The Irony of Barack Obama’s Legacy

It might be premature to start talking about the legacy of a president who, according to polls, stands a decent chance at reelection this fall. But in a sense, we’ve been talking about Barack Obama’s legacy since at least the summer of 2007, well before he was elected president. I’m working my way through a great new essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the September issue of The Atlantic, and here’s one of the more historically aware statements on Obama’s legacy that I’ve seen recently:

The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government. In warring against that paradox, African Americans have historically been restricted to the realm of protest and agitation. But when President Barack Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” he was not protesting or agitating. He was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. The power was black—and, in certain quarters, was received as such.

It’s convenient to think that racial tension in this country has dissipated over the last half-century through the arrival of progressive social legislation and cultural change. But what’s more likely, as Coates suggests, is that new laws and customs have just sublimated racism into publicly acceptable political preferences; it’s not that racism is dead, it’s just that racists nowadays have more legitimate ways to object to people and policies they don’t like, and in a somewhat perverse sense, to defend their views with even greater authority.

This is why it’s important to see Barack Obama in the context of the longstanding division within the black community over whether it’s better to object to the system or master the system. Coates may be right that blacks have typically leaned — or been pushed — towards “protest and agitation” against a system that has never favored them, but there are plenty of people within the black community who have questioned the wisdom of that approach. Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Steele, and Herman Cain stand out as recent examples, but clearly they have all rejected “protest and agitation” by embracing political conservatism, which is still largely unpalatable to the vast majority of American blacks.

Seen against this backdrop, Barack Obama becomes the nascent model of an American black man who is neither a protestor nor a conservative, but rather a socially established, politically pragmatic liberal. He is, in other words, a conceptual compromise between diametrically opposed philosophies within the black community.  That’s not to say that his presidency has been good for black people living in America today, or that he has lived up to the hype, but if you take the longer historical view it’s worth understanding that he represents a new — and perhaps still emerging — type within the black community.

The key question then is whether such a compromised type can effect change in ways that the black community may still need. In comparison to black agitators of the 20th century, perhaps not, but then again perhaps it is time to move beyond the concept of a “black community” as something that is separate from mainstream society. By most measures, Barack Obama has done far less to further any distinctly black or liberal agenda than to show blacks how to be successful and mainstream without completely selling out on values that they feel they must remain committed to. That is a win in certain ways, of course, it’s just that there is a huge difference between remaining conceptually or rhetorically committed to values, on the one hand, and actually pushing those values deeper into the fabric of society, on the other. That is where many liberals — not just black liberals –have been disappointed by Obama’s presidency.

The Agency Dilemma in American Politics

Richard Cohen has a piece in the Washington Post about the insidious effect of Sarah Palin on the field of Republican presidential contenders:

Since Since Palin…ignorance has become more than bliss. It’s now an attribute, an entire platform: Vote for me, I know nothing and hate the same things you do…

So far, the Palin effect has been limited to the GOP. Surely, though, there lurks in the Democratic Party potential candidates who have seen Palin and taken note. Experience, knowledge, accomplishment — these no longer may matter. They will come roaring out of the left proclaiming a hatred of all things Washington, including compromise. The movie had it right. Sarah Palin changed the game.

Plenty of political scientists will tell you that political identification nowadays has a lot more to do with common dislikes than likes, and Sarah Palin is a great example. Her brand of politics centers on rejection — abortion, gay marriage, Washington elites, Barack Obama, basic understanding of facts, etc. — and lots of people evidently identify with that. Still, representative selection, as we’ve seen, becomes difficult with a field composed of candidates like this. At some point, Republican voters need to choose a nominee to face off against Barack Obama in November, and more broadly, to carry forth the ideals of the conservative movement, but it’s hard to identify the best individual to do that among a group of candidates who are all advancing the same wide-ranging view that everything needs to go.

