All I would add is that it would be quite a different matter if Obama routinely complained about others who've given him a great deal more static than we have.
But he does. He complains about the right all the time. There were several examples just this past week or so. We amplify his complaints about the left and dismiss his complaints about the right, but don't confuse our filter with what actually gets said.
Now, Mark did have a point, but so did I--though I didn't articulate it as well as I should have. The important word when I wrote that originally--which for some reason I lost touch with in responding--was "routinely". Obama only occassionally complains about the right, and when he does so, it's usually tied to very specific, objectively verifiable complaints: "They drove the economy into the ditch." His routine is to praise them for God-knows-what reason. And this is the distinction I originally had in mind, which I totally failed to re-articulate in the back-and-forth with Mike.
Fortunately, Paul Krugman posted something on his blog today that helps push this forward:
The Anti-Dog Whistler
So Obama's nominee to head OMB told a Senate panel that deregulation didn't lead to the financial crisis. Urk. I think he may technically be right - it wasn't so much deregulation as the failure to extend regulation to keep up with financial innovation that did it. Still, talk about stepping on the message.
And this gets to a point I've been trying to formulate: while the Obama's political problems are largely due to a lousy economy, it's also true that the administration seems to go out of its way to alienate its supporters.
What I think of is the contrast between how Obama operates and how Bush operated. Bush and his handlers were masters of dog-whistle politics - of conveying to their base, in ways that went under the radar of mainstream media, the message that he was really one of them. The vaguely Biblical language about evildoers, for example, struck most mainstream commentators as being slightly odd, but never mind; what it conveyed to the religious right, however, was the message that Bush was a dominionist at heart.
Obama, however, seems to go out of his way to convey the message that although he rode to office on a wave of progressive enthusiasm, he and his people don't respect the people who got him where he is. There are the gratuitous jabs at the "professional left", the "both sides are wrong" rhetoric even as the right goes all out to destroy him, and stuff like Lew's testimony. I mean, how hard would it be to have a little message discipline here?
In fact, it often seems to me that there's an almost compulsive aspect to the administration's anti-dog whistling. Maybe it comes from hanging out with the political and business establishment, which leads to a desire to seem respectable by dissing the DFHs. But memo to the president: Wall Street will hate you anyway. All you're doing is undermining the enthusiasm of people you need.
Krugman isn't really anywhere close to the heart of problem in any rigorous sense, so far as I'm concerned. The heart of the problem is neo-liberalism itself, and Krugman, for all his plain old-fashioned liberalism that has put him so at odds with Obama, still retains a lot of professional neo-liberalism as an economist (he still doesn't seem to have read Minsky, for example, or at least not in any depth). But Krugman does have a pretty good soft sense of what's wrong, and he's hit on something here that while hardly original is (1) rarely acknowledged by the M$M, and (2) a portal that can lead to much more substantial points.
I've explained it before in terms of Obama & his Third "Third Way" cohort seeking to consolidate an American version of the elite-sustaining conservative welfare state model pioneered by Otto von Bismark, and analytically delineated by Gøsta Esping-Andersen in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. But there's more to it than that, given America's unique place in history as a fading world-dominating power, and Obama's particularly identity and background.
Not least is his 2000 loss to Congressman Bobby Rush. That's where, arguably, Obama clearly learned that he had to be anti-base in order to succeed, since he could never really be one with the base. But he could appear to be, which is where his career headed next--and it hasn't stopped since. Of course, his record of failure as a community organizer provided an important backdrop for all this, but if he had won against Rush (which, of course, was never a realistic possibility), one could at least imagine that he might pursue politics as a means for redeeming those failures.
More likely--given my deep belief in multiple causation and over-determination--I'd say that winning against Rush in 2000 would have lead him in a very similar policy direction, but with a tad less hostility to the base in his makeup, and that relatively small difference just might have been enough to lead to major differences that could have produced a very different outcome from what we now witness. Consider, for example, if he'd had responded to Snowe & Collin's shafting of school kids in the stimulus battle by pulling a Lady Gaga on them, and bringing real heat to bear on them for the complete bogosity of their moderate personas. Just a little bit of that willingness to act in the spirit of the activist base to defend the real interests of the vast middle-class majority would have made him a very different sort of President, and made the Senate a very different place as well.
As it is, I think Obama's loss to Rush merely served to reinforce an entire constellation of other similar or congruent influences, many of them structural, applying to the Democratic Party as a whole. But politics, I believe, like just about any sport, is a game of inches, in which incremental differences can have world-shattering consequences. We may argue all we want about what thos differences may or may not be, but the consequences are quite clear. Obama is not one of us, although he has a significant investment in confusing the matter. And thus, we should have a considerable investment in unconfusing things.
The chief reason that conservative elites empower their base is that the base believes in the worship of authority, so that works out well for the conservative power elites. This isn't at all the case on the left. There is certainly respect for authority, and rational support for institutions and leadership that produce results. But this is far less binding and reliable than what the right has, so elite distrust for the liberal/progressive base is quite "rational" in their own narrow, self-interested terms.
Things are changing now, of course. The failure of conservative elites brought to a head by Bush's many misadventures has produced an opening for fascist-style upwellings that don't submit readily to established conservative elites. And so things are a bit messy right now. But here on the left, the old rules stay pretty much in place, all the moreso with the help of a fresh new face.
