Can You Hear Us Now? By David Michael Green

Created Nov 6 2009 - 12:33pm

So, let me see if I have this straight.

One year ago, the Democrats won commanding victories resulting in
control of the presidency and lopsided majorities in the House and
Senate.

One year ago, the Republican brand was so weak that the party was on
death watch, literally capable of sliding into the history books
alongside the Whigs and the Federalists.

One year ago the country was enthralled with the notion of a new
president who seemed committed to solving a host of problems and,
above all, offering change from a hated predecessor and his
disastrously failed politics.

But now, today, that promised change seems a lot more like chump change instead.

Now, today, the Big Hope president has virtually nothing of import to
show for nearly a year in office.

Now, today, that president continues to follow the policies of his
horrid predecessor on everything from civil liberties to civil rights
to economics and foreign policy.

And now, today, he and his comrades in Congress have squandered
whatever goodwill they once had and face an angry public turning back
to the right, desperately seeking solutions to their problems.

Better still, this is likely only the beginning. Does anyone think the
job situation is going to get better in the next year? How about
Afghanistan? Does anyone believe that the public will be enthusiastic
about Obama's healthcare plans, assuming anyone can locate them, and
assuming that a bill can actually get through Congress? Who out there
thinks that his position on global warming will please anyone in
America, even as it does next to nothing serious about addressing the
problem, and even as it remains - like his healthcare ideas - playing
hide-and-seek with the American public?

I am not surprised that Barack Obama - like the last two Democratic
presidents - has turned out to be a conservative, corporate creature
whose interest in the public interest is scarce and superficial. What
does surprise me, though, is just how bad he is at playing politics,
especially where his own self-interest is overwhelmingly at stake. Can
this really be the same person who ran such a remarkable campaign last
year, stealing the presidency from two of the great figureheads of
American politics?

Obama is one of the most articulate politicians in American history.
And yet, his communications strategy is the absolute worst I've seen
since Carter. In fact, what's most stunning about it is that his team
seems to have dismissed all the lessons learned over the last three
decades - especially from masterful Republican administrations - about
how to market presidents and policies from the White House. This is no
longer rocket science, if it ever was. How can a guy this sharp be so
clueless and, thus, adrift?

Obama is also one of the smartest people ever to sit in the Oval
Office, but he has demonstrated astonishing levels of cluelessness
about what the public wants, about the nature of his opposition, and
about what makes a presidency successful. He doesn't understand that
the public will follow you if you lead them, especially if you do so
with passion. He doesn't get that the conservative movement is a
lethal cancer seeking to commodify, monetize and profitize every
aspect of America, and therefore is committed to the destruction of
all else, including this administration, despite even that it is
essentially staffed by Goldman Sachs. He doesn't understand that the
most successful American presidents were the ones who brought a vision
to the table, and fought for it.

Fundamentally, Obama is an anachronism. He is essentially a nineteenth
century president operating in a crisis era, as the early twenty-first
grapples with cleaning up after the late twentieth.

Historians sometimes debate over whether history makes the man or the
man makes history. Leaving aside the sexist construction of the
question, I think, manifestly, it has to be both. Almost all the great
presidents served during time of great crisis, usually war. But that
doesn't guarantee their place in the historical pantheon. You have to
also meet those challenges of your time. Lincoln is widely considered
America's greatest president. His predecessor, James Buchanan, is
generally thought to be the country's worst. Both faced the same
crisis of Southern secession, but they responded to it very
differently, earning their respective places in history. On the other
hand, had the civil war come twenty years earlier or later, we'd
hardly even know their names, except as the answer to trivia
questions. "Who was the first president from Illinois?!" "Who was our
tallest president?" And so on.

Obama could be Lincoln - or better still, FDR - if he wanted to be. He
has chosen instead to be Buchanan. Faced with crisis scenario after
crisis scenario, the candidate of 'change' repeatedly and
instinctively homes in on the weakest, most centrist, most useless
response possible. His stimulus bill probably stopped the economy from
continuing its free fall, but it leaves the country stuck in months or
even years of unyielding recession at worst, and jobless recovery at
best. His healthcare bill helps in some important ways, but does
nothing to hold down costs in a society that utterly wastes one dollar
out of every three it spends in this area, and it does nothing to make
healthcare more affordable for most Americans. He seems to have some
interest in a global warming bill and a banking regulation bill and
maybe even doing something about civil rights for gays. But in none of
these areas is there any sense that he will do what is morally
necessary. Likewise, with Afghanistan, all the indicators seem to
suggest that he will opt for some numbingly anodyne middle ground.

