Category: Barack Obama

Daou on Bloggers & The Presidency

Peter Daou makes some pretty interesting points his long and somewhat shrill look into “how a handful of liberal bloggers are bringing down the Obama presidency.” This is happening, Daou says, because key liberal bloggers are refusing to bend their principles to support the political agenda of the administration. Daou writes:

The constant refrain that liberals don’t appreciate the administration’s accomplishments betrays deep frustration. It was a given the right would try to destroy Obama’s presidency. It was a given Republicans would be obstructionists. It was a given the media would run with sensationalist stories. It was a given there would be a natural dip from the euphoric highs of the inauguration. Obama’s team was prepared to ride out the trough(s). But they were not prepared for a determined segment of the left to ignore party and focus on principle, to ignore happy talk and demand accountability.

As president, Obama has done much good and has achieved a number of impressive legislative victories. He is a smart, thoughtful and disciplined man. He has a wonderful family. His staff (many of whom I’ve worked with in past campaigns) are good and decent people trying to improve their country and working tirelessly under extreme stress. But that doesn’t mean progressives should set aside the things they’ve fought for their entire adult life. It doesn’t mean they should stay silent if they think the White House is undermining the progressive cause.

Daou goes on to look at the specifics of the Anwar al-Aulaqi case, where the President has ordered that this American citizen be killed overseas. Not surprisingly, there is intense rage online that the administration would go beyond what even Bush and Cheney had sought to authorize under the auspices of fighting terrorism.

There’s obviously tension between the administration and the online progressive movement. I don’t think this tension’s existence is surprising to many people, though the degree to which it is manifesting itself is surprising to me. Read the whole of Daou’s piece –  he is really identifying important threads that will either continue to be problematic for both the progressive movement and the administration, or be resolve and allow both sides to contribute to effective governance.

This Is A Problem

This paragraph, in the New York Times article on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against former CIA prisoners who were tortured in overseas prisons after their extraordinary rendition, is the sign of a very large problem:

The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

For the life of me, I cannot remember President Obama campaigning for office on “a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers.” And it’s not just this.

Among other policies, the Obama national security team has also authorized the C.I.A. to try to kill a United States citizen suspected of terrorism ties, blocked efforts by detainees in Afghanistan to bring habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the basis for their imprisonment without trial, and continued the C.I.A.’s so-called extraordinary rendition program of prisoner transfers — though the administration has forbidden torture and says it seeks assurances from other countries that detainees will not be mistreated.

Again, even without checking the cached versions of BarackObama.com, I’m quite certain these were not core planks in the Obama campaign’s case to the American public about what an Obama administration would do regarding civil liberties, the rule of law, and restoring the Constitution following Bush/Cheney administration abuses.

Of course, looking beyond his candidacy for office, we were told by President Obama in February 2009 that:

Living our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger. And that is why I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture.

I suppose it is technically true to say that “America does not torture” as long as any people who have been tortured or subjected to rendition are denied their day in court and the chance to present evidence that these things happened. Of course, putting our hands over our ears and shouting “La la la la la la” whenever someone tries to have legal remedies for torture doesn’t exactly constitute any lived value I learned about in civics class or Sunday school.

Glenn Greenwald makes an observation that I think captures the gravity of what is actually happening now under President Obama, following what happened under President Bush:

The history of America’s torture regime will record not only the criminality and shamefulness of the torture itself, but also the subsequent — and ongoing — effort by the U.S. Government to prevent its victims from obtaining any justice while protecting the perpetrators from all accountability.

To say that I am disappointed with the administration’s embrace of illegal and immoral legal doctrines put forth by the Bush administration’s sadistic and un-American legal team is an understatement. I’m embarrassed by it. It is indefensible, especially when done by a President who at one time taught constitutional law. A lot was made earlier this week when General Petraeus said that if a rightwing church in Florida burned the Koran, “It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort in Afghanistan.” I really hope that the Mighty General speaks up again, because I don’t know how hiding behind state secrets privileges to protect torturers does anything to help our presence in Afghanistan nor the troops the President has sent there.

As a side note, Marcy Wheeler writes:

So basically, the government can kidnap you and send you to be tortured–as they did with Binyam Mohamed–yet even if your contractors acknowledge what they were doing, if the government wants to call their own law-breaking a secret, the most liberal Circuit Court in the country agrees they can. [Emphasis added]

Among other things, this is as solid example as exists today as to why we need more liberal judges confirmed to the federal bench.

