Barack Obama and the No Big Deal
I was there in Grant Park in August of 1968, when the Chicago police, on the orders of the first Mayor Daley, cracked the heads of demonstrator and passerby alike in a spasm of the very kind of lawlessness they were sworn to oppose.
I was not one of the demonstrators. There was a telephone repair strike, and no reasonable expectation that messages could be reliably delivered by phone among the hotels at which the various state delegations to the 1968 Democratic National Convention were staying. I was part of a cadre of youthful, clean-cut, well-dressed messengers McCarthy campaign had organized to carry those messages by hand, if need be .
Wearing a suit and tie, horn-rimmed glasses, and close-cropped hair, I was stationed at what was then the Pick-Congress Hotel, two blocks away from the epicenter of the violence at Michigan and Balbo. I will never forget the experience of watching the people I'd been raised to see as my protectors, the Chicago police, acting like hoodlums. I will never forget seeing my fellow messengers and even random local residents forced to take refuge in the hotel lobby, blood streaming from their heads and their faces beet-red from the same tear gas that stug my eyes. "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!," they chanted as the billy clubs rose and fell.
It was the last convention to ignore the results of the primaries. It was the last convention held under rules which allowed the results of the primaries to be ignored. The unfairness- the un-American, undemocratic arbitrariness of the whole thing- rankled deeply, and as I walked up an down the klieg-lit Michigan Avenue, lined with National Guardsmen in full combat array, through the lingerling cloud of tear gas hours after the violence subsided, I sensed that something very precious had died that night.
It was a different era. It was a period when TIME magazine was still a journal of news reporting rather than partisan advocacy. It was an era when, to a greater or lesser degree, we could trust the mainstream media to report the news rather than to spin it.
According to Peter Beinart, who wrote this article in the current issue of TIME, what I witnessed on that night forty years ago was the death of American liberalism. According to Beinart, it was reborn a little over a week ago, on election night, when Barack Obama claimed victory in the 2008 presidential election in that same Grant Park where hippie and Yippie had sparred with police over the 11 PM park closing time, and through which they eventually fled their flailing billy clubs some forty years before.
I suppose it's good, in one sense, to see the word "liberal" used again by one who espouses that philosophy. For years now, liberalism has been the political persuasion that dared not speak its name. Those on the left of the American electoral spectrum have customarily referred to themselves as "progessives" of late. I guess with Obama's victory, Beinart, at least, no longer sees the need for euphemisms.
And President-elect Obama is, indeed, a liberal. Now that the election is over, even leftist commentators are beginning to admit that while Obama managed to convince the American people that he is a moderate, not only his history but his agenda is hard left. Not only that, but with impressive majorities in both houses of Congress, he has the wherewithal to advance just such a "new New Deal" as Beinart foresees. Surely the pressure from his base, and from Congress itself, to do just that will be well-nigh irresistable.
The problem is that he lacks a mandate for any such revolution- and my guess is that he's a smart enough politician to know it. He was elected by convincing the American people that his would be a path of moderation and reconciliation; in fact, a great deal of his campaign was dedicated to crying "Foul!" every time John McCain or Sarah Palin pointed out that his personal history, his record, and his positions all contradict that expectation. In this exercise in misdirection, of course, the media enthusiastically joined.
If it ends abruptly on January 20-if Obama does indeed pursue a "new New Deal-" he risks alienating the moderate and even conservative voters who held their noses, ignored his often radical positions on social issues, and hoped for the best, voting out the party they held responsible for the current economic crisis and replacing it with the other guys. That the other guys were led by a bright, attractive, articulate and even eloquent candidate it was hard to personally dislike only made it easier to listen to his rhetoric and ignore both his record and his positions. This remains a center right country, despite what Beinart thinks; the disappearance of security and moral issues from the last campaign was not a function of some seismic shift in American politics, but of the urgency of the necessity of making ends meet in the face of an economic meltdown. Beinart would do well to hesitate before declaring that an election held at a moment of economic crises, which yielded such a patently pragmatic result, an ideological watershed.