As an analogy, if you are a shareholder of a company that is searching for a new CEO, and all the interviewees for the position talk only about what they hate about the company and the previous CEO, it becomes difficult to decide who the best person is for the job. Using stock as compensation is a common solution in that scenario, but it’s unclear how that would apply to representative selection in politics. Theoretically, the ideal scenario for Republican voters would be just the same: that they could offer their candidates stock in the conservative movement — however that is defined — such that whoever they chose would have to advance their agenda. But defining the agenda to be advanced is the tricky part. Mitt Romney is against taxes and healthcare reform, Rick Santorum is against abortion and gay marriage, Newt Gingrich is against taxes and healthcare reform, Ron Paul is against the Fed and monetary stimulus. Even if Republican voters could come to a consensus that the conservative movement is purely about repealing, who is going to decide exactly which policies need to be repealed?

Part of the problem here is with the institution of the presidency and the American style of democracy in general. We talk a lot about political identification — about how voters identify with this or that candidate — because voters don’t really have another way of doing things. Shareholders in a company simply want to choose the guy who says, “I’m going to make this company successful,” and it doesn’t matter what he looks like or how he talks or how blond his wife is. Politics in this country has become so much about personality that these kinds of issues often take precedence over the act of assessing who is going to make a particular movement or agenda successful. And it’s just as much a problem for Republican voters as for any other reasonably broad voting bloc.

Mitt Romney’s Health Care Dilemma

The National Review slams Romney in a piece this morning:

…when conservatives argue that Obamacare is a threat to the economy, to the quality of health care, and to the proper balance between government and citizenry, we do not mean that it should be implemented at the state level. We mean that it should not be implemented at all. And Romney’s health-care federalism is wobbly. The federal government picked up a fifth of the cost of his health-care plan. His justification for the individual mandate also lends itself naturally toward federal imposition of a mandate. He says that the state had to make insurance compulsory to prevent cost shifting, because federal law requires hospitals to treat all comers, insured or not. But if federal law is the source of a national problem, it makes no sense to advocate a state-by-state solution.

Matt Yglesias catches out NR on changing its stance from four years ago, citing NR’s 2007 Romney endorsement editorial. Yglesias observes:

We’ve gone quite suddenly from the fact that Romney can speak with more authority than any other Republican about the pressing issue of health insurance to one in which Romney’s health care record is a dangerous flirtation with policies that threaten the economy and the basic framework of American liberty. If the issue is that NR’s writers have actually changed their mind then they should give some reasons and not just act like Romney’s a scoundrel.

What makes this really disheartening, much past the ideological treachery of publications like the National Review, is that Mitt Romney is the one Republican candidate who, in Ezra Klein’s phrase, has “really accomplished something on the issue.” What Klein’s chart shows is that out of the states from which the 2012 Republican candidates will likely emerge, Massachussetts (Romney’s former state) has the lowest rate of uninsured by a bit. So in just the narrow sense of policy performance, Romney should be bragging to Pawlenty and Rick Perry and Mike Huckabee instead of defending himself against their attacks.

What’s more, public opinion has steadily been in favor of the individual mandate component of the Affordable Care Act, which was one of the central pieces of Romneycare and something that he touted during the 2008 campaign. So in sum, as Governor of Massachusetts, Romney implemented a policy that worked well for his state and that ended up being the template for a nationally popular policy, and yet he is running away from it at full speed.

One has to think that this is a critical moment for Romney. Either he can go on pretending that bringing health insurance to the people of his state was a heinous violation of American liberty that should never have been duplicated on the national level in order to mollify the extreme voices within his party, or he can tell people to cut the crap.

Decoding the Donald

A solid BusinessWeek analysis of Donald Trump:

Trump thrives on an audience and a foil, and today, inside his Trump World Tower offices in New York City, he has both. He’s sitting behind his desk, stacked with magazines and newspaper clippings about himself, discussing his proto-Presidential campaign whose sudden momentum seems to have surprised even him. His longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, hovers nearby with a bunch of papers: a list of assets as of June 30, 2010, and a blue-bound report by the accounting firm WeiserMazars. “Each line’s a different asset,” Trump murmurs, running his finger down one of the pages, which lists categories such as residential properties, commercial properties, clubs, real estate licensing deals, and the Miss Universe Pageant, plus around $245 million in cash and equivalents. Then the papers are whisked away. “Most people think I’m worth two billion. They don’t know.” He adds, “You know, I don’t even have mortgages.” It turns out that he has at least one: Documents on file with the city of New York indicate there is a $160 million mortgage on 40 Wall Street, which Trump borrowed $10 million to buy in 1996.

