Premature Exaltation

I don't feel much like writing tonight, or doing anything much tonight for that matter, probably because I have too much I need to do.

But anyway, President Obama apparently delivered a campaign speech the other day that has his fans all aflutter. Steve Kornacki was so worked up that he posted two pieces on Salon, Monday's "What a president with a strong hand sounds like," and today's "The evolution of a populist." Robert Reich chimed in with "The Obama we've been waiting for."

Understand, what got them all hot and bothered was a speech, not any kind of action. You would think that they'd know better: Obama has talked tough before, usually when an election was involved, and each time retreated to his centrist Fortress of Solitude as soon as the votes were in -- except to scold the insufficiently loyal among Democratic voters.

Reich's piece might just be the worst of the three.

Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008. Since then we’ve had a president who has only reluctantly stood up to the moneyed interests Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin stood up to.

Hopefully Obama will carry this message through 2012, and gain a mandate to use his second term to take on the growing inequities and game-rigging practices that have been undermining the American economy and American democracy for years.

"Hopefully"? I think "hope" and its derivatives have pretty much lost their luster over the past two and a half years. The notion of a mandate is interesting too: Obama had a mandate in 2008, but he pissed it away. And let's not forget, as both these writers seem to have done, that simply securing a second term for Obama is not going to solve his political problems: the Democrats will also have to regain control of Congress. It could happen, but I don't see it happening unless the economy improves dramatically in the next year.

Kornacki was dishing out the same swill, though.

Apparently, Democrats in the Senate will soon call for a vote on a tweaked extension plan, one that would impose a smaller surcharge on millionaires and make up the difference with an assortment of revenue enhancers that Republicans have previously backed. Maybe this will attract more Republican support; but even if it doesn’t, Democrats are making it clear they’ll keep pressing their case through the end of the year if need be. This is a new phenomenon in the 112th Congress: Obama and his party seem to have the upper hand — and they know it.

We've heard this sort of thing before. I'm not persuaded, let alone convinced.

In a way, Obama is still playing uniter-in-chief. But instead of trying to coax Capitol Hill Republicans into compromise, he’s now more interested in rallying the 99 percent against them.

Oh, really? And how do you think he's going to do that? A good many of the 99 percent have learned to distrust Obama the hard way, through his betrayal -- whether by design or through incompetence -- and it's going to be very difficult for him to win them back. Even if we don't blame him for the Republicans' successful intransigence, why should we believe that he'll be any more effective against it in his second term?

As Ari Berman wrote at The Nation,

That will entail, however, a shift not only in rhetoric, but also in policy for a party and president that has too often been seen as prioritizing Wall Street over Main Street. Nor is it realistic to think that the Obama campaign will suddenly win over disaffected former supporters with a series of speeches. Indeed, Occupy Wall Street is aimed as much at the president and the rigged political system in Washington as it is at the nation’s largest banks. As one OWS leader told New York magazine: “These [protesters] aren’t out here because they’re offended that they haven’t been spoken to nicely. They’re out here because they owe shitloads of money in student-loan debt and can’t find a job. Or they can’t afford their mortgage. And if Obama thinks that they’re gonna be able to divert this energy by talking about doing something, he’s got another think coming.”

Obama may not be able to divert the attention of the mass of the population by talking about doing something, but the ploy clearly works on Democratic pundits.

Kornacki also posted a piece today about Rush Limbaugh and his "crush" on Newt Gingrich. Kornacki is really not in a position to cast the first stone.

Incidentally, Obama kicked off his new populist offensive with a decisive move against the People, or at least 51% of them: his Secretary of Health and Human Services overruled an FDA decision to allow emergency contraception to be sold on pharmacy shelves, and without prescription to women under 17. And if you think that one of his Team of Rivals went sneaking behind his back and violated his wishes, Obama has confirmed that, while he was not "involved," he supports the decision:

President Obama said today that “as the father of two daughters,” he supports his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of the Plan B “morning after” birth control pill to girls under 17 years of age.

