both Obama and Clinton promise to end the war, only one has been right on the war from the beginning — Obama. Clinton voted to authorize the war with Iraq and, no matter how much she tries to explain it away, I can only view it as either a lack of judgment or a vote of political calculation, neither of which speak well for a candidate who repeatedly says she is the one who will be ready on day one to be president and commander-in-chief.

Her rhetoric on Iran raises some concerns, as well. While she is committed to diplomacy (as is Obama), she has no intention of sitting down with Iranian leaders — which would appear to make diplomacy impossible. Obama is prepared to meet face to face, a willingness that could be likened to Nixon’s opening to China or Reagan’s face-to-face meetings with Gorbachev. Iran is the United States’ chief rival in the Middle East; it is irresponsible not to talk.

I am more comfortable with that decision now than at any time since this seemingly endless presidential race began, my trepidation fading as Obama has weathered the standard political nonsense — Bill Ayres, the Rev. Wright — and shown himself to have a fairly strong grasp of what ails the economy and a real sense of who is hurting most.

While the punditocrisy tends to dismiss left-leaning economic populism as an unwinnable position in presidential politics, Obama has pushed hard in that direction since tying up the nomination and especially over the last two months as the economy has tanked big time.

And, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out earlier today, Obama is

running on a platform that promises universal preschool, dramatic cuts in carbon emissions and investments in clean energy infrastructure, health insurance that would be affordable for all, comprehensive immigration reform, substantial labor law reform, large new spending on K-12 initiatives, and tax reform to make the federal code much more progressive overall. Is it as left-wing as what John Edwards ran on in the primaries in 2008? No. But it’s much more robustly progressive than what John Kerry offered in 2004, what Al Gore offered in 2000, or what Bill Clinton offered in 1996, and somewhat more ambitious than the Clinton ‘92 program. Presumably, that entire agenda won’t actually be enacted.

But if it were enacted, it would be the most dramatic shift in national policy since the high tide of the Great Society.

He adds that it is crucial to the success of an Obama presidency and progressive goals that “to argue that, yes, he in fact did run on strong progressive agenda and members of congress need to hear that if he wins, that signifies the political viability of a strong progressive agenda.”

Big Tent Democrat, on Talk Left, expands upon this (quoting Yglesias, as well):

It also happens to be true that Obama ran a progressive general election campaign. It is one of the ironies of this election season that Obama flipped the usual formula – run to the Left in the primaries and run to the Center in the GE. Obama has done the opposite. He ran to the Center (really he ran to nothing – he ran to the Post Partisan Unity Schtick) during the primaries and to the Left during the general election.

Which brings me back to my e-mail exchange with Seth Goldberg. The key, as I wrote to Seth earlier this week, is Obama’s progressive instincts, which have helped me overcome my early trepidation.

I was late coming to Obama too. I thought too many progressives viewed him as a human Rorschak, reading into him their own desires and transforming him into something that he isn’t. He is, for the most part, a cautious, somewhat moderately liberal politician with good instincts who I think can be turned by more progressive factions and made to do what’s right. I worry, though, that he might just as easily be influenced by the people who had surrounded Clinton and the conventional wisdom people who always argue that things cannot be done. So we will see. That said, I will be voting for him without reservations knowing that he probably is the first major-party candidate in my voting lifetime (going back to Carter-Reagan) that I feel I can truly be supportive of and feel good about voting for.

Seth offered this response:

I gave Kucinich a few bucks after he wrote up articles of impeachment for Cheney and then a few more bucks when he announced that he had seen flying saucers (or some such) while at a party at Shirley MaClaine’s home. That second donation wasn’t really made to help keep his campaign going as much as it was intended as a small reward. Sort of like a prize for just being Dennis Kucinich. So I was pretty lonely until I overheard Sean Hannity going on about Reverend Wright and how no one could seriously argue that Obama could have sat and listened to his sermons for the better part of twenty years unless he was essentially at peace with the leftist
politics of the Black Church. Pretty soon I found myself sneaking into the other room to listen to Hannity’s radio show and in a matter of days he had me convinced that underneath Obama’s cool and hopeful charm there was hiding a genuine lefty like no other in the Democratic party. The son of a bitch might be right! Well, I never looked back. So when Obama caved on the FISA bill I shrugged it off. When he
says he plans to expand the army and get tough with Pakistan I Ignore it. When he supported the bailout I accepted it as politically expedient. So here I am for the first time in my political life suspending my usual critique of the Democratic Party’s long-running capitulation with the Right and fully expecting that the real Obama will emerge on January 20th to the horror of everyone else in Cranbury just as Sean Hannity has predicted. Desperate times….