Trump has spent years trying to bulldoze the world into believing that he is worth a great deal more than independent analyses have confirmed. He wants the doubters and the haters and the petty critics and the other real estate people to know that not only could he do a better job than President Obama – that, if he were in charge, he would kick China’s and Saudi Arabia’s butts and have jobs flowing back into the U.S. within months – but that he’s been goddamn successful at business.

A highly successful man with a profound insecurity complex – it is the stuff of great journalism. Still, the only relevant question is whether he will run, and if so, why.

The Challenge for Romney

Mitt Romney threw his hat into the 2012 ring today by announcing a presidential exploratory committee, a clear first step toward a declaration of his candidacy. There are a number of obstacles that Romney will face in a 2012 bid, but they all seem to start and stop with that pesky health care bill he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts:

Mr. Romney brings with him a number of liabilities, the largest of which is the Massachusetts health-care bill he signed into law five years ago Tuesday. Republican opponents say the Bay State law is strikingly similar to President Barack Obama’s national health-care law, with its menu of private health-care policies that the uninsured can purchase with government assistance and its mandate that nearly everyone buy health insurance. Democratic activists are planning a series of “thank you” events in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Iowa Tuesday marking the day Mr. Romney signed the guarantee of near-universal health-insurance access into law.

If I’m Romney’s campaign manager, I don’t see a good way around this, except if Romney can just be ineffably handsome at every moment for the next 18 months. Politically speaking, it’s pretty clear cut that he approved health care legislation that not only looks a lot like Obamacare, but was in fact the basis for Obamacare.

The only possible reply is to start talking about how Massachusetts is a small, white state, and that the federal government had nothing to do with it, and that “we did what was best for our folks at the time,” and that “we never would’ve dreamed of doing this on a national scale.” Still, there are plenty of indicting parallels for the likes of Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels (both sitting governors in small, white states, who didn’t enact Obamacare) to draw.

Because of a neat piece of legislation that Romney signed five years ago, he is starting ten feet behind the pack in this campaign, and though he is a skilled politician, I don’t see him catching up in time.

Socialist? Are You Joking Me?

Another bewildering episode in the presidential campaign unfolded yesterday when Barbara West, news anchor for WFTV in Orlando, Florida, asked Joe Biden on a TV interview if his running mate Barack Obama was a socialist. Here’s the transcript of the interview:

BARBARA WEST, WFTV ANCHOR: I know you’re in North Carolina now, helping to get out the vote, but aren’t you embarrassed by the blatant attempts to register phony voters by ACORN, an organization that Barack Obama has been tied to in the past?

JOE BIDEN, DEMOCRATIC VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I am not embarrassed by it. We are not tied to it. We’ve not paid them one single penny to register a single solitary voter.

WEST: But in the past, Senator Obama was community organizer for ACORN. He was an attorney for ACORN. And certainly in the Senate, he has been a benefactor for ACORN.

BIDEN: How has he been a benefactor for ACORN? He was their organizer. John McCain stood before ACORN not long ago complimenting them on the great work they did.

WEST: You may recognize this famous quote: “From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.” That’s from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?

BIDEN: Are you joking? Is this a joke?

WEST: No.

BIDEN: Or is that a real question?

WEST: That’s a question.

BIDEN: He is not spreading the wealth around. He’s talking about giving the middle class an opportunity to get back the tax breaks they used to have.

WEST: What do you say to the people who are concerned that Barack Obama will want to turn America into a Socialist country much like Sweden?

BIDEN: I don’t know anybody who thinks that, except the far right-wing of the Republican Party.

