The Un-Reagan

I'm a bit sorry that Paul Krugman went with the Zombie meme in his most recent NYT column, All the President’s Zombies, because it distracts from the point of the piece.

The pattern of failure is clear in the Obama Administration. It started well before his inauguration, or even his election. Indeed it goes back to the early days of the 2008 campaign. Simply put, it is a lack of a political purpose for wanting to be president. He doesn't have any specific use for power so he doesn't value it. As I wrote from very early on, there was no cause, no clarion call, no political objective that drove Obama. The closest he's come (and I really, really wish this would become a full-on cause) is with his promotion of energy independence and green technology, which is a large enough endeavor to have a profound impact on other areas of government and social policy. Sadly, even if he wanted to, he has lost the momentum that could have made it a powerful platform.

Krugman captures the heart of the matter near the end of his article when he says:

But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.

It's even bigger than that. Reagan turned an equivocal election into a "mandate" by moving decisively to declare absolute victory and demanding that politics be conducted on his terms. Reagan was not merely a "great communicator" (i.e., knew how to deliver his lines well and look good on camera); he was a determined and consummate politician, understanding how to use power to gain more, and with an agenda the length of his arm. He generated results by recognizing and aggressively capitalizing on political opportunities.

That's what an effective politician does.

Obama is aimless upon the political seas, deeply distrustful of any overt display of power that might distance, anger, or irritate someone, somewhere. While the lunatics of left and right salivate over their snuff-film fantasies of guns near the President, the greater truth is the public is swiftly becoming indifferent to our hapless leader, resigned to more of the same-old, same-old from the monied interests. They don't bother to distinguish between the bank bailout and the stimulus plan because they feel the same - money for the well off, reduced living standards for the average Jane and Joe.

His approach is like a weak version of the most unkind caricature of Big Dog, too afraid of offending the Serious People, too much wanting love and approval to be decisive, to make hard choices,to draw lines in the sand, etc. It is as though he thinks we are in 1990, with Bush the Elder at the height of his Gulf War I popularity and before the recession hit, with Democrats entering the nadir of their Congressional power, and with a closely divided electorate, not in one of the most politically advantageous moments for Democrats since FDR. The current economic conditions are the direct results of decades of Republican malfeasance and voodoo economics, the foreign policy debacle is squarely in Cheney's lap, and the electorate has handed the Democrats yet another round of great election victories.

He has failed to present a clear vision of what Democrats are for, thereby defining an alternative vision to Movement Conservatism and letting the party know to move this way, not that. More damaging, he has not made clear, in unequivocal terms, the utter failure of the Republicans to make life better for ordinary Americans on any count. Bill Clinton even laid out the form of the argument in his convention speech:

But on the two great questions of this election, how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America's leadership in the world, [McCain] still embraces the extreme philosophy which has defined his party for more than 25 years, a philosophy we never had a real chance to see in action until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and Congress. Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades were implemented.

This is the kind of argument you have to make to change the way people think. It isn't "failures in the past" but Republican failures. It is being willing to be hated by a fanatical rump group in order to be taken seriously by the majority.

The MSM wants to pamper and coo over its darling, which does nothing to counteract the unrelenting psychotic conservative assault on Obama personally and liberal political objectives in general. The coddling of the MSM may keep The Precious from suffering the personal violations the Clintons and Al Gore endure to this day, but it does nothing to quiet the right-wing noise machine.

The upshot? A lack of direction and a distaste for power (as opposed to adultation and celebrity) has resulted in a loss of the most precious commodity in politics - opportunity to redefine the terms of enagagement. Krugman ends his column with "[I]t’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn." Peter Daou, is more blunt (taken from Corrente as I will not link to HuffPo):

Vital Lessons from the Health Reform Wars

1. The big banker bailout has been far more damaging than the White House can imagine. ...
2. The anti-Bush moment has passed, and with it a huge political opportunity. ...
3. Rumors of the GOP's death have been greatly exaggerated. ...
4. Obama's campaign machine is not fungible. ...
5. The old media machine is alive and well. ...
6. The national debate is still conducted on the right's terms. ...
7. We are a soundbite democracy and the right has better soundbites.

