I Would Prefer Not To, Part 2

Vast Left kindly gave my earlier post a boost on Facebook, though he disagreed with my remarks about Obama's "competence".

IMHO, the competence argument presupposes things about Obama's objectives, or at a minimum tempts us to do so. I suppose one might reasonably imagine Obama sought some sort of braggable closure in the Grand Bargain negotiations, but even that is speculation. And, importantly, what objective did his incompetence cause him to fail at? It's only a failure if you sought a different outcome.

Two things here.  One is that VL evidently missed my reference to the negotiation, not of the deficit deal, but of Obama's 2009 stimulus package.  Maybe I should have put in a link, and I'll add one later, to Obama's own admission that he hadn't done such a good job on that one:

Now in retrospect, I could have told Barack Obama in December of 2009 that if you already have a third of the package as tax cuts, then the Republicans, who traditionally are more comfortable with tax cuts, may just pocket that and attack the other components of the program. And it might have been better for us not to include tax cuts in the original package, let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts, and then say, O.K., you know, we’ll compromise and give you your tax cuts, even though we had already proposed them.

Yesterday VastLeft tweeted "When the job is fucking over the most vulnerable people, the last topic that interests me is competence."  This is mildly alarming; it seems that VL can't grasp anything but the most direct ("Am too! Are not!") argument.  If what I wrote presupposed Obama's competence, it was only hypothetically, for the sake of argument. What I was getting at was not so complex: it was If X, then Y; if not-X, then not-Y: Even if Obama was trying to engineer an economic stimulus that would help the most vulnerable, he did a bad job of it.  He said so himself.  Just as Obama admitted that he did a poor job in his first debate with Mitt Romney.  Is it necessary to be a good debater to be a good President?  Not as far as I'm concerned; but it was still worth noting that he is not a good debater.  (And this is an easy, safe criticism to make, since almost all of his most devoted apologists agreed with it.)  It is, I think, important for a President to be a competent negotiator; it's a significant part of the job.

But it also follows from what I wrote in that post (that the principles you stand up for must be good ones) that it's not enough to be a competent negotiator, one must also be negotiating toward a good end.  If Obama was trying to push through a stimulus deal that would help the majority of Americans, he shouldn't have undermined it by offering tax cuts up front that would undercut its effectiveness.  (If not-X, then not-Y.)  This suggests that improving the economy for the 99% was not his goal, which seems likely, given his record.  This involved the real risk that an underperforming economy would hurt his chances of re-election, but Obama wouldn't have been the first president to run such a risk: Bill Clinton did just that by pushing through NAFTA in 1993, the Democrats lost control of Congress as a result, and Clinton might not have gone on to a second term; like Obama last week, Clinton won his second term by a relatively narrow margin.  Obama's re-election wasn't a foregone conclusion either, and the limping economy worried his partisans. On the other hand the economy was going well for the ultra-rich, with record high profits, but that crucial part of his base was strikingly ungrateful, despite the yeoman service he'd rendered them.  Fortunately for Obama, the Republicans fielded a stellar ticket of fools and bigots -- but even so, the popular vote was a close thing.  The gap between Romney and Obama in the Electoral College was much more dramatic, which is no doubt why those numbers have gotten so much display.  (Not that American Presidents ever need to worry for their well-being when they're turned out of office.)

Now that Obama is in the catbird seat, we'll see him negotiating a Grand Bargain to keep us from going over the Fiscal Cliff.  There's been talk of how good Obama's position is now, compared to 2009 or the debt ceiling battle of 2011.  But by now his goal is pretty clear, a destructive one, so it doesn't matter whether he's a competent negotiator or not.  Whether Boehner or Obama emerges the victor in the Grand Bargaining, most Americans (and most of the world) will lose.  But don't worry: Neither Obama nor his lovely wife nor his beautiful little girls will ever miss a meal, and isn't that what really matters?  What Obama fan wouldn't be happy to go hungry to keep them comfortable?

It's also odd that VL is still hammering away at a point that isn't central to the post he praised so generously; but now I've devoted too much attention to it myself, so on to other matters.  The elections are finally over, and America's best minds can turn their attention to really important subjects: football and basketball.

I Would Prefer Not To

The former (she's still working, I've retired) co-worker who posted this commented, "so true, if our elected officials did this a lot more would get done!"  I see variations on that theme a lot, on Facebook, in the letters to the editors of newspapers, in the comments sections of online newspapers, and in the magnanimous victory speech of His High Mightiness, our newly-elected President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties .  And it makes no sense at all.

I don't dispute that Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have done their best to obstruct President Obama's agenda for the past four year for mainly partisan reasons.  One reason I consider this obvious is that they refused him courtesies they've freely granted to Republican Presidents, like raising the debt ceiling.  Like Democrats who suddenly embraced policies under Obama that they denounced under Bush, they were clearly motivated solely by party hatred.