Populism: It’s September, So It’s OK

President Obama is calling for tax cuts to families earning less than $250,000 a year, but saying he will not support any tax cuts for the rich. This is good. Blue Dogs and New Dems have been calling for tax cuts for the rich (it goes without saying, so have Republicans). It’s something of a surprise to see the President out in front on this; the Conventional Wisdom is that it is to use Republicans blocking working class tax cuts because the richest Americans are left out as an election issue. Funny how populism is finally deemed OK after Democrats’ election chances have been run into the ground due to legislative and messaging choices that have pointedly avoided populism. I’d really like someone to explain to me why populism is acceptable as a backstop to electoral losses, but isn’t acceptable the other twenty-two months of a congressional session.

All that said, this is obviously the right course of action from a policy standpoint and from a politics standpoint. More, please.

Westen on Populism

Drew Westen has a big piece in Alternet about the current political climate and the anger fueling populist backlash. First, I think this is spot-on:

The “Obama Doctrine” should have been that Americans who want to work and have the ability to contribute to our productivity as a nation should have the right to work, and that if the private sector can’t meet the demand for jobs, we have plenty of roads and bridges to fix, new energy sources to develop and manufacture, and schools to build and renovate so our kids and workers returning for training can compete in the 21st century global economy.

And Westen’s natural follow-up is right on too (and useful for determining why so many progressive activists are feeling dissatisfied with the administration’s course of action):

But it’s too late for that. The administration opted for an alternative doctrine, which Larry Summers enunciated on This Week several months ago: that unemployment is going to remain high for the foreseeable future and eventually come down — as if there’s nothing we can do about it — and that they will push here and there for small symbolic measures whose symbolism tends to escape people who are out of work. It’s hard to be excited by symbolism when your children are hungry or the bank is repossessing your home — although you didn’t do anything to deserve it — while the people who did are once again making out like bandits.

Westen describes the current mood in America as populist anger, something that I agree with. I disagree that this anger from the left is because of missed opportunities – sure, that may be part of it with activist Democrats. No, I think the populist anger from the left stems from the fact that the economy remains broken, people don’t have jobs and are suffering because of it.

There’s a lot in Westen’s analysis of the timeline of the Obama administration and choices made. In many ways, Westen provides a comprehensive narrative of that is tossed around in progressive circles of missed opportunities and the progressive critique of what it means, particularly in terms of depressing the base and diminishing electoral prospects in 2010. I do think one paragraph is particularly worthy of quotation:

The underlying psychological assumption of these moves is that if you mix policies from the right and left in equal parts, you win the center. In fact, no one has ever won the center that way. It appears weak, opportunistic, and incoherent to the average swing voter, which is particularly problematic at a time when people in the center desperately want to know that their leaders have a vision and a coherent plan for what to do (which is why both FDR and Ronald Reagan were so effective in moving voters in the center). It doesn’t win any votes on the right. But it does have one predictable effect: It sucks the motivation out of your base, who feel demoralized and betrayed (if they’re part of the “professional left”) or less likely to vote (if they’re average voters who don’t follow politics carefully but just don’t feel very enthusiastic anymore, even if they don’t really know why).

There are a lot of relatively fundamental critiques of this administration, but this strikes me as one of the core ones – the penchant to be post-partisan and find agreement in the ideological lacuna that is the American center. Sure, it makes David Broder happy to see the White House try and strike an incoherent balance, but it just isn’t a political method which understands what voters want, which policies work, and how actions akin to ideology present themselves to the country. Strength wins, not alchemy.

Westen provides a serious playbook for the administration and Democratic leaders to use to describe how we got to where we are economically and who is to blame for it. Not enough of this is being done currently and as a result, Democrats are missing an opportunity to harness populist anger against Republicans and for better governance. There are still massive economic needs – job creation, state funding, green energy development, infrastructure repair, etc – and ample opportunity for Democrats to do things to address these problems, blame Republicans for opposing the success of the American economy, and actually get things on track. All it takes is building a narrative about who is to blame for today’s problems and who doesn’t want them to be fixed, while establishing Democrats in contrast to this. It’s time to do something.

