Assuming all goes as we hope, and Obama is our next President; we have bigger Democratic margins in the House and Senate; it is my belief that Obama will either be huge success or a massive failure (not to put too much pressure on you, big guy). I think our problems are just too big, and the decisions Obama and the Democrats in Congress have to make are just too monumental, for there to be any middle ground. Either Obama's going to come out of this mess looking like he saved the country from disaster, and go down as another FDR or Lincoln, or he's going down in history as the Presidents who preceded FDR and Lincoln and failed- James Buchanan or Herbert Hoover- awash in massive problems they were unable to solve. For the sake of the country, the Democratic Party, and the progressive movement, we'd all better hope it's the former.
The difference will be whether he pushes to be, and succeeds at being, a transformational President, or whether he goes toward what Digby calls neo-Hooverism: that sense that we need to be frugal, cautious, slow, careful, and all other things center-right. Massive problems cannot by solved by halting half-steps, crisis cannot be resolved by too much caution.
I think one of the keys to being a transformational President is to look at solving the big problems together instead of one at a time. I moderated a panel at the Democratic Convention in Denver on the topic of what President Obama's agenda should be (you can watch the video here: scroll down to the "Agenda for the Next American President one on Thursday the 28th). One of the questions I asked the panelists, whom included John Podesta, is what Obama should do first, and John said something very important, something that captures what I believe about the moment we're in now. He said that Obama should not be trying to solve problems one by one- first, get the economy on track, next deal with health care, next with energy, etc.- instead should put together an economic package that makes progress across the board.
I think John's idea of working to solve big problems in a unified fashion makes all the sense in the world. Since you can't really fix the economy without restructuring how we get and use energy, and the way we pay for health care, and the way our tax and regulatory system incentivize bad behavior, it makes sense to begin to do it at the same time.
Now, trying to do this is a big risk. Economic and budget packages that are too ambitious have been known to collapse of their own weight, and taking on the banks, the energy companies, the hedge fund guys, the drug companies, and the deficit hawks all at the same time, which such a transformational package would entail, would be incredibly tough. But I think it's a bigger risk to go slow and try to solve our problems piecemeal, one modest fix at a time. The way the legislative process works is so slow, and the watering down process is so diluting in terms of real impact, that if you did first one thing and then another and then another, it would be a classically dissative process. Momentum would be lost, and the chance to do big transformative things would be lost as well. Meanwhile the problems and crises would keep mounting. That, I believe, would be the path to a failed Presidency.
Some progressives might argue that Obama isn't really a progressive anyway, so why should we care about whether his Presidency fails. I couldn't disagree with that more strongly. Obama, being a Democrat, is going to be perceived by Americans as a representative of the progressive cause. Even if he governs as a centrist or even center-right President, he will still be seen by Republicans and the media as a progressive, and his failure would be seen as a progressive failure. Don't think so? It's happened before, not that long ago: Jimmy Carter was the most conservative Democratic President in the 20th century on economic issues, embracing deregulation and fiscal austerity. But when he failed, Republicans ran for a generation- quite successfully- on attacking the failed liberalism of Carter.
The two failed Presidencies I mentioned at the beginning of this post- Buchanan and Hoover- were both conservatives. The Presidents who succeeded them ran cautious, vaguely center-left campaigns, and weren't certain how hard to push bold policies as they began their Presidencies. But huge problems and strong progressive movements (the abolitionists in Lincoln's case and the labor movement in FDR's) made them think big and be bold in solving the problems of the day. They became the two greatest and most transformative Presidents in American history. In their success, they both preserved the country and dramatically changed the future for the better. Let us hope that Barack Obama, in another moment of profound crisis, will be the same kind of President.
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