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A couple of articles on Obama appeared this week that deserve to be taken very seriously in terms of gauging the newly visible weakness of his politics. Although I have serious disagreements with some details of both of them, their main thrusts are both accurate, they complement one another, and though they reinforce arguments from the left, they are primarily grounded in the very same tradition of pragmatism that Obama himself tries to lay claim to.
The first, by Michael Lind at Salon, concerns Obama's cult-like faith in neoliberalim, asking, "Can Obama be deprogrammed?". Given the multiple crises we now face that all have substantial economic components-economic recovery, health care reform, global warming-as well as the historical centrality of economic policy in American politics, it's far to consider this the single most important policy fundamental one could focus on. Lind points out tellingly that that neoliberalism hasn't delivered in the past, except in terms of transitory illusions, and can't be expected to deliver now. This contrasts dramatically with the success of New Deal liberalism, Lind point out, which may need updating, but remains much sounder in its fundamentals than neoliberalism ever dreamed of being.
The second, by David Bromwich at Huffington Post, (highlighted by David Mizner in a quick hit) strikes deeply at the question of Obama's process, under the potentially misleading title, "The Character of Barack Obama".For Bromwich is not writing about character so much as he's writing about political process, bringing together matters of temperament, judgment and political philosophy. These are all things that others have raised before-present company included-but Bromwich has fit them together in a way that seems more than the sum of its parts, even as it says almost nothing about the substance of Obama's challenges or policies.
While Versailles might claim that Lind is arguing from the left, two points would dispute that interpretation. First, solid supermajorities of the American people support the welfare state spending that's a prime legacy of the New Deal policies he champions. Second, Lind's argument is empirically driven by looking at realworld performance that ideology-driven neoliberals simply refuse to deal with. Thus, it's much more accurate to situate Lind at what could be called the "deep center". Meanwhile, Bromwhich's criticism is simply far too process-focused to sustain any sort of ideological labeling. Both, in short, could well be embraced by a substantial majority of the American people-as many or more as voted for Obama in the first place.
To be sure, as a leftist, I would take them considerably further. But they are sufficiently free of the narrow-minded ideological fetters of Versailles that I'm quite happy to support them both as a reasonable starting point for actually undoing the damage that Obama was elected to clean up. What stands in the way of this is quite simple: the political establishment culture (aka Versailles) and Obama's bizarrely deferential attitude toward it.
Because Lind's thesis is more fully understandable from the brief description already given, I'll begin my discussion with Bromwhich in this first installment, before returning to Lind for a closer look in part two.
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