Obama’s Failure

Last night Obama made a properly muted speech about our retreat from Iraq. A war that should never have been. Not a military defeat, but not a win. Just a massive cost, with no gain, and a huge loss of prestige. Then came the zinger: now we should turn our focus to domestic issues.

Huh?

A little late maybe?

There is a great deal of post summer chatter already building in anticipation of this fall’s elections. All the evidence points to a disaster for the Democrats. A well deserved disaster in my opinion. Amidst all the noise is a common theme: voters who are traditional Democratic party supporters are unlikely to vote. A close look at the polls suggests that the impending implosion of the Democrats is more a function of their supporters unwillingness to vote than a surge towards the GOP. Why is this?

One word: Obama.

He has turned out to be a failure on the single most important issue. The economy.

His post election strategy has been persistently wrong. His priorities were backwards. His effort negligible. And his leadership weak.

The huge push last year to legislate health care reform is a classic example. The effort was always to going to meet huge and vitriolic resistance from a Republican party whose recent – post-Reagan – history is relentlessly anti-social. None of us should forget that the GOP has never forgiven FDR for the New Deal or Johnson for the Great Society. In some parts the civil rights act still stings. It was Reagan who told us that social security would undermine the moral fiber of the country and turn the US into an insipid Euro-style mess. His anti-government rhetoric laid the groundwork for the emergence for today’s extreme right wing version of Republicanism. A version that Eisenhower and even Nixon would disavow.

So the election of a black president, and occasion for celebrating America’s diversity, became a lightening rod for the resurfacing of America’s ugly past and its tendency to veer sharply to the right in times of change.

The stage was set for a massive show of intolerance and pettiness.

Into which Obama threw himself and his party with gusto.

Except, he retreated immediately and left the party in the hands of Reid and Pelosi, who were consequently demonized as they tried to steer health care reform between the Scylla of GOP vitriol and hatred, and the Charybdis of left wing disillusionment occasioned by Obama’s apparent disappearance from the field of battle. The upshot was a long and bloody campaign at the end of which a very unpopular reform was passed into law. Unpopular on the right because it offended the anti-social worldview of the conservative base. Unpopular on the left because it represented a cobbled together set of half measures, and left the hated insurance industry relatively unscathed. From an economic point of view the legislation makes sense: it reduces the Federal deficit substantially. The problem is that all the benefits are off in the future and the nastiness, hatred, and extremist ranting remains current.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I supported health care reform. I am not a fan of the law, it is inadequate and is full of the kind of compromise that Congress creates because of its undemocratic structure. Nonetheless it is a start.

The blood spilled to pass reform would not have, alone, been enough to send Obama and the Democrats to the doom that seems to be awaiting this fall. Both were aware of the political capital being spent. That capital had to be replenished if they were to come out even.

And this is the failure of Obama.

On no other issue did he succeed sufficiently to rebuild that capital.

On the contrary he slid even further behind.

His weakness was exposed as economics. Sometimes presidents can get away with being unsophisticated with respect to economics. Voters never punished George W. Bush for his inept management of the economy. His indifference to the budget and economic problems are legendary. Yet he managed to escape unscathed. We may have ridiculed him for his cartoon like view of life and his buffoonery, and we never had a chance to hold him accountable for the 2007/2008 crisis. We were numbed by the bail outs of the banks. But the low level of competency of the Bush regime was so normal we simply waited to be saved. And we allowed Bush to slide into history, hoping that he never resurfaced.

The problem is that, from the very start, Obama failed to take charge of the economic issues threatening his administration. There is much rewriting of history going on as the failure of policy over the last two years exposes Obama’s weakness. The current argument is that the stimulus was too small, but that no one realized the depth of the crisis. WE can only realize the stimulus’s inadequacy retrospectively. So the story goes. Sorry but that’s plain wrong. There were plenty of us arguing that the stimulus was too small. There were plenty of us invoking the research that tells us that recessions following a financial crisis are very different from ‘normal’ recessions. There were plenty of us warning of the employment disaster that could emerge were we not strong and decisive in our actions.

Rewriting history just won’t do.

Yes, the stimulus worked within its limitations. No, it was nowhere near the powerful response the country needed.

The lack of imagination and strength is what has allowed the crisis to linger. And as the crisis lingers so the Democrats and Obama have been exposed as either naive, inept, or just plain feckless.

They have repeatedly caved in to GOP anti-social activity.

Why?

The fall election is the return on the investment in leadership that Obama has [not] made.

And it isn’t as if there were not chances for redemption. Financial system reform was such a chance. He muffed it. The nation was screaming for revenge against the banks that caused the crisis. Instead we were given insipid reform that left the mega-banks as they were. Yes there were tweaks. Yes some red tape was burnished and put back onto the deregulated rodeo that banking had become. But the trajectory was not altered. The banks still are enormously powerful. They dictate rather than receive policy. They dominate legislation through their donations. They took a hit, but their profits in 2009 were at an all-time high. Bonuses are back. And the unemployment siutation is not improved. Ordinary Americans are still paying the price for Wall Street’s follies, while traders bitch about being slightly cramped within their third, fourth or fifth homes.

Obama deserves to lose and lose big. The Democrats deserve to be trounced.

They both forgot that they represent the hopes and aspirations of the underprivileged. That’s why they are supposed to stand firm against the behemoths of Wall Street.

So the twin failures of spine: the inability to face down GOP anti-social politics over the stimulus, and the capitulation to big money over bank reform, turned into lost opportunities to restore the capital used up over health care reform.

The odd thing, in my view, is that both of these opportunities were tailor made for a left of center government. They were laden with populist attraction. Taking on the big banks and saving working households from disaster are the stuff of a classic script about the triumph of ordinary folks over the rich. A real all-American story was waiting to be played out. What might have been provides a stunning contrast with what is.

Obama muffed his chance to write history in big letters. Instead he muddled along bureaucratically and tinkered timidly. He lacked the spine to fight. And we needed a fight.

The fight should have cleansed us of the Reagan illusion and the sickness of selfish, anti-government, anti-social, market biased, and militarisitic belligerence that have typified America for three straight decades.

The only thing that stood between ordinary people and the horrors of depression was the government. Did Obama make that case firmly? No. Did he attempt to stuff the anti-government rhetoric of the GOP back into the past where it belongs? No. Did he pursue big banks on behalf of the little folks? No. Did he beat down the obstructionism of the Republicans? No. Did he badger wayward Democrats? No. Did he even make that case that he is saving capitalism from itself? No.

He was being nice when we needed nasty.

And nice loses every time when a crisis requires steadfast.

The sad part is that Obama’s failure is our failure. We will soon be living with a fired up Republican Congress intent on attacking the weak, the underprivileged, and the unemployed. This was our chance to redress the damage of the Reagan illusion. This was our chance to undo the huge skew in wealth created by the right wing since 1980. This was our opportunity to rebuild the America of the post war years and revitalize the drooping middle class. We could have claimed the future for our children and burnished the economy to hand on to them the opportunity we received from our parents. But no. It appears we are doomed to continue to wither.

Too bad. Too, too bad.

That’s Obama’s failure.