| What he was selling to his base as transformational leadership was, in fact, simply a shift in management strategy--nothing to be concerned about. It would be just like Tony Blair's New Labor taking up the task of running Maggie Thatcher's neoliberal Britain more efficiently than the Tories had proved capable of. That was his message to America's elites, sent via the proxy of Nevada voters, via the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal. Clinton and Edwards were quite right to pounce on this, even if they may have somewhat mischaracterized what he said. Their underlying point has proven to be quite accurate: Obama does not represent a political sea-change from Reagan's legacy, rather he is quite comfortable living within it, and--whether he realized it or not--normalizing it so that no genuine alternatives are even thinkable.
Simply put, Obama was talking about Reagan approvingly in a way, using the very same sort of language that Reagan himself might have used to describe "all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s". It was as if he'd committed a Freudian slip, revealing a subconscious father-figure fixation on Reagan that no amount of conscious political disavowels could put to rest. And once he came to power, that subconscious affinity proved itself to be much more significant than his conscious protestations to the contrary. Put simply, Obama has conclusively proven himself incapable of thinking outside of Ronald Reagan's box--so much so that he's not even capable of comprehending what that box is, any more than a fish can understand water.
What's more, Obama was adopting a pseudo-meta-political pose, pretending to a position of above-the-fray superior wisdom, as if to strike the pose of a senior statesman, deliberately belying his actual lack of political experience. But this pose was pure bunkum, recycled, standard-issue DLC/Versailles centrism, utterly impervious to the actual historical record. Indeed, Clinton himself had tried to do precisely what Obama claimed he could do--reach out across the aisle by speaking differently than Democrats before him had--and he got his head handed to him for his troubles. Furthermore, while Obama was pretending to say it was a matter of the times, he was clearly arguing the contrary. "Shucks, I'm not a unique figure," he was saying,in essence, "I'm just the same as Kennedy or Reagan"--a once-in-a-generation charismatic leader.
What made that convenient slight-of-hand so much more dangerous and consequential than it appeared to most people at the time was the profound misreading of history that it depended upon--a misreading of history that failed to grasp the longer cycles of American history, and placed far too much emphasis on the superficial play of colorful personalities such as Kennedy and Reagan. It's not that such figures have no importance. That's not the argument at all. It's that their importance can only be understood in terms of the larger historical patterns in which they appear. There's no better way to ensure that you misunderstand them than to pluck them out of their contexts, like a kid putting together an all-time all-star baseball lineup, which is precisely the sort of thing that Obama was doing--the same sort of thing that the punditalkcrazy does all the time, and one of the countless little things he did to endear himself to them.
The chart at the beginning of this diary tells one important part of the story about Kennedy and Reagan--both were beneficiaries of political attitudinal shifts they played little part in creating. What they could do was play a role in giving expression to the shifts that helped bring them to power. But this wasn't something they could do by themselves. Kennedy was an inspiring figure who accomplished relatively little legislatively, but he paved the way for LBJ, a legislative powerhouse who build enormously on the still-strong political and institutional foundations of the New Deal era. Johnson's Great Society represented the strongest late second wind of any party system in American history, even topping the Republican dominance of the 1920s.
Reagan, OTOH, was not in a position to build any comparable legislative legacy--even with the cross-over support of conservative Southern Democrats in Congress. Rather, he was a front man for building a conservative infrastructure that Nixon had already helped lay the foundations for, dating all the way back to his early red-baiting races for Congress and the Senate. What changed with Reagan--not a result of him, but with him as a prime exemplar--was the right's systematic appropriation of left/progressive strategy and tactics for reactionary ends. The right reinvented think tanks as long-term strategic policy messaging entities; it created an ideological media with a pretense of objectivity, while mercilessly attacking the relatively non-ideological, but establishment, media as ideologically biased; it created a permanent top-down counterpart to progressive social movements that ebbed and flowed dramatically over time, only rarely mobilizing for national political effect; and it used massive Keyensian deficits to generate economic growth which it then credited to anti-Keyensian conservative economic policies. In short, it initiated all-out hegemonic warfare adapting many cultural forms of the New Deal era for fundamentally contrary purposes.
Obama, like most Democratic politicians of the past 30 years, is far too shallow a thinker to grasp the enormity of what conservatives are up to. The systematic nature of conservative hegemonic warfare is beyond him. All he sees is the figurehead. And because of that, he can only praise Reagan, he can never be him.