The terms of the debate have not and will not change until we have someone who can use a political opportunity to make change happen. Change isn't a campaign; it is a mode of political life. It happens because you want to change for a reason, and you fight tooth and nail to achieve your goal.

Obama explicitly sold himself as the next Reagan, but never understood what it was that made Reagan effective. Like the Whole Foods shoppers who confuse a marketing schtick for a political position, The Precious wanted to be like Ronald Reagan: The Movie! - the media image of an avuncular, slightly absent minded fellow who was loved by all - and not Ronald Reagan, the man who made the Movement Conservative wet dream of national power come true. In the process, Obama has made himself into the un-Reagan.

The other president Obama wants to be compared to is JFK. I'll have more about that in another post.

Anglachel

Admiring Reagan

Paul Krugman is one of the best in the business when it comes to political snark. His put down today of Posner's epiphany that modern conservatism is intellectually bankrupt is both succinct and funny as hell.

But it is the middle two paragraphs of the post, where he goes after the actual ideology, should be required reading for anyone who would call themselves a liberal:

... And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

Krugman makes two crucial points here. The first is how could anyone with three functional brain cells have ever found anything compelling, let alone admirable, in the political ideology of the Movement Conservatives? They were as incoherent and intellectually compromised in 1994 as they were in 2004. There is nothing here that should be treated with anything except derision should it dare show its face in public.

The second point is the more telling. No matter how far you go back in the Movement Conservative history, you cannot find anything that is not poisonous. The founder of this ideological nightmare, William Buckley, used racism and fascism as foundations for his shining city on a hill. 1994, 1984, 1980 and the Gipper himself; it doesn't matter where you try to locate the golden era of this creed, Movement Conservatism has always already been allied with the worst impulses of the nation.

The third point he leaves as a lesson for the reader to draw - And just why does anyone on the Left feel a need to compromise with this most compromised intellectual agenda? How can anyone with the conscience of a liberal express any admiration for a faction that is rooted in socio-political commitments antagonistic to the rule of law and the fundamental premise of human equality?

Who indeed.

Anglachel

Culture Club

“What happened was Democrats had gotten complacent, had gotten fat and happy. they thought there was a government program to solve every problem. Ronald Reagan came in and said we need to break out of the old ways of doing things and create a leaner, more effective government,” [Obama] said. “That was the right message then. I think that right now we went too far in the wrong direction. We can’t go back to the old liberalism of the past, but [when] you are on your own economic philosophy [of] Bush and McCain doesn’t work either. Let’s try a new way where we apply common sense, have government do what it does well [h/t, Lambert]

The Democratic nominee is holding up Reagan as someone who had the right idea about government. As I wrote in Where the Shadows Lie, "The ultimate shadow of Reagan is that you don’t win by defending losers, only by securing the interests of the winners. That is the dark heart beating in the chest of the Unity Democrats. They are done with the losers." I wrote that on September 16, before the Hanky Panky was passed with the full participation of the Democratic leadership, and it becomes more true with every day. Here are a few references before I get into the meat of this post:

• Biden on the cultural racism of undecided voters
• Donna Brazile on Obama's probable social and economic policies
• Bob Somerby on pseudo-liberal attempts to incite culture wars

It would be best to understand this post if you read the Somerby post. It's fairly short for him. Here is the heart of the argument (my emphasis throughout):

Why is this bad for progressive interests? First, because you simply can’t build a progressive politics from the desire of people like King to overstate, mislead and inflame. ... King’s rhetoric encourages, almost demands, leaps of logic—encourages readers to think that one man’s cry makes everyone around him “rabid” (and perhaps “ugly”)...