The guy is a leaky bucket at a time when the boat has been swamped.
He's an pressureless fire hose when the house is in flames. A tattered
parachute when the ground is coming up fast. A rusty musket as the
Huns come over the ridge. At a time when America needs a bold,
powerful and wise leader in the White House - principally to undo the
damage of the bold, powerful and sociopathic guy who was just in there
- we have instead Mr. Rogers' pet gerbil. Complete with cardigan
sweater and barbiturate-laced water supply. Obama seems to want
nothing more than to be liked. In the neighborhood called Earth.

The great irony, of course, is that he is accomplishing just the
opposite. Gallup recorded his job approval ratings right after his
inauguration at 69 percent. Today they are down to 50. That's not 35
percent, like his predecessor, to be sure. But since when did being
better than George W. Bush become the standard? A backed-up toilet was
more popular than Bush a year ago today. Hell, even gonorrhea was more
beloved. But the point is that dropping fifteen to twenty percent in
job approval in what is likely to be the best year of his presidency,
at a time when the public is likely to be most generous, is a
spectacular failure of the first order. Even according to Obama's own
pathetic standards. If all he wants is to be liked, he's still blowing
it. This is the equivalent of having every fourth friend or family
member drop you on Facebook. Not a good sign, especially if you live
for popularity.

It didn't have to be this way. He could have been both a great
president, a popular president, and a heroic president. All he had to
do was be willing to treat the people who already hate his guts as
political enemies. All he had to do was be willing to treat the people
who live to fleece the country as treasonous thieves. All he had to do
was to speak clearly, act boldly, and lead a broken country down the
bright shining path toward repair that is obvious to anyone who is
willing to look. But since that group excludes most Americans right
now, this notion of bold leadership is especially essential.

In fairness to Obama, the public doesn't really know what it wants
these days, and best of luck to the two new Republican governors
trying to cut taxes without deficit spending. If they can do it, they
will only do it by slashing government services. Idiotic voters love
tax cuts in the abstract. They will most likely feel a bit less
enamored of closed schools, pothole proliferation, massive prisoner
releases and state parks that cost as much to get in to as
professional sports stadiums now do. For the last several decades,
these selfish citizens have been all to willing to be trained by one
of the sickest regressive mantras of them all - that government is
just some bloated pig wasting tax dollars, and therefore that they
could have their tax cuts without any cost to service, or without
deficit spending. Apart from occasional lip service to Jesus, there is
nothing closer to the core of the regressive/Republican canon than
this tax-cutting chant.

It's a complete lie, of course, and it took about five minutes into
the Reagan administration to show that. Reagan slashed taxes so much
that he tripled the national debt in eight years time. That problem
wasn't helped by the fact that Republicans actually blow through cash
faster when they control the government than do supposed
"tax-and-spend Democrats".

But now the day of reckoning has arrived, especially for the states,
which generally do not have the federal government's capacity to tell
gigantic lies through borrowing. People in New Jersey and Virginia
have been stupid, and all they had to do to see how stupid they were
being is to look at what that "economic girly-man" Arnold
Schwarzenegger has been doing to Caleefornya. The state government is
essentially conducting a going-out-of-business fire sale, and its
creditworthiness is now about as good as Bernie Madoff's. Government
services are being tossed overboard as if they were lead cannonballs
in a leaky rowboat.

This is the denouement of regressive fiscal policy these last decades.
Lotteries won't save our state and local and federal governments
anymore. Selling off land and highways and other assets no longer
works, 'cause they done all been sold. Privatization of every service
from prisons to the military not only doesn't save money, it only
gives you less quality at greater cost. And whodathunk that? Who could
imagine that converting a not-for-profit government program into a
profit-making private one would cost more? Profits don't cost
anything, do they? And you know how much more efficient(!) business is
than the government, right? Like health insurance, for example, where
overhead is a mere thirty-five percent, compared to the outrageous two
percent of Medicare.

So, yeah, in fairness to Obama, the public doesn't know what it wants,
except that it wants it all. Since that can no longer be provided, it
will happily pull the lever for any politician offering the sweet song
of "change" from the status quo, the more vague the promise and the
more aggrandizing to the voter, the better.