Which is not exactly surprising: Obama's the guy who joked that if some guy makes a pass at his daughters, he'll take him (and probably his whole family too) out with a predator drone.

This lends support to Katha Pollitt's concern that he will "yield to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which has lobbied fiercely for a broad religious exemption from new federal regulations requiring health insurance to cover birth control with no co-pays—one of the more popular elements of Obama’s healthcare reform package. Talk about the 1 percent and the 99 percent."

A Critique of Pure Reasonableness

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor, and as a fairly devoted Obama loyalist, representative of the type. Today he's arguing that being abused by the GOP has "positioned Obama well to battle the GOP on taxes." The outcome of the battle over the deficit -- y'all remember that, don't you? -- was that while Obama's "reasonable man" strategy succeeded in getting the populace to regard the Republican Congress negatively and saddle them with most of the blame for the mess,

... it was far from a complete triumph [for Obama's "reasonable man" strategy], because the widespread anger at the GOP failed to translate into newfound support for Obama, whose overall job approval rating (and standing in head-to-head match-ups with potential 2012 foes) has continued to deteriorate since the debt ceiling fight. In other words, he succeeded in making his opponents look very unreasonable, but didn't get any points for coming across as reasonable himself.

That could have been because the mass of Americans realized that while letting the GOP make itself look bad was a strategic victory for Obama and the Democrats, it still resulted in a lousy deal for the ordinary voter. The corporate media and the party loyalists are only interested in how each party benefits, both in Congress and in the next round of elections, but it doesn't seem that I'm alone in having other interests. If the debt-ceiling debacle was even a partial "triumph" for Obama and the Democrats, it was a Pyrrhic triumph: Another one like that and we're done for. And it looks like we're in for more triumphs like it.

Kornacki hopes that this time Obama will take off the gloves and go mano-a-mano with the Republicans, showing them what he's really made of or at least sending some really tough messages and creating an image of toughness. Typical Obama-fan stuff, and we've been there before, though instead of breaking out the pom-poms and going into Full Poodle Skirt cheerleader mode,** Kornacki goes for gravitas.

In a way, though, the debt ceiling experience is a perfect setup for what Obama is now doing. Take his new threat to veto any deficit reduction plan that the congressional supercommittee produces if it doesn't include more tax revenue from wealthy Americans. No longer is Obama instinctively staking out a compromise-friendly position. How this will be regarded by the public is a fascinating and tricky question. On the one hand, polls consistently show that voters strongly agree with the principles Obama is now articulating. On the other hand, public opinion is quirky. As Greg Sargent put it today:

Now, Republicans tend to think such polling isn’t that meaningful. Even if it shows public support for high-end tax cuts*, Republicans are happy to target Democrats on the issue, because they can continue to make the general charge that Dems are tax-hikers, furthering the narrative of profligate Big Government liberals running off the spending rails. Republicans believe this narrative is very potent with moderates and independents. And there very well may be something to this.

When you factor in the the number of pundits and media outlets proclaiming that Obama is playing to his base and ignoring moderates with his new approach, the danger for the president here becomes obvious.

Not "the danger for most Americans," not "the danger for the already reeling economy," but "the danger for the president." Meaning, of course, political danger, like dropping approval numbers or dwindling chances of re-election. Now, if we can get unemployment to drop meaningfully, if we can get some real economic growth happening (instead of flood-up patterns to the rich that increase our already outrageous economic inequality), then maybe I'll care about "the danger for the president." Till then, I think Kornacki has mistaken me and most people for somebody who gives a fuck. The president, like any other politician, is not an end in himself but primarily a means to an end for most citizens: someone who serves our interests, not his own, and the two interests are not at all the same.

How can he combat it? Here the damage that he helped inflict on the GOP 's image this summer could be very helpful. If his Republican opponents are seen as fundamentally unreasonable ideologues, Obama may have more leeway than he otherwise would to behave "unreasonably" -- especially if he is doing it in the name of a principle with which most Americans say they agree. Now when Republicans (or the press) bemoan Obama's supposed unwillingness to reach across the aisle and compromise, he can reply, "I already tried that, over and over and over" -- and there's a chance voters will know what he means.

