"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
--"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon"
Dylan:
And here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
--"(Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The) Memphis Blues Again"
Buffy:
"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school."
--"After Life," Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
LBJ was a tragic figure. Barack Obama is a farcical one--and the joke's on you if you still don't realize that after his second mass escalation of the war in Afghanistan. As Robert Mann makes powerfully clear in his 2000 book, A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam, Johnson had been traumatized by the Democrat's sweeping losses as a result of the Korean War. The Democrats had held the Senate majority since FDR became President in 1932, and looked like they would hold it forever until Truman was caught flat-footed by the outbreak of the Korean War. Johnson did incredible work first winning back the majority, then engineering a massive landslide victory in 1958. He was petrified of the prospect of doing that again, and determined not to let it happen.. It was a deeply flawed decision--a tragic one--but at least LBJ had the excuse that it hadn't been tried before and found wanting.
Barack Obama has no such excuse. But he's not just repeating LBJ's mistake of trying to have guns and butter at the same time. He's repeatedly made clear that the butter has to go, no matter what. The only question is when. Unlike the GOP, when Obama talks about cutting budget deficits, we have every reason to believe that he's dead serious. Both Social Security and Medicare are in serious peril under Obama, no matter what happens in Afghanistan.
I've always expressed a certain bewilderment about Barack Obama. The things he does just don't make sense if you look at them at all carefully. Or rather, they do make sense--but only if you make rather bizarre assumptions. For example, assume on the one hand that (A) he actually does understand the basics of American political history, he knows that no major, transformational policy ever came from bipartisanship, he understands that he just won a realigning election, (B) he's spent years working within the Democratic Party, and (C) that he wants to utterly destroy the Democratic Party's chance for political dominance over the next 40 years. If you accept those three premises, then the following makes perfect sense.
It was laid out exquisitely by Dday at Hullabaloo on Friday, "The Costs Of Reductive Thinking". In it, he quoted Barack Obama from the Organizing for America strategy session on health care saying:
"So for about the same cost per year as we've been spending over the last five to six years, we could have funded this health care reform proposal, just to give you a sense of perspective."
And himself responding:
I don't know if I was the only one, but my immediate reaction was, "Um, well, why don't you do something about that?" I mean, sure, the costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq and a war headed toward quagmire in Afghanistan could have paid for the front end of health care reform. But they're both still raging, at a time when we have few national security interests in those regions, and certainly nothing that could not be handled with a diplomatic, law enforcement and intelligence approach rather than a military one.
So if the cost of the wars from 2003-2009 could pay for health care, the future costs from 2009-2019 could go a pretty long way in their own right.
It's particularly pernicious to find the President making this argument, when as commander-in-chief he has the ability to draw down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. If he wants to make that kind of comparison, he ought to back it up.
In the diary "Obama, Progressives, and the Question of A Successful Presidency", Robert in Monterey (a historian by training) wrote a comment that I responded to immediately, but felt deserved a good deal more attention than that. Apparently others agreed as well, since it now has 25 "4"s.
First he wrote about the current administration misreading the political landscape, then he wrote about other recent examples of other administrations doing the same, albeit in somewhat different ways. I'm going to reproduce what Robert wrote, and tie it back to my argument in the previous diary about the anomalous nature of the Sixth Party System--but with a bit of a twist, because the origins of this pattern of disconnects starts even earlier. Here's the beginning of Robert's excellent comment:
They've misread the last 8 years
It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Obama and Emanuel have quite fundamentally misread what has happened to American politics the last 8 years (and going back even further, of course). Obama's basic view was that Bush was an irritant - remove him and you remove the cause of the infection in US politics. Without Bush out there sowing division Obama believed he could build a stable center.
Rahm Emanuel's role was to be the force behind that work. For Emanuel, the Obama Administration was an outright restoration. He would pick up right where he left off in 2000, cutting deals of a center-right variety and browbeating a weak progressive bloc into accepting it.
Neither of them have understood how much has changed between 2000 and 2008.
Bush was a symptom, not a cause. The right-wing under Bush became even more entrenched and hostile to anything not conservative and not Republican. They deepened their level of crazy. Obama's belief that he can reach out to these people is stunningly, tragically naive.
Similarly, Emanuel and Obama have not quite grasped how progressives have been changed by 8 years of Bush. We learned that the right-wing is to never be trusted on anything, ever, for any reason.
But we also learned to be extremely sensitive to Democratic efforts to sell us out. The Democratic decision to support the Iraq War initiated dramatic change in the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. We learned to never again let our values be abandoned by our party, and we began 6+ years of organizing work to ensure it would never happen again.
Both Obama and Emanuel seem to believe that we will just quietly fall in line when we are asked to support a compromise that has been drawn up along Republican lines. In doing so they are revealing their immense disconnection from the basic political realities of the day.
That pretty much hits all the high points in the Obama disconnnect. While this precise articulation of the Whitehouse failure is invaluable, I want to boil it down to something simpler in order to stress what I believe it shares in common with other Democratic disconnects: First, it is Washington-centric. Second, it is concerned with governance in the now. It does not comprehend how Washington appears to the public at large, nor does it grasp the nature of organized rightwing opposition, which quite unlike it conceives of politics as an unceasing battle--a battle without rules, except as they may be used as weapons, shields, or instruments of deception.
Tomorrow, America honors the birthday of heroic civil rights activist Martin Luther King. Americans revere King across the political and ethnic spectrum for his wisdom, idealism, courage and practice of non-violent civil disobedience against the forces of racial oppression. Thanks in large part to the trailblazing efforts of King and his followers; America inaugurates its first black president the very next day when Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20th. Yet even as Americans celebrate the historical arc from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama, the scars of racial injustice remain woven into our country's fabric.
Understandably, historians have overlooked the immediate aftermath of King's assassination in a Memphis, Tennessee hotel on April 4th, 1968. The meaning of King's life as well as the tragedy his loss represented has received considerable attention from historians and the body politic. Yet the immediate aftermath of King's death was dwarfed by his iconic life as well as the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the violence that took place during the Democratic National Convention later that year.
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