It should be remembered, however, that bipartisan cooperation brought us the Vietnam War, Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Hyde Amendment, the North American Free Trade Agreement, welfare "reform," the Defense of Marriage Act, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other dismantling of important protective regulations, the invasion of Afghanistan, torture and indefinite detention, the invasion of Iraq, the attack on Libya, drone warfare, No Child Left Behind, the current murderous sanctions against Iraq, and the Bowles-Simpson Commission, and many other wonders.  It looks poised to bring us a further assault on Social Security and Medicare, and more austerity generally (except for the top 1%) in the name of deficit reduction.  I doubt that my co-worker, or the many other people I've seen calling for "working together", would think that all of those were positive developments.  (That's assuming that they know what most of them are, which I also doubt.)

A dozen years ago, the now-late Alexander Cockburn wrote after the defeat of Al Gore:

First a word about gridlock. We like it. No bold initiatives, like privatizing Social Security or shoving through vouchers. No ultra-right-wingers making it onto the Supreme Court. Ah, you protest, but what about the bold plans that a Democratic-controlled Congress and Gore would have pushed through? Relax. There were no such plans. These days gridlock is the best we can hope for.

Alas, this time around there's a good chance that Barack Obama, Harry Reid and John Boehner will sit down and reason together over the deficit, with disastrous results.  Maybe not -- Boehner has hinted that he's still not on board with higher taxes for the rich -- but I expect Obama will be ready to waive that demand if it gets him cuts in Social Security and Medicare.  We'll see.

There are times when refusal to cooperate is a good thing.  I supported the Democratic state legislators in Wisconsin and Indiana who fled their states to try to block destructive Republican initiatives.  Would I support Republicans who did the same thing?  Yes, if (but only if) they were really opposing bad legislation.  It's not enough, as I've said before, to stand by your principles: your principles have to be good ones.  And who decides what are good principles?  I do.  You do.  We all do.  But we don't necessarily agree.

And that's the trouble with JFK's bromide above.  Who could possibly disagree that we should work together for the common good, rising above cheap partisanship for the good of the country and the world?  Has anyone ever disagreed?  Certainly not many.  Most people are sure that their position, their answer, is the right one.  So where do you go from there?  Most people have no idea.  I think that reasoned, informed debate is one tool.  I have learned a lot by watching intelligent, informed, rational opponents articulate their disagreement.  The outcome may not establish the right position or the right answer, but it often establishes that at least one is wrong, and that is a good thing to know.

But a lot of people hate debate.  Like Lady Augusta Bracknell, they dislike arguments, which are always vulgar and often convincing.  Or as too many people have said, "Arguing on the Internet is like competing in the Special Olympics -- even if you win your [sic] still retarded!  LOL LMFAO! ROFL!!!!"  (This canard seems to imply that these people would approve of debate elsewhere than the Internet, but I don't think so; at least, when I've asked them where debate and argument should happen, they don't have an answer.)

And if I have learned one thing from the past election season, it's that an election campaign isn't the right place for a debate either.  Not even the official Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates.  On their own account, Democrats no less than Republicans have no idea what to do when someone disagrees with them about the issues or the positions of the candidates, so they fall back on abuse.

But I've written about that enough in the past several weeks.  The main point is that negotiation isn't about debate, though it may include some along the way.  Nor does it promise "the right answer," perhaps especially in politics.  This is a point that party loyalists will make when their own side is criticized, though they will abandon it when they're criticizing the other party.  And I don't believe it would make any difference at all if party labels were set aside, because in politics other factors are at least as influential as party: money, seniority, the coming elections.  And more than two sides are usually involved.

If two parties sit down to negotiate in good faith, the result will not necessarily be good.  It's like voting: there is no reason to believe that voters will make the "right" choice, but the point is that they have a say (at least in theory) and therefore some accountability, if only to themselves.  In the real world it's likely that both sides are negotiating in bad faith.   It might be quite bad, but principles aren't involved.  I have to keep reminding myself that this applies to negotiations in government.  Remember Barack Obama's failure in bargaining for his stimulus package, where he unilaterally offered tax cuts to the Republicans before they'd even asked for them.  That's a lack of basic competence, which should be borne in mind by those who think of Obama as their mighty shield against the Republicans.  Obama can't even play ordinary chess very well.  In service of his corporate donors and cronies, he knows how to strongarm his fellow Democrats and to a slight degree the Republicans, but that's not chess-playing, that's main force.  Which is also a factor in negotiations.

But still, one thing we should have learned from the past four years is that Obama isn't as smart as he thinks he is.  (Do I think I'm smarter?  I really have no idea.  What I think is that years of hanging around with America's elites has made Obama less smart than he used to be.  In his place I might have made the same mistakes.  But the point is that he made them.  I've noticed that some former high US officials have admitted that they did the wrong thing while in office.  Either they said so explicitly, or did so tacitly by adopting different positions after they were out of office.  And they can't be accused of not knowing what real politics is like (a popular attack on non-politicians when we dare to speak up).  The key question then is how to make those different positions feasible or workable for politicians while they're still in office.  There's much talk of what is "politically possible" and "politically impossible."  The pressures on politicians to get rid of social programs, to cut taxes on the rich while maintaining social programs for them, to wage wars of aggression and terror, are obvious enough.  So what kind of pressure will make them do the opposite?