The fact is that Barack Obama's election was in no way comparable to that of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1932, FDR garnered 57.4% of the popular vote and 472 electoral votes to 39.7% and 59 electoral votes for Herbert Hoover. In 2008, Barack Obama received 52.7% of the popular vote and a projected 365 electoral votes to John McCain's 46% and a projected 173 electoral votes. It is true, as leftist commentators point out, that Obama's victory was the largest any Democrat has enjoyed since Lyndon Johnson destroyed Barry Goldwater in 1964. But that's hardly an impressive statistic; in the 44 years since then, this is only the second time a Democrat has managed to win a majority of the popular vote!
No, this is no mandate. The American people didn't so much vote for Barack Obama and his platform as it rejected George W. Bush and the status quo; if anything, Obama owed his victory precisely to the willingness of the electorate to ignore his ideology, rather than to his endorsement of it.
Leaving aside the likely negative impact Obama's desire to soak the rich is apt to have on the economy (an exercise which, as the economically literate realize, generally ends up getting all of us wet; one does not stimulate a sluggish economy by crippling its wealthiest players!), the odds of an Obama presidency producing an economy materially better in 2010 and even 2012 than today's are long indeed. Beinart, pointing to the example of FDR, says that the mandate-less Obama need only produce a modest improvement to be judged by the voters as doing well enough. He misses the point that should Obama pursue the revolutionary, New Deal-style agenda he advocates, the troublesome issues which faded into the background in 2008 will instantly reassert themselves. Obama will then be forced to run for re-election as a president who has presumed to go beyond his relatively narrow mandate, not as one fighting to do what the voters signed off on.
The instinct to try to take the country drastically to the left will be a severe tempation for Mr. Obama. My guess is that he's going to be smart enough to avoid it. But should he attempt to govern from the center, he will alienate his own base. No matter which direction the Obama presidency takes, it will not be as easy to reassemble his coalition in 2012. Simply by the act of choosing between the Obama his base supported so enthusiastically and the Obama the average American voted for, he will alienate a critical part of his base.
My guess is that marginally the safer path would be to try to govern from the center; Beinart to the contrary, there are still far fewer liberals than moderates in America. But the crisis is not as deep as the one we faced in 1932, and even though the president-elect is going to great lengths to caution that the economy will take a long time to fix, the brief Mr. Obama has from the American voter is considerably more tentative. If history is any guide, 2010 will be a Republican year, and I would give Mr. Obama no better than a 50-50 chance at re-election.
The fact is that the economy is likely to get worse on his watch, and even if it subsequently gets a little better, Barack Obama lacks the electoral capital Franklin Roosevelt was able to call upon in order to gain re-election in the face of a mediocre first-term economic record. The crisis this time around is too deep to be solved in one term. Yet the situation isn't nearly as bad as it was in 1932. We are not in a depression. The patience of the American people is unlikely to be as great in 2012 as it was in 1936.
This president-elect has only a very limited mandate, and I see no compelling comparison between the 2008 election and that of 1932. In fact, the evidence that 2008 was a re-aligning election seems to me to be just about nil; if anything, it was Obama's ironic casting of himself as a post-ideological candidate that secured his election.
For him to turn around now and attempt to emulate FDR in creating a "new New Deal" would likely seal the deal for the Republicans next time around. For Mr. Obama to do so would be for him to disasterously overreach. Rather than a "new New Deal," the safest course for him would be to initate the "No Big Deal-" cautious, incremental change, serving as a break on the extremist impulses of a Congress that otherwise would be utterly out of control.
Even then, it may not be enough. I do not believe that the American people will re-elect Barack Obama unless he's able to point to a record of achievement precisely in fixing the economy- and I don't think he's going to be able to do it. And an aggressive lurch to the left by the incoming president would more than likely achieve fewer positive economic results than negative social ones. The moral and security issues which suddenly disappeared from the campaign just ended will be back with a vengence next time, when Barack Obama rather than George W. Bush is the issue. And the further left Obama tries to take the country, the more prominent the issues he managed to avoid in 2008 will become.
Rather than FDR, I have a hunch that the closest historical parallel to Barack Obama will turn out to be Jimmy Carter- and that we'll look back on Mr. Beinart's article four years from now, if we remember it at all, as a classic example of hubris combined with wishful thinking.