Why is this bad for progressive politics? First, because you simply can’t build a progressive politics from the desire of people like King to make average people dumber. It’s dumb to think that one man’s cry turns thousand of others into “a lynch mob”—into “a rabid audience” whose “ugliness is stunning.” But beyond that, writing like this keeps a “culture war” going. The pseudo-right invented this culture war, because it can win no other way.

Why is work like this bad for progressive politics? Because many people will see the unfairness of King’s loud cries—and their hearts will harden accordingly. They will harden in their sense that there is no harbor for them on “the left”—in their sense that there is no reason to listen to liberal or mainstream complaints about the conduct of McCain and Palin. Some of those people would have seen what is wrong in the conduct of McCain and Palin—if King had bothered to dirty his hands explaining the misconduct to them. But they will recoil at the sheer absurdity of this column’s rhetoric—even as pseudo-liberal hearts are warmed. This leaves us caught in that “culture war”—the war the other side wants.

As a general matter, nothing is dumber than fighting on turf the other side has chosen. And that’s what pseudo-liberals do when they keep this “culture war” going—along with its familiar handmaiden, the journalism of perfect dumbness.

I both agree and disagree with Somerby on his evaluation of the culture war. His analysis of Colbert King (and later Frank Rich) is spot-on, exposing their inflammatory rhetoric about the degree and nature of alleged racist incidents at McCain and Palin campaign events. Where I disagree, and it is more that I want to expand his insights than that I disagree with them, is that his claim that the culture war is only wanted by "the other side". I believe that we have seen enugh from the Unity Democrats this year to understand that we have two very different culture wars going on, one loud, public and mostly symbolic, the other quiet, behind closed doors and extraordinarily effective.

You can think of it as a four paned grid. In the top left, the elite of Whole Foods Nation. In the top right, the elites of the Movement Conservatives. Lower left are the rank and file of the Democratic Party and the left-leaning population, while the lower right contains their counterparts aligned with the Republicans. There is the campaign war of the left column of the grid fighting the right column. There is also the class war of the top row of elites waging a kind of war on the losers in the bottom row. We might have to toss in another row on intelligentsia and media in between the party power brokers and the plebes, but they will identify upwards more than down.

The first of these culture wars is the one the Left likes best to fight, popular culture, and is the one Somerby warms against. In contests since Reagan, the media has been squarely on the side of the Right even as elite opinion makers are themselves far more socially liberal than they argue. We've been used to watching the media bash the effete latte libruls trying unsuccessfully connect to the common man while the Republicans know how to have a beer with the heartland. Just below the surface of this lurked the argument about the Democrats pushing the agenda of the black urban underclass at the expense of "real" Murkins.

What marks this year is the media cheering Whole Foods Nation to victory over the Bunkers and Bubbas. Why? A change in where the Democrats got their support:

One of the most telling facts about the Obama's constituency ... is that it is a coalition of people who need or demand the least amount of social benefit from our government. They are the under politicized younger voters and upper middle class whites. The two groups, coincidently, are the ones most influenced by trends in consumer popular culture and have the greatest of ease using the latest technologies.

Life in the Post Political Age

This analysis was borne out by the exit polling from the primaries. The Stevensonian elite predicated its run this year on deliberate abandonment of the poor and working class, who they see as cultural traitors, and playing to the winners of great economic transformation since the 60s. As this is both the media's class and the fantasy it holds of itself, they loved the story - we are the ones we've been waiting for. Unlike the Clintons (“He came in here and he trashed the place, and it’s not his place.”), Obama is seen as a proper member of The Village, unconnected to the (white) trash that both parties have sullied themselves appealing to.

The Republicans have seen their previous winning narrative about representing the salt of the earth turned upside down, and are now being portrayed as nothing but backwards racists. I have a certain grim satisfaction in seeing this, having watched the Movement Conservatives race-bait their way into power, except that the media outrage is just as faux about the Republicans as it was about the Democrats and its lies about Clinton, Gore, Kerry, etc.