Obama On Reagan--A Closer Look
So let's take a look at how PoliFact exonerated Obama, and ask ourselves if there isn't a deeper problem that PoliFact's analysis overlooked-the problem of Obama's implicit acceptance of Reaganism's broad outlines, more than an explicit endorsement of its harsher specifics. PoliFact began by describing the controversy as it had developed, which revolved around comments Obama had made in an editorial meeting with the Reno Gazette-Journal, not just the passage above about Reagan, but also words about the GOP being the "party of ideas". Then PoliFact said:
Instead of a long point-by-point comparison of the politics of Obama versus Reagan, let's just put this to bed by giving Obama's comments a fuller context.
During the 49-minute editorial board meeting, Obama was essentially asked how long his coattails might be for other candidates in House and Senate races. His response lasted a few minutes, but here's a bit of what he said:
"I think that we're shifting the political paradigm here. And if I'm the nominee, I think I can bring a lot of folks along on my coattails. You know, there's a reason why in 2006, I made the most appearances for members of Congress. I was the most requested surrogate to come in and campaign for people in districts that were swing districts, Republican districts where they wouldn't have any other Democrat.
"That was based on their read of the fact that, you know what, this is somebody who can reach out to independents and Republicans in a way that doesn't offend people. ... I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times.
"I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I mean, I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating and he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is, people wanted clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing, all right? I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times.
"I think we're in one of those times right now. Where people feel like things as they are going aren't working. We're bogged down in the same arguments that we've been having, and they're not useful."
While one can credibly argue that Obama wasn't so much endorsing Reagan as he was playing the history professor, one can argue that he was doing a miserable job of it, as I argued above. Beyond that, Obama's historical account also overlooks the fact that Carter himself was more conservative than any Democratic President since Woodrow Wilson, and only beat off a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy because of the short-term "rally round the flag" effect that followed the hostage-taking at the Iranian embassy. It also overlooks the fact that if the Reagan/Bush campaign hadn't interfered in negotiations with Iran, the early release of the hostages could have re-elected Carter, despite the troubled state of the economy. In short, Obama was reciting conservative mythology while pretending to talk history. He was also making a ludicrous mistake--not fully appreciated at the time--to infer that because his transpartisan rhetoric (coming from a black man, no less) was so appealing he must, therefore, govern in a transpartisan manner, because that's what people wanted. Ronald Reagan certainly did no such thing. He used a phony transpartisan appeal, then governed as far to the right as he could get away with.
First off, there's simply no escaping the fact this is Reaganite rhetoric:
He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating and he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is, people wanted clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing, all right?
But the so-called "excesses of the '60s and the 70's", as Matt Stoller wrote:
were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. The libertarian anti-government ideology of an unaccountable large liberal government was designed by ideological conservatives to take advantage of the backlash against these 'excesses'.
It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power. Lots of people don't agree with this, of course, since it doesn't fit a coherent narrative of GOP ascendancy. Masking Reagan's true political underpinning principles is a central goal of the conservative movement,
Matt's link above is to a Krugman op-ed, which is a useful reminder of just how basic racism is to the rise of today's Republican Party and the conservative movement that dominates it:
Republicans and Race
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Over the past few weeks there have been a number of commentaries about Ronald Reagan's legacy, specifically about whether he exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement.
The controversy unfortunately obscures the larger point, which should be undeniable: the central role of this backlash in the rise of the modern conservative movement.
The centrality of race -- and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans -- is obvious from voting data.
For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn't true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.
More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as "humiliating to the South." Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year's House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.
The G.O.P.'s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization." So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.
And Ronald Reagan was among the "some" who tried to benefit from racial polarization.
True, he never used explicit racial rhetoric. Neither did Richard Nixon. As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, "Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics," "Reagan paralleled Nixon's success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race -- a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines."
Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen -- a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman's race, but he didn't have to.
There are many other examples of Reagan's tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here's one he didn't mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South -- but not in the North -- the food-stamp user became a "strapping young buck" buying T-bone steaks.
The fact that a black man not named Alan Keyes could run for President in apparent utter ignorance of that history is jaw-dropping. But that very much appears to be the case with Obama. And if he isn't in utter ignorance, he's something much worse--he's in utter denial. Either way, it's a good part of why Obama is apparently utterly incapable of talking about race, except when his back up against the wall. Worse still, it's connected to why he can't even think about race, so that he never even seems to consider fighting for race-neutral policies--such foreclosure relief--that would none-the-less assist a disproportionate number of blacks.
Indeed, by his own anti-populist politics, he's doing everything imaginable to validate the rightwing pseudo-populist narrative, which has always sought to lump together "liberal elites" and minorities in opposition to salt-of-the-earth "real Americans."