What does all of this mean? well, I think Norman Solomon sums it up in a column on Alternet, in which he says that an Obama victory would be “a clear national rejection of the extreme right-wing brew that has saturated the executive branch for nearly eight years.”

What’s emerging for Election Day is a common front against the dumbed-down demagoguery that’s now epitomized and led by John McCain and Sarah Palin.

That said, progressives — those on the left side of the political spectrum — cannot sit on their hands and assume that an Obama presidency will magically transform the world, that it won’t bring us a repeat of the Clinton years and their capitulation and triangulation, their promise and disappointment.

Progressives are mostly on board with the Obama campaign, even though — on paper, with his name removed — few of his positions deserve the “progressive” label. We shouldn’t deceive ourselves into seeing Obama as someone he’s not. Yet an Obama presidency offers the possibilities that persistent organizing and coalition-building at the grassroots could be effective at moving national policy in a progressive direction.

Progressives need to remember, he says, that there will be just as much work to do after the election as there has been up until this point. The left needs

to mobilize for a comprehensive agenda including economic justice, guaranteed healthcare for all, civil liberties, environmental protection and demilitarization.

The forces arrayed against far-reaching progressive change are massive and unrelenting. If an Obama victory is declared next week, those forces will be regrouping in front of our eyes — with right-wing elements looking for backup from corporate and pro-war Democrats. How much leverage these forces exercise on an Obama presidency would heavily depend on the extent to which progressives are willing and able to put up a fight.

So, for those of us who view Solomon’s laundry of progressive goals — “economic justice, guaranteed healthcare for all, civil liberties, environmental protection and demilitarization” — as the key to our future, to a better future, then fight we must.

Obama has joked that he wasn’t born in a manger. He’s right. He can only be as successful at making positive change as we let him be. It is up to us as much as it is to him and to the people in Congress. We have to keep the pressure on, keep pushing, keep fighting. It is our only hope.

The candidates, the press and overreactions

(image from MSNBC)

The conservative wing of the blogosphere has been buzzing about the decision on the part of the Obama campaign to cut off a Florida television station from access to the candidates and their wives. It is a foolish move on the campaign’s part, of course, but the conservative response certainly goes beyond the rational.

A typical comment comes from Greg Pollowitz at National Review Online, who called the campaign’s decision

A preview of things to come in Obamerica — play ball or you’re out.

This echoes a letter I received over the weekend (it’ll run in Thursday’s paper):

An now Joe Biden receives some questions he is uncomfortable with, and the Obama campaign pulls all further interview from the station — WFTV in Florida? Is this an example of things to come and what we should expect from an Obama presidency — that we shall not dare question anything our president or vice president do? Is this a democracy or a dictatorship?

Again, the Obama folks were wrong to cancel Jill Biden’s appearance, but for conservatives and Republicans who have been chattering about liberal bias — and who applauded decisions by the McCain campaign to shield Sarah Palin from the press and who canceled an interview on Larry King’s show because of touch questioning of a McCain advisor by CNN’s Campbell Brown:

This afternoon, anchorman Wolf Blitzer announced on air that McCain’s planned interview with Larry King tonight had been canceled by the campaign. Blitzer said McCain aides complained that Brown had gone “over the line” in her grilling of Bounds.

McCain campaign spokeswoman Maria Comella later explained the cancellation with this sharply worded statement:

“After a relentless refusal by certain on-air reporters to come to terms with John McCain’s selection of Alaska’s sitting governor as our party’s nominee for vice president, we decided John McCain’s time would be better served elsewhere.”

The thing I find so striking about this is that the rhetoric being used by the McCain campaign — the faux outrage, etc. — is no different than that offered by my liberal colleagues. That the GOP has ginned it up this time is no surprise, nor is it a shock that they were silent when McCain shut CNN down. the same can be said about Obama and the left.

In any case, there is another angle on this that goes beyond the Biden interview and raises questions about WFTV anchor Barbara West. Watch the video of the WFTV-Biden exchange, an interview framed around McCain talking points.

Now, watch her interview with McCain from about a week earlier, which was done by the same WFTV anchor and followed the same basic script.

I wouldn’t characterise it so much as a softball interview as I would pitching him batting practice — or free television ad time on a news show.

The lesson in all of this, I think, is that we need to see these little campaign outrages for what they are — nonsense that will be forgotten once the campaign is over.

I just don’t see either of these candidates as being the reincarnation of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush when it comes to the press. Both have a history of being open and available and both are likely to revert to past history once the election passes.

Or, at least, I hope that’s the case.