The second theatre of culture war is taking place out of sight of the cameras and is the class war against the losers. The power elite in both parties are part of this cultural club. This is what makes sense of Obama's Reagan worship and the refusal to engage with traditional Democratic constituencies who do not like his actual policies. Given that there is no where else to go in the popular culture wars, the political calculation is that these groups will not defect to the Republican side in an election, and so there is no political capital to be gained by making economic or policy promises to them. The Village with its multi-million dollar celebrity talking heads is part of this elite. They agree about a need for a sound fiscal policy (even when that policy is bailing out the failures of Wall Street) and for austerity for the lower classes. As the anonymous political consultant points out:

It is precisely because of the iron grip of this consensus, that even if we have a new Democratic President and an enhanced Democratic majorities in the Congress, there will be no legislation signed into law to make it easier to organize workers, provide universal health care or deal with our ever widening class and income divide in the United States. ...

Elite consensus on the issues of race, sex and role of faith in public life are to the left of public opinion, the only area in which this is the case. Elite opinion is overwhelmingly secular, pro-choice, supportive of gay rights and hostile to overt displays of racism. ...

When social conservatives complain about the "Liberal Media" they are not wrong, but only in regard to their issues. The contempt of the American elite for the religious right is quite real. What social conservatives misunderstand is that the hostility against them is not because the threat their ideas represent but only a display of the traditional contempt that the merciless strong have for people they consider to be the feeble minded weak.

Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus

The contempt and moral superiority of the power elite is not just aimed at the social conservatives. It also is aimed at anyone who is too serious, too earnest, too uncool to be a member of their club, which allows them to attacks figures as diverse at Al Gore and Bristol Palin. The connection between people so disparate is how uncomfortable they make elite opinion makers feel. People like Gore insist that something be done about health care, inequity and environmental destruction. People like Bristol Palin remind the opinion makers that their liberal ideals are only meant for themselves, where they can enact their own social policies because they can afford to, and are not for the likes of her.

In both of these wars, what we find is the privitization of the risks of ordinary life, from health care to housing, from economic advancement to old age retirement. Policies and institutions that would defend working class power (and, increasingly, any wage-based employment, even in the so-called professions) are being deconstructed in the name of efficiency, fiscal responsibility and freedom of choice. The two theaters of operation create two sets of discourse; one focuses on the popular culture and is a battle of competing moralisms, the second one looks at economic class culture and is the consensus view of elite opinion undisturbed by the dumb-show for the groundlings. What kind of politics does that get us? I return to the anonymous political consultant (my emphasis):

The recent enthusiastic embrace of Senator Obama of the call for "responsibility" from inner city black fathers is a prime example of this issue. What he is really saying is, "I will never blame the owners of the country for the social problems caused by their economic policies." Senator Obama knows better than anyone that you can eliminate most of the problems of inner city fathers in a generation with a decent educational system and living wage jobs.

But all systems of power need a convincing and unlikable enemy, which can bury the contradictions of the system. In our case incoherent, undereducated black urban males fit the bill perfectly. They are being attacked not because they are a threat to the power structure, but precisely because they are not.

What voters are expected to believe is that after a 30-year class war against the bottom 90% of income earners, the source of their troubles are black rappers and inner city fathers and not criminality on Wall Street or a corrupt political system. The road to the White House over the past 30 years has been paved by pretending to believe the absurdity that the individuals who pull the levers of power over people's lives are named Willie Horton, Sister Souljah and Ludicrous, and not Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm and Hank Paulson.

Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus

The attacks on the GSEs and low income/minority borrowers as the scapegoat for the financial meltdown is another example of this move, though coming from the Right and farther reaching than Obama's self-serving attempts to distance himself from "undeserving" black populations.

What club do you belong to in this two-front war?

Angachel

In Reagan's Shadow

Watching precipitous drop on Democratic popularity in the polls - from the anonymous Democrat to the presidential nominee - leaves me shaking my head at the sheer ineptitude of the people allegedly in charge of the operation. But even more it makes me want to take a long, hard look at why, in a political year that favors the Democrats more than any year since the FDR era, victory is being thrown away.

