There was a superficial incoherence to Gibbs' hippy-punching, but that only masked a deeper incoherence. The superficial incoherence was (a) essentially dissing the "professional left" as elitist, out-of-touch & politically irrelevant while (b) blaming it for bringing Obama down.
But the deeper incoherence is Obama's own political philosophy, strategy, and ideology. He'd be fine, it could at least be argued, if he was up against Eisenhower-era Republicans like his grandparents and their friends. But no sane person in the world thinks that he is. And since he's not, everything he does is taking place in a sort of an Alice-in-Wonderland world. If he wants to lash out and blame "the professional left" for this, that's fine. But it doesn't tell us anything about anything except him--and how he blameshifts for his own failure on his own terms, the terms of a would-be "transformative reformer" out to battle special interests and return sovereignty to the people--something he obviously has not done.
Indeed, this supreme act of hippy-punching--barely more than two weeks after his supreme make-nice video message to Netroots Nation--seems like nothing so much as a declaration of Obama's own intransigence and unwillingness to face reality. He may be much more sophisticated, in language at least, but he's just as much close-minded to unwanted input as Bush & Cheney were, and Gibbs' hippy-punching was intended to triple underscore that in neon red magic marker, even as he overly denied it.
The very fact that Gibbs is outraged by Bush/Obama comparisons shows how significant they are. A stuck pig squeals. Like Bush before him, Obama would rather fail spectacularly on a global scale than admit his failures so far and take fundamental corrective action.
Of course it's not just progressives that Obama is disappointing, but it's convenient to pretend it is so. However, the unemployment rate, the mortgage foreclosure rate, and the state-and-local government layoff-and-shutdown rate are all far too high for that to be true. And it's not just "the professional left" that's being ignored. It's just about everyone outside of K-Street, including veterans.
It's certainly not fair to criticize Obama for not being a Lefty. He wasn't ever a Lefty. He didn't promise to be a Lefty. And there's no reason to expect that he would ever become a Lefty.
But Lefties (like me) who criticize Obama are not criticizing him for failing our Lefty test. Our criticism is that Obama is failing the Obama test: that he is not delivering the presidency that he promised.
When Candidate Obama took on Hilary Clinton, he was quite clear about what he thought about the way Washington works. And he was quite clear about why he was running for President. As he said:
[U]nless we're willing to challenge the broken system in Washington, and stop letting lobbyists use their clout to get their way, nothing else is going to change. And the reason I'm running for president is to challenge that system.
Read it again: "The reason I am running for president is to challenge that system."
....
Obama's strategy as president has not been to "change the way Washington works." Rather, he has pushed reforms in the same old way, with the same old games.
Lessig does a masterful job of pounding this simple point home. But I'd be deeply remiss not to further connect Lessig's point with one made by Chris as culminating point of his post-2004 elction analysis ("Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition"): The key to building an enduring progressive coalition is to unite self-identified liberals with self-identified reformers, whose primary concerns lie with opening up government and making it more accountable. And this is Obama's greatest failure: a failure to deliver on the actual substance of non-partisan openness and good government.
I believe it is possible to break the majority Republican coalition, which is primarily an ideological coalition of conservatives against liberals, and create a majority Democratic coalition that will last for at least two or three decades, by liberalizing / progressivizing the 10-15% of the population that is currently primarily reform minded and non-ideological (and thus has a strong tendency to support major third-party efforts). While it is currently non-ideological, this segment of the population, which has existed in large numbers since at least the 1880's, has an outlook on politics that is far more closely allied with liberalism than conservatism because of its emphasis on reform. It is, to put it one way, latently liberal. This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform. Pulling this off will also require dismantling the Great Backlash narrative of oppressive liberal elites, and replacing it with a narrative about conservatism being a force that relies on pure theory, faith-based worldviews, and that supports status-quo institutions such as corporations and the media.
Ironically, I once thought that Obama's problem was that he was too much this sort of reformer, as opposed to having an economic populist sensibility. And, indeed, I repeatedly pointed out how pairing Obama with John Edwards--the strongest candidate for articulating an economic populist theme--produced far the strongest Democratic ticket in 2008, a ticket that could have conceivably won another five states or so.
Today, while it's as clear as ever that Obama lacks credibility as an economic populist, the real news is that he also lacks credibility as good government reformer as well, despite his ability to talk a truly great game on the campaign trail.
Here's a bit more of how Lessig spelled it out, recalling Obama's campaign rhetoric:
Or again:
[I]f we do not change our politics -- if we do not fundamentally change the way Washington works -- then the problems we've been talking about for the last generation will be the same ones that haunt us for generations to come.
Or again:
But let me be clear -- this isn't just about ending the failed policies of the Bush years; it's about ending the failed system in Washington that produces those policies. For far too long, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, Washington has allowed Wall Street to use lobbyists and campaign contributions to rig the system and get its way, no matter what it costs ordinary Americans.
Or again, as he asked, again and again:
Do we continue to allow lobbyists to veto our progress? Or do we finally put our national interests ahead of the special interests and address the concerns people feel over their jobs, their health care and their children's future?
Or again, as he explained:
We are up against the belief that it's OK for lobbyists to dominate our government -- that they are just part of the system in Washington. But we know that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem, and this election is our chance to say that we're not going to let them stand in our way anymore.
Or perhaps put best:
We need to challenge the system... And if we're not willing to take up that fight, then real change -- change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans -- will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo.
While it's no doubt true that Obama deliberately encouraged a wide range of people to read their hopes into him and his broad-bore promise of "hope" and "change", the examples Lessig cites are clearly typical of themes Obama returned to again and again and again. If he was deliberately vague on a wide range of substantive issues (notwithstanding web-only position papers he could easily walk away from), he repeatedly returned to this promise of sweeping change and unprecedented openness at the proceedural level. This was the substance of his campaign: The promise of opening government up to the people. And that is the promise that has been broken, more than anything else.
It's the promise that was broken when single-payer advocates were excluded from the health care debate, and had to get arrested on TV in order to break through the barriers that Obama had helped construct to keep them out.
It's the promise that was broken when activists pushed to have war crimes investigations of the Bush Administration, and Obama ignored them, despite the priority given in his own issue-selection process.
It's the promise that was broken when Wall Street insiders were given exclusive control over "fixing" the mess that they and their friends had created--and left the rest of America behind.
It's the promise that was broken when parents and educators were excluded from the corporate-oriented "Race to the Top" educational lottery system was used to force money-starved states to fall into lockstep with a neoliberal educational agenda that was nowhere to be found in Obama's campaign speeches.
It's the promise that was broken when veterans who campaigned prominently for Obama grew increasingly frustrated with being frozen out, as the same old unresponsive establishment remained firmly in place.
As Lessig's critique starts to sink in, hopefully progressives will press harder and harder on Obama's failure on this front--not to embarass or humiliate him, but to continue the work of building the coalition that Chris pointed to nearly six years ago, because that coalition of potentiality is what really won the 2008 election, and it's up to us to keep that potential alive, and find ways to manifest it, regardless of how its promise is betrayed and obscured by Obama and Gibbs.
In the long run, Gibbs' fit of hippy-punching may well turn out to be a turning point, the point at which the Obama spell was broken, and people began to reconnect with the emerging promise of a liberal/reform coalition that truly can lead us to a renewal of the promise of America.
STATE BLOGS
