You've been through all of F. Fitzgerald's James Baldwin's books
You're very well read, it's well known.
But something is happening here, and you don't know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?
President Obama is not a psychopath, unlike George Bush. And yet he seems to sleepwalk like one. There is a profound disconnect between the man he hints at being around the edges--the man he pretended to be during the campaign--and the things he does day in, day out. Friday, George Lakoff posted a diary that's most illuminating, both for what it accurately says, and for what it mistakenly assumes about Obama. The title, "Obama's Missing Moral Narrative", is spot on. So, too is the basic message: that Obama needs to fiercely embrace the moral narrative that he seemed to invoke when he was a candidate. But having so sagely diagnosed the what of Obama's failing, I'm afraid that Lakoff has unfortunately mis-dignosed the why.
David Kaib did a quick hit on Lakoff's diay, and commentator Vlaszlo linked to a May 2008 piece by Adolph Reed (black activist academic) in the Progressive magazine, arguing that Obama's always been a neo-liberal, rather than a progressive, at least since he began running for office. This rings increasingly true for me. The longer I see him in action, the harder it is for me to believe his post-election actions are anything but expressions of his "true self", even if there is also a piece of his true self that doesn't quit fit and that spills over sometimes.
Lakoff's piece starts slowly with some obvious, but sharply accurate observations:
Barack Obama may be one of the best communicators of this generation, but he is not living up to his own talents. In a year of disasters, communication failure doubles the disasters.
If, as he says, the monster spill was his highest priority from Day 1, he needed to communicate that from Day 1 - or at least Day 3 or 4. It took five weeks for him to tell the nation what he and his administration were doing.
The result was visible in the press conference yesterday. He was on the defensive. He needed to be on the offensive - from early on. The choice is not doing or communicating. It is doing and communicating.
His narrative: This is a tough, unprecedented situation, but I'm in charge, and I've been very busy, in the Situation Room where I belong, not on tv. I'm fully competent. I'm a good policy wonk - ask me any question about details. I'm honest. I admit my few policy mistakes. I think about the details day and night. Don't think I'm oblivious.
It's defensive, trying to overcome criticism that should never have been allowed to accumulate. But worse, it's weak when it needs to be strong.
The president did do the required minimum. He placed a moratorium on offshore drilling and cancelled oil leases in the Gulf and off Virginia. He appointed a commission to make safety recommendations. And he is reorganizing the Mining Management Service. All to the good, but ...
In the above, Lakoff has very precisely pegged Obama's cautious neo-liberal modus operandi. He then really hits his stride with the following:
Crises are opportunities. He has consistently missed them. Today was a grand opportunity to pull together the threads - BP and the spill, Massey and the mine disaster, Wall Street and the economic disaster, Anthem BlueCross and health care, the Arizona Immigration Law, Don't Ask, Don't Tell - even Afghanistan. The press threw him fastballs straight down the middle, and he hit dribblers every time.
It's not that he said nothing to tie them together. But there was no home run, no unifying narrative, no patriotic call to the nation on the full gamut of issues. Instead, there were only hints, suggestions, possible implications, notes of concern - as if he had been intimidated by the right-wing message machine.
And yet, Obama of all political leaders, could have done it, because he did before in his campaign.
The central idea is Empathy. Democracy is based on empathy, on people caring about one another and acting to the very best of their ability on that care, for their families, their communities, their nation, and the world. Government must also care and act on that care. Government's job is to protect and empower its citizens.
All this is quite true, I would argue--indeed achingly so. But at the same time, in another way, it's entirely beside the point, because Obama is not that guy. And he's not that guy in part because Ed Kilgore's analysis of the neoliberal Third Way (the Third "Third Way" in my analysis, revisited yesterday in "The context of our dis-contents") is mistaken: it's not just about government using private means to serve public ends, it's not the same old liberalism in a more "market-friendly" bottle. It's an inherently minimalist philosophy that only grasps the vaguest sense of what the old liberal rhetoric about the common good is talking about. Because Obama is technically so damn good at doing the rhetoric when he's really on (compared to other national politicians, at least) Lakoff, like many others, falls into the trap of thinking that rhetoric expresses Obama's "true self", but by now it should be obvious that it's really just a talent he has that makes him stand head and shoulders above all the rest of the neo-liberal pack.
That's the fundamental reason why Obama hit dribblers in the press conference: because neo-liberalism is all about the dribblers. Don't swing for the fences, it says. Don't go for single-payer--or even for a robust public option that would lead to single-payer over time--even though it's what's needed to dramatically cut the over-priced costs of healthcare "system". Don't go for a $1.3 trillion stimulus, even though that's what the macro-economics tells you is needed to really jolt the economy out of the recession, preserve necessary state and local services and put people back to work sooner, rather than much, much later. Don't go for a dramatic shift to clean energy, energy efficiency and massive investments in green jobs, even though that's what the science says is absolutely necessary to avoid a coming climate catastrophe.
"The central idea is Empathy," Lakoff writes. But not for neoliberals. Intellectually, it may be, in the sense that Lakoff maps metaphorical entailments. And I don't doubt for a minute the significance of that sort of argument. What's missing is that Lakoff's metaphorical analysis fails to address the vast disconnect between rhetoric and deeds. It misses, in short, the Orwellian dimension that virtually defines the politics of our age.
Empathy, and acting on it effectively, is the main business of government.
And Obama knows it in his heart.
Perhaps that may be true. But neo-liberalism is not about listening to your heart. That's for "bleeding heart liberals". That's not what neo-liberals do. And next is where Lakoff gets things most wrong:
Yet the right-wing has intimidated Obama into dropping not just the word "empathy," but the idea. Empathy is a positive deep connection with other people in general and with all living things, the ability to see and feel as they do. The right-wing, which shows little empathy, has confused empathy with a bleeding-heart sympathy for individuals, which they see as a weakness. And though Obama has repeatedly made the distinction clear, he has allowed the right wing to intimidate him into abandoning "the most important thing my mother taught me."
This is an appealing explanation, but it's simply not credible any more. Obama wasn't just intimidated into dropping empathy--both the word and the idea--since he was inaugurated and the right began its vicious attacks. He grew up in a political environment that was entirely hostile to empathy, and he adapted to that environment. Of course, making a show of empathy was an absolute requirement, given the constituency he came from. But nothing is a stronger bulwark against grasping the logic and power of empathy that Lakoff describes than a political lifetime of faking it. And that, sadly, is the bottom line of Obama's politics, the bottom line of neo-liberalism and the third "Third Way."
If it's any consolation, Lakoff's misapprehension is a mirror-image reflection of the neo-liberals' own misapprehension. You see, they actually believe their own BS. They believe that they share the same goals as genuine progressives, but only want to achieve them through different, more "rational", more "market-friendly means. They have thoroughly convinced themselves that they really do care--at least the non-sociopaths among them. But when it comes down to actual results, there's simply no there there. Which is why, for example, it's entirely irrelevant to them that charter schools show no better performance than traditional public schools. What matters to them is the rhetoric not the reality.
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