I'm with Pat Lang for the most part, though I'm much more critical of Obama than he is, probably because I have no investment in the candidate. I think he over-emphasizes racism as a point of resistance to Obama, but his evaluation of McCain and Palin are painfully accurate. They are, singly and together, disasters. Unlike other bloggers and a number of commenters on this blog, I think McCain is a revolting politician, a man of bad temper, questionable ethics, and reprehensible positions. Palin is worse. They are bad for the nation, not because of their marriages and family lives, knowledge of the internet, age or religion, but because their world views are fearful, ignorant and destructive. Their philosophy of government is authoritarian, no matter the window dressing of fighting corruption. I can admire their personal drive and dedication without thereby declaring their political objectives to be anything but inhumane. I can decry derogatory attacks on them on account of their gender, age, sociological backgrounds, etc., yet remain opposed to their political intensions. That the systems they work within force them into more moderate paths is the virtue of the institutions created to defend liberal democracy, not some insight into their alleged hidden moderate beliefs. They are talented politicians, after all, and know how to seem when in the public eye.

I can do this with a single phrase - They are Republicans and I oppose what the Republican Party, through its words and its deeds, stands for. That should be the first and last thing out of the mouth of every Democrat, yet is the formulation you just don't hear from Obama or the DNC. It's all about Hope™, Change™, and Bi/Postpartisan™ yadda-yadda. No one needs to explain to me or millions of other Democrats that the political opposition are, well, opponents; what requires explanation is how and why our own party has made itself into a different kind of opponent, one that is ineffectual against the Republicans but manages to insult and alienate its own constituencies with breathtaking precision.

I think there are two issues to examine, Obama's failure as a Democratic candidate and the aimlessness of the Democratic Party. The latter is the larger problem, without which the former would not exist. At root, neither are able to escape Reagan's shadow. This post I will focus on Obama, and save examining the party for the next round.

Obama has explicitly modeled himself on the popular backwards-looking image of Reagan - the positive, constructive, above-party guy who did spectacle well and inspired people to support him with a flash of his smile and the thrill of his oratory. He cites Reagan as an exemplar of the mode of politics he wants to engage in - telegenic, above the fray, sweeping political change and ignoring the critics. Even if he had not been trying so hard to dismiss Bill Clinton in order to minimize Hillary, Obama would still have been engaged in Reagan worship. Thus, the entire packaging of himself as a movement, swallowing hook line and sinker the hagiography of Saint Ronnie.

Charles Krauthammer is a hack and writes some of the most despicable commentary in American politics, but he wrote something truthful on Friday. He talked about the packaging of Obama (my emphasis throughout):

But Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain's Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama's meteoric rise was based not on issues ... but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.

The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer's remorse, was the Democrats' realization that the arc of Obama's celebrity had peaked -- and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.

[Krauthammer discusses key speeches by Obama, then says] The problem is that Obama began believing in his own magical powers -- the chants, the swoons, the "we are the ones" self-infatuation. Like Ronald Reagan, he was leading a movement, but one entirely driven by personality. Reagan's revolution was rooted in concrete political ideas (supply-side economics, welfare-state deregulation, national strength) that transcended one man. For Obama's movement, the man is the transcendence.

Which gave the Obama campaign a cult-like tinge. With every primary and every repetition of the high-flown, self-referential rhetoric, the campaign's insubstantiality became clear. By the time it was repeated yet again on the night of the last primary (#3), the tropes were tired and flat. To top himself, Obama had to reach. Hence his triumphal declaration that history would note that night, his victory, his ascension, as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

Clang. But Obama heard only the cheers of the invited crowd. Not yet seeing how the pseudo-messianism was wearing thin, he did Berlin (#4) and finally jumped the shark. That grandiloquent proclamation of universalist puffery popped the bubble. The grandiosity had become bizarre.