Compared to such mammoth misreadings of American history and politics, it may seem almost petty to point out that the 1980 election could have turned out much differently than it did, not least because of one thing that appears nowhere in Obama's narrative--the Iranian hostage crisis. What's more, without that crisis, it's quite possible that the 1980 election could have be noted as a turning point to the left, since Ted Kennedy pre-crisis was on track to defeat Carter in the primary, and certainly would have been a much more vigorous defender of Democratic core values against Reagan than Carter proved to be.
The first thing to note about that crisis is that it was first initiated because Democratic President Jimmy Carter foolishly took it upon himself to pick up after the Republican's mess. It was Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower who authorized the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, and to install the dictatorship of the Shah. His Democratic predecessor, Harry Truman, had refused to overthrow an elected government. Then, 26 years later, when the inevitable finally happened and the Shah was overthrown, Carter let Harry Kissinger talk him into letting the Shah come to America--which naturally infuriated the Iranian people, and led to the capture of 53 people in the American embassy.
For a crucial few months, this action had a similar effect to 9-11, it caused people to rally around the President, who had previously experienced very low approval numbers. The short-term bump in Carter's approval numbers came in late 1979 and early 1980, the crucial period of time when small-state voters can have a disproportionate effect in the primaries, particularly for saving the bacon of an endangered incumbent:
Souce: Roper Center.
That rallying effect lasted long enough to help Carter stave off an unprecedented primary challenge from Ted Kennedy in early 1980, but it did not last long enough to get him through the general election--indeed, Kennedy surged in the last half of the primary season. Wikipedia explains:
Kennedy refused to run in 1972, and again in 1976. Many suspected that Chappaquiddick had destroyed any ability he had to win on a national level. However, in the summer of 1979, he consulted with his family, and that fall, he let it leak out that because of Carter's failings, 1980 might indeed be the year. Gallup had him beating the president by over two to one.
Kennedy's official announcement was scheduled for early November. A television interview with Roger Mudd of CBS a few days before the announcement went badly, however. Kennedy gave an "incoherent and repetitive"[4] answer to the question of why he was running, and the polls, which showed him leading the President by 58-25 in August now had him ahead 49-39.[5] American hostages were taken in Tehran, Iran, and Carter's approval ratings jumped in the 60-percent range in some polls, due to a "rally 'round the flag" effect[6] and an appreciation of Carter's calm handling of the crisis. Kennedy was suddenly left far behind. Carter beat Kennedy decisively in Iowa and New Hampshire. Carter decisively defeated Kennedy everywhere except Massachusetts, until impatience began to build with the President's strategy on Iran. When the primaries in New York and Connecticut came around, it was Kennedy who won.
Carter was still able to maintain a substantial lead even after Kennedy swept the last batch of primaries in June.
Thus, by the time of the general election, Carter's failure to free the hostages had become a primary emblem of a feeling of national humiliation, which Reagan promised to put an end to. Those who were not politically conscious at the time simply have no idea how important a factor this was--in part because it has simply been left out of all the standard political narratives.
But consider this: Nightline was originally founded as a program devoted to following the hostatge crisis, and it provided a daily half-hour dose of reminder to the nation. There has never been such a sustained focus on one political subject in American history by a national media outlet of such reach, aside from during time of war. It was completely unprecedented.
Thus, at one level, it was nothing more than (a) Carter's deluded belief in bi-partisanship and (b) timing that caused the election to turn out as it did. Without the hostage crisis--or without it coming when it did, Kennedy would probably have been the candidate, not Carter. And Kennedy was a much more dynamic campaigner, unencumbered by Carter's record.
And then there's the whole matter of the Reagan/Bush campaign committing treason by doing a secret deal with Iran to prevent the hostages from being released before the election. I've written about this on several occassions. There's a good deal of circumstantial evidence for this conspiracy--not least the fact that arms shipments to Iran that were central to the Iran/Contra conspiracy began before that taking of the hostages that were the purported rationale for the Iranian arms deal side of the conspiracy. But the most compelling evidence about this came from former Soviet intelligence, describing their knowledge of meetings held to negotiate the deal, which became available to congressional investigators just as Clinton was about to be sworn into office. The report was deep-sixed by then-Congressman Lee Hamilton, as described by author and investigative reporter Robert Parry in his series "The October Surprise X-Files".
In short, rather than signaling a massive ideological of any sort, the 1980 election was highly contingent on foreign policy circumstances that could well have turned out very differently, and the almost certainly were treasonously manipulated by the Reagan/Bush campaign. Obama's description of that election faithfully reflects the degree to which his own thinking has been shaped and limited by the hegemonic warfare of the right, which severely limits his ability to fight back on his own terms, since he can't even think on his own terms.
Finally, before moving on, let's take another look at how the passage PoliFact quoted ends, following the part where he's talking about Reagan:
I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times.
"I think we're in one of those times right now. Where people feel like things as they are going aren't working. We're bogged down in the same arguments that we've been having, and they're not useful."