Of course, there's also a chance they won't, but that's the risk that comes with being president when the economy is as rotten as this.

Of course, Obama as president has nothing to do with the rotten economy.

But notice how Kornacki tries to frame this, and imagine some other possibilities: if voters didn't lavish approval on Obama's capitulation to the Republicans last summer, maybe it was because life isn't a zero-sum game where there's only one winner and one loser, one good guy and one bad guy. Maybe it wasn't because we didn't understand what the president was trying to do, in his latest round of eleven-dimensional chess -- maybe we understood all too well, and we didn't like it. Even though most of us don't seem to recognize this most of the time, it is possible for both sides to be bad guys, and it's possible to blame both Obama and the Republicans for the deal they reached. This is incomprehensible to the corporate media and party loyalists, but if Obama wants to avert "danger to the president," he had better try to understand it. If Obama hoped to make himself look reasonable to the public by putting Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, then he not only failed but he's even more stupid than I gave him credit for. The Republican Party is going down like a burning dirigible, and Obama seems determined to wire the GOP to his neck and go down with it.

There's nothing "unreasonable," either politically or in terms of people's lives, about blocking the destructive policies embraced by the Republicans, the corporate sector, and the Blue Dog Democrats. It's perfectly reasonable for Obama to raise taxes on the rich; the Bush-era tax cuts should have been allowed to expire long ago. It's perfectly unreasonable to cut payroll taxes (via) that support Social Security and to cut back on Medicare (via) and Medicaid. Notice again that Obama has promised, in his new tough-guy mode, to "veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to pay their fair share." He promised, then, to change -- that is, cut -- benefits for those who rely on Medicare. Give him a bill that raises taxes "on the wealthiest Americans," and he'll happily slash away at Medicare. All of Obama's "unreasonability" is aimed at you and me, not at the Republicans. And this political battle, contrary to Steve Kornacki and his ilk, is about you and me, not about Republicans versus Democrats. Whoever claims victory at its end, they'll be standing on our bodies.

*Is that a typo or a Freudian slip in Greg Sargent's article? What the polls show is not public support for "high-end tax cuts", but rather public support for "high-end tax hikes." The following sentence indicates that he knows it, as does the rest of the article.

** I swear I had no idea when I wrote this that Kornacki was gay; he only came out to the world this past week, 16 November 2011.

P.S. Typo fixed; thanks, JV! (As always, a post which points out a typographical error will contain a similar error itself.)

Till the End of the Age

Steve Kornacki at Salon briefly dared to tone down his adulation of President Obama after the debt deal, but he can't quite let go of it. Today, for example:

If there was ever a chance that there'd be a follow-up to the now clearly inadequate stimulus that Obama pushed through Congress at the start of his presidency, it vanished for good (or at least through the 2012 election) last November, when the GOP reclaimed the House and increased its share of the Senate. We knew then that the scale of collaboration between the president and the 112th Congress would probably be limited, at best.

It depends on who "we" are, I guess. There has been plenty of collaboration between Obama and Congress in this session, in the form of Obama collaborating with the Republicans. The stimulus bill was "clearly inadequate" when it was passed, and we who pointed that out were not surprised to see Obama scaling up his concessions to the Right as his term went on. (Of course, we who noticed such things, the premature anti-collaborationists as it were, were and are taken seriously only as "professional leftists" who didn't want to President Obama to succeed. Which was true, if success is to be measured in terms of enacting the Republican Right's agenda, as it has proved to be.)

Kornacki continues:

Five dozen districts that voted for Obama in '08 are now represented by Republicans. If Democrats can pick off half of them in '12, and keep their losses to a minimum elsewhere, they'll be in position to win back the House -- making it possible for Obama to enjoy a productive relationship with Congress again.