Obama's Altitude Sickness

The Berlin speech was meant to invoke memories of JFK, but even more so of Reagan, to try to make a claim in images that could not be done in words - I'm just like the Great Communicator and you should respond to me in a comparable way.

Krauthammer points to the reason why Reagan, who was not nearly as popular as his idolators would have you believe, was able to so thoroughly dominate the political sphere. He had a foundation. He was a hard-line ideologue who had honed his political talents for decades and who was backed by what is still one of the best funded, most ideologically compact and politically determined groups in current Western politics - the Movement Conservatives. Regardless of what liberals may think of Reagan's political objectives (that they were crack-pot, inhumane, self-destructive, anti-American, etc.), Reagan offered something concrete to every constituency who supported him. Conservative judical appointments and breaking the barriers between church and state for the theocons, pumping up not just the military but the necessity of US hegemonic power for the neocons, deregulation and supply-side economics for the rest of the cons and crooks in the corporate suites. And he delivered. Even when he was forced to make strategic retreats, the rhetoric did not abate and the overall objectives were never abandoned. He was relentless in pusuit of his vision of how the world should be.

The backing from the Movement Conservatives is important. No matter how charismatic this actor, he was the head of a movement that preceded him and had an independent existence apart from him. It's still with us today. Reagan became the embodiment of this operation, not the operation itself. The Obama campaign's exuberant highs were based on nothing more than a cult of personality, which was at base little more than the frantic wish of his supporters to see themselves an ennobled by their support of him. The attacks aimed at his opponents - personal, vituperative, slanderous - probably tell us more about the insides of his supporters' heads than anything else, places awash in guilt over their very real racism, glee at being able to openly express their deep seated misogyny, accompanied by a big dollop of class resentment. Obama's own exhortation that his supporters should not think of themselves as anything but "Obamacans" is as clear a statement of the movement as anything else I've seen. The alpha and the omega of the campaign is the adulation of the man at the center.

It inverts the power structure that put Reagan where he was and put the nation on the road to disaster. An established, well-funded national operation that controlled major propaganda outlets, deliberately tapping into resentment and fear about changing socio-political institutions and structures, and has as its goal infesting the entire government from President to dog-catcher with its anti-democratic minions, selected a 100% loyal and massively effective partisan to be its face and drum up popular support. I'm sorry, but the Chicago Combine at its greatest expanse of powers, even if backed with every penny George Soros & Co. have ever earned, cannot compare.

When I look at the collapse of Obama, the Movie! (a fall well under way during the primaries), what I see is the level of support an ordinary Democrat might garner in a ho-hum year. The One, The Precious, is gone. Palin robbed him of the celebrity, the quality of being shiny and new, and what we see is Obama as an unadorned Democrat. His high points now are when the actual heroes of the party, Bill & Hillary, come out and offer reasons for us to vote as Democrats for the ticket.

The proper Democratic figure to compare to Reagan is Bill Clinton, particularly as Bill is actually more popular than Reagan with the general public. He did this by copying Reagan's substance, which was to identify constituencies and fight for them, and letting the style chips fall where they did. It helps that Big Dog is one of the most talented political speakers alive, able to convey complex political realities in direct, simple language, but oratory alone can be upstaged. He is beyond the shadow of Reagan because of his focus on what Reagan championed and how to push through liberal counter-measures in a way that doused the fires of resentment. His success was limited because he did not have the party and movement apparatus at his disposal that Reagan commanded and because the Right targeted him (quite correctly) as a very dangerous opponent.

Oddly enough, with the loss of celebrity, Obama ends up being the generic Democrat from central casting, promoted by a party actively jettisoning everything that makes it distinct. We have no signature issues for the campaign, only hopey-changey, we're not Bush (which worked so well for Kerry, as I remember...), don't vote for the guy who's stupid and out of touch (which worked so well for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis and Gore, as I remember...), we're all to blame for this Washington gridlock because Washington is the problem, etc., etc. There is nothing that looks, sounds or feels uniquely Democratic.

They are still running against the shadow of Reagan.

Anglachel