So what are we to make of this? For starters, it’s pretty clear how utterly confused this woman is. It’s one thing to be an ignorant American who buys into an insular, prefabricated fallacy fashioned by the media. It’s quite another to be a media figure who buys into an insular, prefabricated fallacy fashioned by a political campaign. It’s a third thing still to employ that fallacy against that campaign’s rival. Sure, Ms. West’s question is a cheap shot of the very worst sort, especially with the shape the McCain-Palin ticket is currently in. Sure, it’s a stupid, misguided question that exacerbates bitter partisan politics and plays on people’s ignorant fears – two of the prevailing trends in our society that Barack Obama has sought to combat. Those two things, however, I can stomach because they bear no material relevance to an Obama presidency beyond being belligerent and hurtful.

What I can’t stomach is this: in its wording and tone, the question legitimizes an egregious – and now quite popular – misinterpretation of Obama’s comment about “spreading the wealth.” The comment was most certainly not an endorsement of socialist philosophy or Marx. It was, first and foremost, a comment made amidst an impromptu conversation on economic policy with a voter (Joe the Plumber) on the campaign trail. It was not a comment made in a debate, a stump speech, a convention speech or any other public forum. It was not published in campaign literature or on any campaign-affiliated website. It has not been reiterated or reformulated in any way by either Obama or Biden or any of their aides or supporters. If one had to classify it as either a policy platform or an off-hand remark, one would have to choose the latter.

Those things considered, in the interest of fairness and journalistic consistency, Ms. West should have gone on to ask Sarah Palin if she really wanted to “drill baby drill” and John McCain if he really wanted to “bomb bomb Iran.” That is the level of seriousness the question contains, and unfortunately, about the level of seriousness left in the McCain campaign.  

Moreover, it has come to light in the past few days that both McCain and Palin, in their past – and now disavowed – political careers, made comments quite similar to Obama’s. In his latest column in The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg recalls an interview on MSNBC from the 2000 campaign in which McCain argued for higher taxes for the rich. Hertzberg also quotes Palin: “We’re [Alaska] set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”  

There is a more serious issue at stake here, though, which requires us to do more than just fire back at McCain and Palin. Are we Americans stupid enough to mock and dismiss such a notion as “spreading the wealth” simply because of its connection to an (inappropriately) vilified historical figure? Wouldn’t it be better to consider the actual circumstances facing us? Over the last eight years, the gap between the rich and the poor in this country has undergone unprecedented expansion. Our economy is in severe decline and on the precipice of even greater disaster. A few weeks ago our Congress was forced to use $700 billion of our money to buy Wall Street out of irrevocable collapse. During the Bush Presidency, middle and working-class families have been made to foot the bill of a $120 billion/year war and sweeping tax cuts for wealthy corporations and the richest 1%.

Despite all of this, we are still one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. And yet, our education system is failing across the board, our health care ranking has fallen to 38 in the world, behind Colombia, Morocco and Costa Rica, among others, we have not allotted any funds to reform energy or environmental policy, and public transportation and infrastructure, especially in big cities, has fallen way behind. This is the America we live in after eight years of doing the very opposite of spreading the wealth. 

We can do better. We ought to be spending our money on anything besides war and financial bailouts. We ought to spend it on education, health care, environmental and energy reform, infrastructure, etc. In short, we ought to spend it on the American people again. Those are the things that matter to Americans, the things they’re investing in when they pay taxes, the things they expect their government to care about. As Hertzberg rightly points out, let’s look at Europe, where citizens pay slightly higher taxes and receive considerably higher returns: excellent education systems, free health care that works, well-maintained and efficient public transit, and serious reforms of energy usage and environmental protection.

These things are not pie in the sky for America. On the contrary, they are things we should already have and should only be thinking about how to improve. It’s only the Bush economic policies, the ones McCain wants to continue, that make them unattainable.