Wait a minute. That "productive relationship with Congress" gave us that "clearly inadequate" stimulus bill, the corporate-subsidy Affordable Health Care Act, and an ongoing failure to keep the progressive-sounding promises Obama had made during his campaign, because the nasty partisan Republicans wouldn't cooperate with the President. Obama and his apologists were big on excuses for their failures when they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House; I don't believe their situation is going to be as advantageous after November 2012 as it was after November 2008, but even if they did, would it make any difference? If they couldn't -- or wouldn't -- do better then, they won't be able to do better after the next election.

Realistically, this may be the best case scenario for Obama and his supporters -- gut it out for the next 15 months, eke out a small but impressive-seeming win, then hope the Republicans of the 113th Congress decide its in their interests to be just a little bit more open to collaboration.

For the rest of us, a President a little bit less open to collaboration would be better, but that's not a best-case scenario, it's an impossible dream.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

Wow. Even the faithful Obama apologist Steve Kornacki is expressing some doubts about the Great Collaborationist. As a result of the GOP's earlier push for a voucher program to replace Medicare, and Kathy Hochul's surprise victory in a May 24 special election in New York, using Medicare as a club to beat her opponents:

Suddenly, the idea that Democrats might actually post the 25-seat gain needed to win back the House in 2012 didn't seem out of the question. At the very least, it seemed, they had found a winning issue sure to bring them within striking distance of control heading into the 2014 cycle.

But then came the "grand bargain." For the past several weeks, Obama has aggressively and publicly pursued a deficit-slashing deal with Boehner that, in exchange for relatively slight revenue increases, would make deep domestic spending cuts, even in Medicare and Social Security. The grand bargain now seems dead, but Obama has now provided an abundance of emphatic sound bites in which he makes it clear that he believes entitlement spending can and should be cut and that doing so would strengthen -- and not harm -- the programs. In other words, he has handed the GOP the tools to create the perfect response to ads like Hochul's during the '12 campaign.

The basic political logic behind Obama's move is obvious. As Ed Kilgore noted this morning, he is pursuing a reelection strategy that depends on convincing swing voters that he's a reasonable, compromise-friendly pragmatist -- and that the GOP is beholden to an irrationally ideological base. There are even those who believe Obama always knew the grand bargain wouldn't work, and that he pushed it so hard just to demonstrate how unwilling the GOP is to compromise. ...

What is clear, though, is that Obama has made his party's strategy for next year's election a lot more complicated.

Yup, that's pretty clear. So clear that even Kornacki can see it.

I want to stress again that the move against entitlements isn't news to those who've actually paid attention to Obama. He began dropping hints about cutting Social Security and Medicare before he won the nomination, let alone the election. I don't think it's at all unfair to say that the budget conflict just gave him the chance he's been waiting for all along.

Go Get 'Em, Slugger!

Two interesting posts at Salon.com on Obama's deal to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the rich.

One, by Steve Kornacki, "Actually, it's a pretty good deal," is gleeful.

And it's also worth remembering that there's a clear disconnect between the loudest voices on the left -- the ones that have been branding Obama a sellout -- and rank-and-file Democratic voters, who still approve of the president's job performance at a rate of about 80 percent. Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan weren't doing that well with their own bases at this same point in their presidencies.

It's true that Democrats continue to approve Obama's job performance at a rate of about 80 percent; funny that it wasn't enough to stave off those losses in November. I'm not sure where Kornacki got that bit about "rank-and-file Democratic voters," which sounds like he's talking about Democrats other than the professional leftists and whining losers -- including such typically rank-and-file Democratic constituencies as labor -- who weren't so wild about the way the country was going in the weeks before the midterm elections, and were finding it difficult to motivate themselves to get out the vote. Much of what Kornacki calls "the left" is rank-and-file Democrats, in other words -- it sure as hell isn't Republicans.

The second piece, by Gene Lyons, titled "Obama Bought Himself Precious Time," is reasonable enough. Lyons, another party loyalist, stresses (as Kornacki does) that Obama basically traded the extension of the tax cuts for the extension of unemployment benefits.

The Party of No was forced to say yes. From a Tea Party perspective, GOP leaders agreed to increase the budget deficit purely for the sake of multimillionaire tax cuts. How much clearer can things get?