This last paragraph is particularly important, because what it describes is one of the characteristics of a transition from one party system to another. One of the reasons that one party system gives way to another is that the old party system proves incapable of addressing new issues. The transition from the Fifth Party System to the Sixth Party System was the exception that proves the rule. In the end, the Democrats of the New Deal Party System were capable of addressing the issue of civil rights, but doing so fractured their base, particularly costing them in the white South, thus allowing Nixon to win in 1968, ushering in the dealigned Sixth Party System.
Obama's superficial misreading of history would place the cut-points at 1960 and 1980, but none of the deeper indicators favors seeing either election as representing such a profound turning point. Kennedy certainly offered a contrast in age, style and personal vigor compared to Eisenhower, but he was heavily into continuing the arguments that had predominated throughout the 1950s. Indeed, civil rights would prove crucial in a below-the-radar kind of way, but it's precisely because it remained off the table as a partisan issue that it worked so well, as news of the Kennedy's intercession to get Martin Luther King out of jail spread through the black press and gained important black urban votes in the North without incurring any noticeable cost.
Similarly, in 1980, the treatment of race underscored continuity, not change. By then, race had been placed squarely on the table by the transition from the 5th to the 6th party systems, and Reagan ran on it, hard, with a combination of symbolism and the new coded language that had emerged to replace the discredited overt racism of days gone by. As Matt makes clear in the passage I quoted from, the very "excesses of the '60s and the 70's" that Obama uncritically narrates as simple historical facts was an example of such coded language.
Obama faces a two-fold problem here: First, he conflates charismatic candidates and critical, realigning elections, without an inkling of the vast differences between them. The two are completely unrelated as a matter of logic, though they can coincide accidentally. Second, because he doesn't understand the differences, he has no clue about how to deal with the fact that he is both a charismatic candidate, and one who has won what by all rights should be a critical election. This is such an important point that I'm going to deal with it separately in another diary next weekend.
The "Party of Ideas" Canard
Next, PolitFact turns to the second troubling remark from this interview, where Obama parrots the conservative hegemonic narrative of the GOP being the "party of ideas":
And does this next part sound like a Republican sympathizer?
"And, you know, the Republican approach, I think, has played itself out. I think it's fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you've heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they're being debated among the presidential candidates and it's all tax cuts. Well, you know, we've done that, we tried it. That's not really going to solve our energy problems, for example. So, some of it's the times. And some of it's, I think, there's maybe a generation element to this, partly ... I didn't come of age in the battles of the '60s. I'm not as invested in them.
"And so I think I talk differently about issues. And I think I talk differently about values. And that's why I think we've been resonating with the American people."
....
Our take, Obama may want to think twice before invoking the R-word again any time soon. But in this case, it was little more than a sound bite taken out of context and twisted.
Actually, it was quite a bit more than a sound bite taken out of context. Obama is basically endorsing the conservative meme that the GOP had become the "party of ideas". Furthermore he does this so thoughtlessly that the example he proffers is actually evidence of hegemonic dominance--which is something rather distinct from being the "party of ideas", as I explained in my Dec 2008 diary, "The Party of Ideas As Weapons vs. The Party Of Ideas As, Well, IDEAS!".
So, to answer PoliFact's question, "And does this next part sound like a Republican sympathizer?" The answer would be, "Yes, it does. Absolutely. And it's all the more problematic because of how deeply unconscious it all is."
Conclusion: Obama Is No Reagan
Republicans and conservatives have mythologized Reagan so heavily that it's difficult to focus on what was actually real about him. Most of his purported virtues are either imaginary, exaggerated, or questionable. But one thing is certain: he was a perfect figure for his base to rally around, and he knew it. Contrary to the mythology, he did not change a lot of people's minds, as the chart that begins this diary indicates. But he did fire up his base, and make it much, much easier for the conservative movement as a whole to engage in vigorous institution building and mult-faceted hegemonic warfare. In short, he empowered all those who were naturally behind him and he vigorously promoted the hegemonic language of conservatism.
Barack Obama is the exact opposite of this. He was elected almost entirely because of conservatism's epic failure during the Bush years--which itself followed two decades of persistent earlier failures that were repeatedly explained away or ignored. Far more than Kennedy or Reagan, his election was one that demanded a fundamental reorientation of everything that had become routinely accepted and assumed. His individual characteristics and capacities may have had everything to do with winning the primary nomination, but they had virtually nothing to do with winning the general election.
In short, he won despite completely misunderstanding the basic historical/political context in which he won. It's no surprise, really, that he has utterly failed to govern effectively as a result. It's exactly the result one would expect from such a profound misunderstanding. |
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