The McCain campaign, and now Ms. West, have used Obama’s comment not to bring up an important issue, not to extend the debate, but to swiftboat his urgently necessary economic plan. In doing so, they have relied, rather predatorially, on the penchant of ignorant people to be more easily swayed by dishonest symbolism than by hard facts and the truth. What could be less American?

With circumstances as dire as they are, I think we must begin to invest again in the American people, not just the rich. That means focusing on their problems, and providing them remedies. We can choose to call that “spreading the wealth.” Or we can call it “being more American.”

The Big Ripout

Not more than six weeks ago, the presidential race was a literal pick ’em, a neck and neck dogfight that no one could call. How did it change so quickly?

Let’s jump back to the first week of September: John McCain was riding high after his selection of Sarah Palin for running mate and his convention in Minneapolis, Obama and Biden had lost a bit of steam on the campaign trail, the economy was holding steady, and new reports had started filtering in that parts of the “surge” in Iraq had met their objectives. Most national polls showed an electoral scenario similar to 2000 and 2004, with the slight advantage to McCain and Palin. Senate and House polls showed Republicans recovering a few key seats they had lost in 2006 and possibly regaining their Senate majority. 

Then the asteroid hit Wall Street. Lehman, Merrill, AIG, Wachovia; one by one, they fell. Financial markets around the word felt the shock waves of the impact. In stepped Henry Paulson, shrewd moneyman but hapless politician, to broker a deal with Congress. Then President Bush stepped up and backed him.

The Greek melodrama-become-tragedy ensued. John Boehner, Roy Blunt and other free market-trumpeting Republicans in the House put their foot down and said no, while Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Obama, McCain and others insisted yes. After a great deal of kowtowing and begging, Congress passed the bill and the recovery package went into effect. 

Now, here we are, some six weeks later, eight days before the election. The bailout seems to have stemmed the tide of economic disaster, at least for the time being. But the bottom seems to have been ripped right out of John McCain’s presidential campaign. He’s now eight points behind according to most polls, more than 50% of Americans think he will continue the Bush economic agenda, he’s behind by significant margins in Virginia and Colorado, two longtime aces in the hole for the GOP, and he’s in a rift with his running mate (the “diva,” one campaign official derisively labeled her). Even worse for the Republican Party, it’s now looking as if the Democrats will expand their Senate majority by six or seven seats and their House majority by up to thirty seats.

One commentator on MSNBC noted earlier today that although we’ve seen landslide elections in the past, we’ve never seen two in a row. If it was any more one-sided than it is right now, he said, it would be biblical.

The accusations have already started swirling. Conservative pundits have alleged that Obama is running a dirty campaign, not adequately reporting campaign contributions, for instance, and that McCain is running a sloppy campaign, choosing Sarah Palin, being too negative, too old, not distancing himself from Bush enough, etc. I think neither is true. Rather, I think this is one of those rare situations where a horrendous catastrophe, brought about in no small part by avarice and delusion, ends up benefitting the good guy (see the story of Noah’s Ark in the Bible for another such situation). 

The economic meltdown, I think it is safe to say, has had a profoundly negative impact on the reputation of the Republican Party, more than the tone of either campaign, more than the debates, more than any other single issue. The old adage that “politics is about the price of eggs” is true, and the particularly severe circumstances we are currently experiencing explain why a disproportionate number of moderate voters have moved into the Obama camp and even some longtime Republicans have defected. An eight-point swing in six weeks, especially in the last two months of a 19-month campaign, is serious business, and it requires a serious explanation. 

I’d love to chalk it up to the American people having had a change of heart, realizing that Obama is the man we need and McCain is not. But I think it is less a case of that than of people starting to blame the Republicans for the current mess and choosing the only alternative open to them. That’s fine, we’ll take it. But is it really true, as Sarah Palin often demands, that we should not be focusing on who to blame but on how to fix it?

I think not. I think that would be rather like telling an alcoholic you have just diagnosed with depression not to focus on the cause. That notwithstanding, I wouldn’t say that John McCain has run a bad campaign; people are always going to charge that the loser in a competition implemented a flawed strategy. Rather, I think that larger events, namely those connected to the economy, took the competition out of his hands, and for that matter, out of Obama’s hands, too.   