The Tea Party is already pissed off at the GOP leadership, which is why they ran their candidates against mainstream GOP incumbents; that's not news. Of course, from a left perspective, Democratic leaders also agreed to increase the deficit for the sake of multimillionaire tax cuts.

The trouble I see is that there's no reason to believe that the economy will improve enough to do the unemployed any good, and the tax cuts aren't going to help -- rather the opposite; tax cuts do not stimulate the economy, so Obama's compromise has the worst of both worlds, increasing the deficit while depressing the economy. The question is whether the positive elements of the deal will be able to improve the economy enough to offset the depressing elements. As Lyons says, Obama bought himself time, but I don't expect him to use that time constructively -- it will be a career first for him if he does. Since most Americans are less concerned about the deficit than they are about the economy and unemployment, Obama and the Democrats really need to do something about the economy and unemployment and worry less about the deficit.

Lyons terminally annoyed me, though, with this bit:

Maybe it's because I'm lucky enough to have a decent job, and maybe because I never envisioned Obama as a political messiah to begin with, but an awful lot of this commentary strikes me as overwrought. Or maybe it's because I'm a sports fan and tend to see politics more as a game than a theatrical melodrama on themes of good versus evil.

Sports similes usually get my back up; allow me to quote myself here.

Let me see if I can put this clearly. Sport is not politics; politics is not sport. Setting up proper health care for ordinary citizens matters a great deal -- it is, in fact, a life-and-death matter, unlike who wins the Superbowl or today's IU-OSU football game, which doesn't matter at all. Not in the slightest. And the worst thing about organized sport, even worse than the amounts of money wasted on Albert Speer stadiums and the like, is that it is intended to teach people from childhood that winning a game is as important as feeding the poor or preventing war. And it works -- that's why Americans spend their free time following sports instead of attending to what their government is doing.

But there's the problem for Lyons's view: many Americans see games as very important, indeed as cosmic melodramas of good versus evil. Which doesn't mean that I think that one should indulge in overwrought rhetoric, as Obama did during the recent campaign. That's just Lyons the party loyalist, taking up the anti-left talking points of his leadership. I don't think that politics is a theatrical melodrama on themes of good and evil either, but it is serious in a way that no game can be. Unemployment is at Great Depression-level highs in this country right now, for example, even though corporate profits have metastatized under Obama. Does Lyons want to tell the unemployed that their situation is just a play in a game? I don't think the reason is that he's got a "decent job," because I also have a decent job and I still take the plight of the unemployed seriously. Nor did I ever view Obama as "a political messiah." (Here Lyons is using the Dem talking point of jeering at those who were "disappointed" because Obama didn't bring world peace in 48 hours.)

Maybe there's a third way of looking at things, as there usually is. Something like this, quoting Obama's latest press conference:

WHAT SOME WOULD HAVE PREFERRED: “Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.” The assumption here is that he would have lost the fight. It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does.

Or, as Avedon said at Sideshow:

It's not that "the left" doesn't praise your policies, it's that you keep passing policies nobody likes. You're all lies and no fight. (Isn't it amazing how he can never push things any farther left than way out to the far right?). We would have loved it if you'd at least compromised on health care, Mr. Petulant, but you didn't - you just gave the store away, and now you want to give away the rest of the block - and then dismiss objections to destroying the lives of 98% of the country as a fight for "an abstract ideal". It's not an "abstract ideal", you little creep, it's our country and our families and our lives. It's food on our tables and a home to live in and getting the heat up above freezing in the winter and preventing your children from dying unnecessary deaths. It's honest work for honest pay versus begging and bowing and slavery. A roof over your head and food in your belly are not "an abstract ideal", you putz. Don't ask me to thank you.

This also answers Gene Lyons: a roof over your head and food in your belly is not a game either, except maybe to comfortable people who have decent jobs and they're all right Jack, they've got theirs. And maybe, sometimes, politics is a theatrical melodrama on themes of good versus evil -- except that in the two-party system as presently constituted, what we've got is evil collaborating with evil. The fact that one side is the bad guy doesn't mean that the other side is the good guy.