HT: Real Clear Politics
I was not one of the demonstrators. There was a telephone repair strike, and no reasonable expectation that messages could be reliably delivered by phone among the hotels at which the various state delegations to the 1968 Democratic National Convention were staying. I was part of a cadre of youthful, clean-cut, well-dressed messengers McCarthy campaign had organized to carry those messages by hand, if need be .
Wearing a suit and tie, horn-rimmed glasses, and close-cropped hair, I was stationed at what was then the Pick-Congress Hotel, two blocks away from the epicenter of the violence at Michigan and Balbo. I will never forget the experience of watching the people I'd been raised to see as my protectors, the Chicago police, acting like hoodlums. I will never forget seeing my fellow messengers and even random local residents forced to take refuge in the hotel lobby, blood streaming from their heads and their faces beet-red from the same tear gas that stug my eyes. "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!," they chanted as the billy clubs rose and fell.
It was the last convention to ignore the results of the primaries. It was the last convention held under rules which allowed the results of the primaries to be ignored. The unfairness- the un-American, undemocratic arbitrariness of the whole thing- rankled deeply, and as I walked up an down the klieg-lit Michigan Avenue, lined with National Guardsmen in full combat array, through the lingerling cloud of tear gas hours after the violence subsided, I sensed that something very precious had died that night.
It was a different era. It was a period when TIME magazine was still a journal of news reporting rather than partisan advocacy. It was an era when, to a greater or lesser degree, we could trust the mainstream media to report the news rather than to spin it.
According to Peter Beinart, who wrote this article in the current issue of TIME, what I witnessed on that night forty years ago was the death of American liberalism. According to Beinart, it was reborn a little over a week ago, on election night, when Barack Obama claimed victory in the 2008 presidential election in that same Grant Park where hippie and Yippie had sparred with police over the 11 PM park closing time, and through which they eventually fled their flailing billy clubs some forty years before.
I suppose it's good, in one sense, to see the word "liberal" used again by one who espouses that philosophy. For years now, liberalism has been the political persuasion that dared not speak its name. Those on the left of the American electoral spectrum have customarily referred to themselves as "progessives" of late. I guess with Obama's victory, Beinart, at least, no longer sees the need for euphemisms.
And President-elect Obama is, indeed, a liberal. Now that the election is over, even leftist commentators are beginning to admit that while Obama managed to convince the American people that he is a moderate, not only his history but his agenda is hard left. Not only that, but with impressive majorities in both houses of Congress, he has the wherewithal to advance just such a "new New Deal" as Beinart foresees. Surely the pressure from his base, and from Congress itself, to do just that will be well-nigh irresistable.
The problem is that he lacks a mandate for any such revolution- and my guess is that he's a smart enough politician to know it. He was elected by convincing the American people that his would be a path of moderation and reconciliation; in fact, a great deal of his campaign was dedicated to crying "Foul!" every time John McCain or Sarah Palin pointed out that his personal history, his record, and his positions all contradict that expectation. In this exercise in misdirection, of course, the media enthusiastically joined.
If it ends abruptly on January 20-if Obama does indeed pursue a "new New Deal-" he risks alienating the moderate and even conservative voters who held their noses, ignored his often radical positions on social issues, and hoped for the best, voting out the party they held responsible for the current economic crisis and replacing it with the other guys. That the other guys were led by a bright, attractive, articulate and even eloquent candidate it was hard to personally dislike only made it easier to listen to his rhetoric and ignore both his record and his positions. This remains a center right country, despite what Beinart thinks; the disappearance of security and moral issues from the last campaign was not a function of some seismic shift in American politics, but of the urgency of the necessity of making ends meet in the face of an economic meltdown. Beinart would do well to hesitate before declaring that an election held at a moment of economic crises, which yielded such a patently pragmatic result, an ideological watershed.