It’s easy to read Westen’s account of the first year and a half of the Obama administration and be depressed. But this is prescriptive analysis. He provides a clear path forward for the administration to both achieve great things and have continued electoral success. Whether or not the administration is interested in pursuing Westen’s recommendations is obviously another question. But being where we are now is not determinative of future failures, but for the extent that the administration is unwilling to change course. Looking at the economy and at the political peril Democrats are facing electorally, it’s hard to imagine a situation where the President doesn’t start acting like his shoes were on fire.

Nonetheless, that unimaginable situation is the one we continue to find ourselves in. The time for change is now. Westen provides a good playbook. I hope the administration uses it.

Krugman

It’s pretty rare for me to find a blog post, let alone a full opinion column, that I agree with pretty much word for word. But today’s column by Paul Krugman is pretty much it for me. Krugman shows a magnificent understanding of the Obama administration’s behavior and how it has generated a disappointed base. But what makes Krugman’s column important isn’t that he adequately describes progressive pessimism about Obama, but that he sincerely tries to show the administration how their course of actions has been counterproductive and resulted in smaller achievements and more frequent defeats. Krugman is clearly a person who wants Obama and this administration to succeed; I hope the White House can view this column as being written in good faith and with the best of the country in mind.

It’s also worth pointing out Krugman’s endorsement of Elizabeth Warren to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He makes the case for Warren and also points out that if the administration does not nominate her to run the CFPB, it’s likely that it will serve as a microcosm for ways in which the administration has disappointed progressives.

It’s really interesting to watch the progressive online community pay this close attention to Warren and the CFPB. When I was working on Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign, in 2007 and early 2008, Tim Tagaris and I theorized that beyond ending the war in Iraq  and Bush’s attacks on civil liberties, the biggest issue that consistently drew blog outrage was the bankruptcy bills. Progressive blogs were able to watch and comment on fundamentally unfair and corporatist legislation. In many ways, progressive opposition to the bankruptcy bills of 2002-2005 is a perfect encapsulation of progressive values. Then the blogs were largely older, whiter, college educated and with incomes of over $70,000. And yet, economic legislation that would disproportionately hurt poor people and people of color was one of the most energizing issues in the blogs. I think a similar thing is happening now with the CFPB and Warren. It’s not just about appointing Warren, a proven advocate for the middle class; it’s about having government that works for the people. Separate from the specific policy and political implications of the CFPB fight, this is a great reminder to me of why I’m glad to be a member of the online progressive community.

Context

Apparently it is no longer required in quotes printed by conservative columnists, just as it is not required for videos ran by conservative bloggers (let alone for them to be taken seriously by the administration).

Of course conservatives in the media or elected office attacking Democrats or progressives through an out-of-context-to-the-point-of-falsification quote is not new. Only recently, the targets picked by the right have been so absurd that they have fallen apart within themselves. But it’s not any different than finding a single user-submitted video out of tens of thousands and claiming that MoveOn ran ads comparing Bush to Hitler. Nor is it any different from the massive promotion of a couple of numb skulls who claim to be Black Panthers who tried to block voting at a predominantly black polling place on election day in 2008 (let alone then blaming the Obama administration for the Bush administration choosing not to prosecute them). Nor is it different from nut picking a crazed commenter on Daily Kos or Huffington Post who attacked Joe Lieberman along anti-Semitic lines and claiming that Ned Lamont’s supporters were all anti-Semitic.

Taking quotes out of context or finding non-representative individuals and promoting their views as representative of an entire political campaign or party is stock in trade for the conservative movement.

The only remarkable thing about the Breitbart/Sherrod and Zuckerman/Obama instances of missing context is that they are being called out as the dishonest smears that they are.

Chuckles the Sensible Woodchuck

ChucklesTheSensibleWoodchuckLast month I mentioned a brilliant cartoon by Tom Tomorrow that effectively lampooned how the American right as bizarrely warped perceptions of the positions held by President Obama. In it, Tom pointed out the irony of the right portraying Obama as a crazed liberal, when in fact most of his actions show he is a centrist with some strongly rightwing views on executive power. At the time, Tom and I got into a back-and-forth on Twitter, as I viewed his toon as showing pretty clearly the same sort of dynamic from the left, wherein the President has taken positions that are similar or even more extreme than Bush on many issues, yet some Democratic supporters gloss over what this means. I tried to highlight the behavior on the left as similar laughable to what Tom described on the right.