Moreover, I think big money has made its choice in this election: 1) just last week Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke proposed a $200 billion stimulus package to offer more direct relief to homeowners facing foreclosure, a measure that jives nicely with Obama’s economic philosophy, 2) we’ve known for several months that Obama’s chief economic adviser, Robert Rubin, was a former chairman of Goldman Sachs, and 3) perhaps most significantly, three of the top six contributors to Obama’s campaign thus far are Goldman, JPMorgan, and Citigroup, all of whom fared beautifully in the bailout. 

As much as I can’t stand John McCain and his running mate, it seems that greater forces are at work in this election than his poor strategy.

Powell’s Endorsement of Obama: What it Means

A couple of days ago former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for president on Meet the Press. Very few – if any – could have predicted this kind of bold and crucially-timed political statement from the former Army General who served from 2001 to 2004 in the Bush Administration and was one of the more frequent frontmen for their criminal policies. Indeed, the shockwaves from it continue to emanate through both the McCain and Obama campaigns and through the media.

Political comentators on the right, such as Rush Limbaugh, George Will and Bill O’Reilly (formerly great admirers of Powell for his decorated military service and seemingly race-neutral politics), seemed to take particular exception with the endorsement. They and others issued statements soon after the show that the endorsement was all about race. 

When asked what impact the endorsement would have on the campaign, Will remarked,

“Some impact. And I think this adds to my calculation – this is very hard to measure – but it seems to me if we had the tools to measure we’d find that Barack Obama gets two votes because he’s black for every one he loses because he’s black because so much of this country is so eager, A) to feel good about itself by doing this, but more than that to put paid to the whole Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson game of political rhetoric.”

Limbaugh added several hours later,

“Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race…okay, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I’ll let you know what I come up with.”

Of course if you know these two, it’s not so surprising to hear them talk like this. But what this episode illustrates on a larger scale is how openly and unabashedly racist people in this country still are. These two – especially Limbaugh – have a huge base of supporters, especially when you factor in that they operate in print and on the radio, two of the more outdated forms of media communication. If they really admired Powell apart from his (ill-advised) participation in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations, they would not have turned on him with such haste and petty disdain.

The fact is this: no matter how you feel about Powell, Obama or anyone else on either side of this campaign, the General gave a well-reasoned, articulate explanation for why he will be voting for Obama on November 4th. He does have a decorated resume of bipartisan service, he was a dedicated soldier, and he has never been a radical spokesperson for the left or for progressive racial politics. To cast as him as such is not only tasteless and stupid, but downright embarrassing.

What’s more is that Powell delivered his endorsement with a level of racial sensitivity and forward-thinkingness that, regrettably, we have not even seen from the Obama campaign, let alone McCain or any of his supporters in the media. He raised the elepant-in-the-room point about Obama being a Muslim: as Americans, he said, we should not stand for even a second for the kind of kneejerk racism that treats a Muslim presidential bid as unconscionable. For some inexplicable reason, this is the first time any public figure has gone on record not just to say, “Obama’s not a Muslim,” but to say, “So what if he is?” Good for Powell.

The point pertains not just to Muslims and not just to Obama, of course, but to the general bigotry that is still very active in our national politics. Unfortunately, the Republicans are not even the sole perpetrators of it; recall Hillary Clinton calling Obama a Muslim back in the Spring during her bid for the nomination. As it has been almost since this country’s birth, the problem is systemic.

Beyond helping Obama in the polls and ruffling the feathers of some of the more despicable individuals in the conservative media, I think the real and lasting impact of Powell’s endorsement (to help Will better answer his question) is to remind us of the subtle but real pitfalls that bigotry still poses, and that going forward, we will have to be especially wary of them. 

I wonder if it ever occurred to Will or Limbaugh that Obama’s skin color doesn’t figure much into our thinking: Powell and others of us are voting for him simply because he’s a better candidate for president than John McCain. Period.