But that doesn't mean Obama isn't both a fool and a disaster to his
country for his relentless pursuit of mediocrity in governance and
tepidness in policy. He's a fool because he doesn't realize that he
and his party have become the anti-change incumbent targets of the
very same tool they rode to power. In 2010 and then again in 2012,
they will be smashed by angry voters demanding that something be done,
just as they were in elections held this week.

And he's both a fool and an American disaster because he could have
written a much different story for the history books. Americans want
their leaders to lead, oddly enough. Voters are incredibly lazy about
understanding politics, in between their bouts of rage at the lousy
politicians selected by those darned... lazy voters. That laziness
means that they will follow you if you lead. They'll even follow you,
for a while anyhow, if you're ideas are insane. George W. Bush is the
paradigmatic case. Americans didn't want the war in Iraq. They didn't
really even want the massive tax cuts. But he hammered those policies
home, using every technique of the bully pulpit to masterful effect,
and he got what he wanted, even when he lacked a majority in Congress.
He might have gotten his Social Security theft bill through Congress
as well, had he not already established himself to the electorate as a
liar and a disaster-inducing idiot. (Bush should get on his knees and
thank Darwin that he failed on that front. Seniors would likely be
lynching him now if his bill had passed.)

Obama could have been a bold, decisive and game-changing leader, but
he has chosen instead to be Bill Clinton in the time of Franklin
Roosevelt. He wants to do something about the Great Depression. But
not too much! He want to respond to Pearl Harbor and the Nazi threat
to plunge the world into a thousand years of darkness. But only if no
one would get hurt! He want to make sure Americans aren't ill-fed,
ill-clad and ill-housed. But only if the Republicans literally seeking
to destroy his presidency will go along for the ride!

Brilliant. He doesn't get that people want leadership from the
president, that they absolutely demand that in a time of crisis, and
that they will drop you like so much depleted uranium if you don't
bring it during a time of big, multiple crises. Like now. This guy is
fast wearing out his welcome.

The mood of the public today is anti-incumbent, and the president and
his party are the incumbents du jour to be anti against. They have
exacerbated their problem by failing to take the steps sufficient to
really solve problems, and by focusing on problems other than the one
absolutely at the top of the public's list right now - jobs and more
jobs.

Most of all, though, this president has almost completely lost control
of the communications high ground. For a president in the American
system of distributed power - especially one who, unlike George W.
Bush, is unwilling the toss the Constitution and its separation of
powers into the garbage can - communications mastery is everything.
You can only win by skilled use of the bully pulpit. Obama, on the
other hand, has allowed himself to be defined by others, not least of
which including a now revived and revanchist Republican Party, blood
dripping from its fangs, a very hungry look gleaming in its eye.

So, for example, most Americans now think Obama is a liberal, despite
the fact that he is actually quite conservative (except if you count
as liberal spending a ton of money to clean up the regressive right's
multifarious messes).

And most Americans do not consider themselves liberal.

Neither of these outcomes was necessary. A skilled and gutsy and bold
President Obama would have staked out an agenda clearly in the public
interest, identified just as clearly the opponents to that agenda and
their motives, hammered home his relentless sales pitch to the public,
twisted arms right out of their sockets in Congress, and forged a new
progressive majority in America over sensible policies, leaving the
minority of old white male crackers out there foaming at the mouth,
forming the core of the Republican Party. Tony Blair was the model
here. He aggressively painted - quite accurately - the British
Conservative Party of Thatcher and Major as the source of the
country's woes, and he never stopped reminding people of their
disastrous reign. Meanwhile, Blair did nothing much in office, signed
up for the Iraq war - totally in opposition of public sentiment, lying
all the way - and helped to bring on a vicious recession. And he still
bought the Labour Party more than a dozen years in office, just by
reminding the public of how bad the Tories had been.

Obama is, instead, taking himself down and - in as cruel a twist as
history can muster - the progressive values he long ago walked away
from, along with him.

Where we go from here could be very, very ugly. The GOP right now is
in the process of alienating and crushing every last scrap of
moderately sensible politics from within its ranks. That means that
American voters will very likely have the following choice in 2010 and
2012: On the one hand, a discredited do-nothing Democratic Party that
promised change and didn't deliver; and on the other, a rabid,
ultra-regressive GOP that is itself promising change from the failed
former would-be change-providers.

Before you guess who would win that contest, bear in mind that this is
likely to be happening under still dire economic conditions and a
shrinking national standard of living.

You may be forgiven for thinking that that scenario is all too
reminiscent of a certain European country in the 1930s.
_______
About author