You can't blame him for doing that, a politician's apologists protest: Look at the pressure he was under.  To me it has long been obvious that the remedy is to put pressure on him (or her) to do something else.  If nothing else, it would remove the excuse.  One could say to the politician in question: you'll be voted out of office whatever you do, so you might as well do what you yourself agree is the right thing.  It might not be the right thing; he might just be telling me what he thinks I want to hear.  But that's not important here: the important thing is to take away the excuse.  Probably he has more excuses up his sleeve, but enough pressure should force him to acknowledge that they are excuses.   And then, to quote the psychoanalyst at the end of Portnoy's Complaint, we may perhaps begin.

Pearls Before Swine

Okay, this is something I just don't get, and it has been a frequent complaint by Democrats.  First, the demand that "our elected officials should be cooperating like this all the time, not just in the face of terrible disasters."  Really?  So Cleage approves of Democratic politicians' willingness to cooperate with George Bush, ratifying his tax cuts for the wealthy and his nomination of some of the vilest people available to important posts, going along with his criminal invasions of other countries, passing on his use of torture and ignoring his contempt for the Constitution?  Really?

Somehow I doubt it.  What I think Cleage means is that Republicans should "cooperate" with President Obama, and maybe with any Democratic President.  Ironically, they have often done so, though usually in the worst cases, like the NDAA.  If Mitt Romney wins the election next week, will Cleage demand that the Democrats work with him as he slashes Social Security and other support programs, invades Iraq, repeals Obamacare, bans abortion, and legalizes polygamy?  Or will Democrats be exempted from the requirement of "cooperation" when a Republican is President?

I suppose the underlying idea is that politicians should "cooperate" to do the right thing and the best thing for the nation and the world.  That sounds really nice, but under the best of circumstances people differ about the best and the right thing to do.  You could make a case that the Republicans should have cooperated more with Obama than they have in fact, because the policies he was trying to implement were mostly Republican policies, and they opposed them simply because he was a Democrat.  Much the same happened when Bill Clinton was President, after all: he was aggressively business-friendly, pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement, trying (but failing) to pass GATT, and "reforming" the welfare system while nurturing a couple of major market bubbles -- in Internet stocks and housing -- that made lots of money for the rich before they came crashing down.  The Republicans never appreciated how helpful Clinton was to their aims, just as they don't appreciate Obama now.

It is reasonable to call for cooperation on shared goals, but I don't think Cleage really wants to acknowledge that Obama and his opponents share so many important goals, though they certainly do.  Where one side wants one thing and the other wants the opposite, cooperation really isn't the right approach, especially when one side believes that the others side's aims are wrong.  Then it's entirely appropriate to dig in your heels and refuse to budge.  You might still be wrong -- as I've said before, consistency is only a virtue if you're consistent about the right things -- but refusing to cooperate for the right reason, on the right issue, is a virtue.  Surely Cleage, with her background in the Civil Rights Movement, knows that.

It was hypocritical of the Congressional Republicans to refuse to raise the debt ceiling for Obama last year, when they'd done it without complaint for Bush and his predecessors.  They were caught flat-footed when Obama wanted to "intervene" in Libya, because they couldn't very well defend Qaddafi but didn't want their nemesis Obama to look good by shedding Muslim blood while posing as a champion of democracy.  Similar difficulties arose when our good friend Hosni Mubarak experienced some trouble in Egypt: on the one hand, democracy against dictatorship is Good, so Obama should let Mubarak fall; on the other, Mubarak was repressing Muslims, so Obama should support him -- preferably he should do both at once.  Even his violation of the War Powers Act after the Libyan intervention didn't bother them much; why should it?  And so on.  But addressing these points would require pointing out where Obama was wrong, so Cleage and her fellow devotees can't really go there.

Which brings me to my second point.  We have been told indignantly over the past four years that it's foolish to expect idealism or principle to triumph in politics. That's not what politics is about.  At the same time, Obama represents the triumph of idealism and principle.  Anyone who expected Obama to stand by his progressive-sounding promises was naive or a cynic. True Obama supporters, by contrast, are just cynical enough.  They understand the necessity of Realpolitik as Obama practices it.  Politics is a brutal, heartless game, a blood sport, and we should cheer on our star player without being Monday-morning quarterbacks; we can't know what he knows, and we must trust him.  Whatever Barack does is good, by definition.  He knows best, certainly better than we do.  The true believer must hold the two opposing beliefs in mind at once -- Obama is pragmatic, dirtying his hands in our service; Obama is a shining idealist, fighting amoral opponents with the power of true goodness -- unified by faith.  Those who fall away due to lack of faith are anathema; don't even mention those who never had faith to begin with: their god is their stomach, their glory is in their shame, their destiny is destruction.  Obama is great by ascription; there cannot be any valid criticism of him, because by definition he is always right.  He may perhaps disappoint, but even there the fault lies with you for being disappointed.

The trouble with reason and principle, to loyalists like Cleage, is that they are unpredictable: they may lead to unacceptable conclusions.  You might discover that what you wanted to believe is not true after all.  You might end up criticizing or -- horrors! -- condemning someone you revere.  What counts to a loyalist is the conclusion you reach, not the process by which you reach it; the loyalist starts with the conclusion, and works backwards.