The fact is that Barack Obama's election was in no way comparable to that of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1932, FDR garnered 57.4% of the popular vote and 472 electoral votes to 39.7% and 59 electoral votes for Herbert Hoover. In 2008, Barack Obama received 52.7% of the popular vote and a projected 365 electoral votes to John McCain's 46% and a projected 173 electoral votes. It is true, as leftist commentators point out, that Obama's victory was the largest any Democrat has enjoyed since Lyndon Johnson destroyed Barry Goldwater in 1964. But that's hardly an impressive statistic; in the 44 years since then, this is only the second time a Democrat has managed to win a majority of the popular vote!
No, this is no mandate. The American people didn't so much vote for Barack Obama and his platform as it rejected George W. Bush and the status quo; if anything, Obama owed his victory precisely to the willingness of the electorate to ignore his ideology, rather than to his endorsement of it.
Leaving aside the likely negative impact Obama's desire to soak the rich is apt to have on the economy (an exercise which, as the economically literate realize, generally ends up getting all of us wet; one does not stimulate a sluggish economy by crippling its wealthiest players!), the odds of an Obama presidency producing an economy materially better in 2010 and even 2012 than today's are long indeed. Beinart, pointing to the example of FDR, says that the mandate-less Obama need only produce a modest improvement to be judged by the voters as doing well enough. He misses the point that should Obama pursue the revolutionary, New Deal-style agenda he advocates, the troublesome issues which faded into the background in 2008 will instantly reassert themselves. Obama will then be forced to run for re-election as a president who has presumed to go beyond his relatively narrow mandate, not as one fighting to do what the voters signed off on.
The instinct to try to take the country drastically to the left will be a severe tempation for Mr. Obama. My guess is that he's going to be smart enough to avoid it. But should he attempt to govern from the center, he will alienate his own base. No matter which direction the Obama presidency takes, it will not be as easy to reassemble his coalition in 2012. Simply by the act of choosing between the Obama his base supported so enthusiastically and the Obama the average American voted for, he will alienate a critical part of his base.
My guess is that marginally the safer path would be to try to govern from the center; Beinart to the contrary, there are still far fewer liberals than moderates in America. But the crisis is not as deep as the one we faced in 1932, and even though the president-elect is going to great lengths to caution that the economy will take a long time to fix, the brief Mr. Obama has from the American voter is considerably more tentative. If history is any guide, 2010 will be a Republican year, and I would give Mr. Obama no better than a 50-50 chance at re-election.
The fact is that the economy is likely to get worse on his watch, and even if it subsequently gets a little better, Barack Obama lacks the electoral capital Franklin Roosevelt was able to call upon in order to gain re-election in the face of a mediocre first-term economic record. The crisis this time around is too deep to be solved in one term. Yet the situation isn't nearly as bad as it was in 1932. We are not in a depression. The patience of the American people is unlikely to be as great in 2012 as it was in 1936.
This president-elect has only a very limited mandate, and I see no compelling comparison between the 2008 election and that of 1932. In fact, the evidence that 2008 was a re-aligning election seems to me to be just about nil; if anything, it was Obama's ironic casting of himself as a post-ideological candidate that secured his election.
For him to turn around now and attempt to emulate FDR in creating a "new New Deal" would likely seal the deal for the Republicans next time around. For Mr. Obama to do so would be for him to disasterously overreach. Rather than a "new New Deal," the safest course for him would be to initate the "No Big Deal-" cautious, incremental change, serving as a break on the extremist impulses of a Congress that otherwise would be utterly out of control.
Even then, it may not be enough. I do not believe that the American people will re-elect Barack Obama unless he's able to point to a record of achievement precisely in fixing the economy- and I don't think he's going to be able to do it. And an aggressive lurch to the left by the incoming president would more than likely achieve fewer positive economic results than negative social ones. The moral and security issues which suddenly disappeared from the campaign just ended will be back with a vengence next time, when Barack Obama rather than George W. Bush is the issue. And the further left Obama tries to take the country, the more prominent the issues he managed to avoid in 2008 will become.
Rather than FDR, I have a hunch that the closest historical parallel to Barack Obama will turn out to be Jimmy Carter- and that we'll look back on Mr. Beinart's article four years from now, if we remember it at all, as a classic example of hubris combined with wishful thinking.
HT: Real Clear Politics
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