I missed it at the time (I was on vacation), but a couple weeks ago, Tom did a new cartoon describing the similar phenomenon of liberal attitudes on Obama. Part of the point that Tom makes so well in this strip (and people like Glenn Greenwald have made repeatedly since early 2009) is that liberals cannot and should not change their assessments of a President’s actions dependent on what party that person belongs to and whether or not you voted for them. If you’re changing your views or apologizing for a politician who has not met your expectations, something is wrong.

The strip definitely worth a read and I hope/imagine the new character, “Chuckles” the Sensible Woodchuck, will be a recurring one in this strip.

Alterman & 12 Dimensional Chess

At the end of a long, thoughtful and dare I say, Must Read piece in The Nation on the structural hurdles in American politics and the media that prevent a truly progressive presidency from being realized, Eric Alterman writes:

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. For that strategy to make sense, however, 2013 will have to provide a more pregnant sense of progressive possibility than 2009 did, and that will take a great deal of work by the rest of us.

In effect, Alterman writes twenty some odd pages of thoughtful analysis as to why Obama is and will continue to be a serial compromiser and throws it out the window. Nothing in Alterman’s analysis suggests previously that Obama is forestalling meaningful change to remain electorally safe and then will act boldly once he is a lame duck. And there’s nothing in the Obama administration’s rhetoric in the first year and half of his term, nor the two year campaign which preceded it, wherein Obama has suggested that he’s simply holding fire until he gets past 2012.

Moreover, not only are we not seeing this plan put forth by Obama, there are no predictions that I know of that suggest that between now and January, 2013, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate will increase nor that there will be meaningful filibuster reform. In fact, Alterman has already identified filibuster reform as a necessity for political change, while he bemoans that Senate leaders have not gotten behind it. So not only is Obama not out there saying he’s holding fire deliberately, but the congressional landscape he will need to actually open fire is likely to erode from where it was in January, 2009.

Alterman does a tremendous job explaining why realizing progressive change is hard. But it makes absolutely zero sense for any progressive to hold out hope that President Obama is in fact playing twelve dimensional chess and waiting an entire term to do Really Big Progressive Things. Rather than hold out any hope that President Obama will improve his behavior if re-elected, progressives need to focus on (1) improving the political and media landscapes that currently impede change and (2) forcing the Obama administration and Congressional leadership to govern as progressives now.

Grim’s Look At the White House

Ryan Grim’s piece yesterday on the role the political team in the White House has played in shaping the administration’s policy agenda over the objection of policy experts is pretty startling. It puts together a narrative that explains why the White House continues to eschew emphasizing job creation and stimulus spending, while favoring talk of deficits and cutting entitlements.

There’s clearly and rightly a concern in the White House about winning elections. What is remarkable, though, is the complete lack of recognition that good policies lead to good political results. Further, by pushing good policies and building public support for them, there’s an opening to make them politically even more valuable. That is, the White House has the ability to help make electing candidates that support their agenda easier.

What’s particularly bizarre is how wrong the White House political team is when it comes what the public sentiment is on the economy, jobs, and deficits. Grim notes:

Senior White House adviser David Axelrod told the New York Times recently that “it’s my job to report what the public mood is.” The public mood, said Axelrod, is anti-spending and anti-deficit and so the smart politics is to alleviate those concerns. “I’ve made the point that as a matter of policy and a matter of politics that we need to focus on this, and the president certainly agrees with that,” said Axelrod of the deficit hawkery that the administration has engaged in over the last several months.

But the public isn’t primarily concerned about deficits and spending! They’re most concerned about jobs and the economy! The polling is really clear on this and yet it doesn’t seem to penetrate the Beltway Bubble. In one of the most crucial moments of this administration’s political life, they are buying Republican and Blue Dog spin. The result will be conservative policies that present the administration and Democrats as nothing more than Republican Lite. That it is coming from this White House is depressing, but not surprising.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure why leaders of the Democratic Party think having 9.7% unemployment is acceptable or that it’s something that voters will forget when they go to vote in November. Even if the deficit was the top public concern (it isn’t), eliminating it by fiat tomorrow would not change that at least one in ten Americans do not have jobs. Someone who does not have a job isn’t going to have their rent or food bills paid by a lower deficit. Decisions about who to support politically will be made in light of the factors in peoples’ lives, not abstractions that aren’t lived day to day by unemployed or under-employed Americans. It’s hard to believe that the political team at the White House thinks otherwise, but then again, it isn’t.