| The first, "Putting the left's Obama "despair" in perspective", by Steve Kornacki, took note of the discontent, and then proceeded to compare it to the discontent faced by other Presidents. I think that Kornacki's studied disregard for the content of the discontent with Obama made his piece a good deal less interesting and insightful than it could have been.
Here'a a main thrust of Karnacki's analysis:
Five of Obama's six immediate predecessors enjoyed at roughly this point in their presidencies what could fairly be described as serious tension with their party's base. The lone exception was George W. Bush, who was shielded from meaningful intraparty dissent by 9/11....
For three recent presidents, this tension ended up having a deleterious long-term impact: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. The good news for Obama is that their examples aren't particularly analogous to his, because Ford, Carter and Bush all faced skeptical and even hostile bases from the start of their presidencies....
As I noted above, the common thread in these examples is that Ford, Carter and Bush were all distrusted by their party's bases before they came to office. The GOP base with Ford and Bush and the Democratic base with Carter had little to no built-in loyalty.
The story is different with the other two recent presidents to encounter early problems with their base. Both Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan came to office with more stable relationships with their bases -- Reagan because he was the embodiment of the GOP base and Clinton because of his knack for straddling his party's fault lines. For different reasons, both of their examples are more analogous to Obama's.
This might be fine as far as it goes, but the problem is that it doesn't go much farther. And, in fact, Clinton did have a problem with his base. His political skill allowed him to survive personally, but his embrace of NAFTA played a key role in bringing about the Democrats' loss of Congress in 1994, as demonstrated by Walter Stone and Ronald Rapoport in Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence. I've written about this myself on several occasions, most extensively, perhaps in "The Perot Pseudo-Realignment--Lessons For Today".
This legacy was, in fact, one reason that many people supported Obama in the primaries: Hillary Clinton was just too closely associated with this past, as was her entourage of advisors. Obama, it was hoped, would not repeat Clinton's mistakes. The fact that he has repeated them in various ways is one of the reasons he's spurred the current debate about him. What's more, he seems to have created the same dynamic that hurt the Democrats so badly in 1994: he's fired up the GOP base, while depressing his own. Like Clinton, he's politically insulated as an individual, since there's no obvious figure for oppositon to coalesce around. But this does not bode well for the party.
The second Salon piece by Ned Resnikoff, is "Does the left even know what 'progressive' means?" The answer, of course, is "no". But Resnikoff only manages to rehearse the obvious points--some of which are misleading at best. He's absolutely right that conservatism is much more clearly defined, and that this is a problem for progressives:
And make no mistake, it is a problem. Part of the strength of the modern conservative movement is its startling clarity of purpose: beneath all of the platitudes about "freedom" and "liberty" is a well-oiled ideology machine that combines reduction of the welfare state (or at least consolidation of it around those who are already well-off), expansion of the national security state, and, although to a lesser extent in recent years, a full-throated endorsement of theocracy. All of these things are bundled together into a worldview as airtight and neatly self-contained as a conspiracy theory or fundamentalist religion in its alright.
Progressives should not envy conservatism for this entirely -- it is important to stay self-reflective, self-critical, and vaguely cognizant of reality. But progressive self-criticism and soul-searching is too often limited to questions of tactics and strategy, when the deeper issue is a seeming inability to articulate progressive first principles. The result is what we have now: a morass of factions and interests that sometimes work in harmony and often don't. A ragtag group that can never seem to find a consistent frame for the policy proposals it puts forth.
I would argue, as I have many times before, that the key difference between the two is that conservatives have been waging hegemonic warfare for the last 30+ years, while progressive have not. (Both concepts are fuzzy, and take on diverse forms, as I've also argued.) Narrative simplicity is both reflective of conservative's antipathy toward complex thinking, and love of simple stories on the one hand, and the tremendous amount of time, energy and money that's been invested in creating a simply narrative framework: simple, but still riddled with contradictions and utterly divorced from the facts.
I could say much, much more about this piece (as I have said much on the topic in the past), but my main purpose in citing it is simply to note that despite its shortcomings it does one thing that's valuable: It reinforces the point that it matters that people are confused about what being a progressive means. And that is why I and others argued in response to Mike that debating over Obama and progressivism was not just a philosophical waste of time, but a vitally important political discussion.
Some Comments Here At Open Left
perdita expressed a very popular complaint that went to the very heart of the matter:
I think it matters
I think it matters whether Obama has progressive values. (I don't think he does.) It matters because it determines how we relate to him, and above all whether we trust him. Right now there are a LOT of progressives who are giving Obama a huge amount of slack because they think he's doing all he can. They're not putting heat on him, and so he gets away with misleading excuses and fake rationalizations. You may say: It shouldn't matter, because people just should fight for the causes they believe in. But people are balancing busy lives and at the end of the day, their degree of trust in Obama does shape their political judgments, choices, and actions.
The issue I follow most closely is GTMO. It's remarkable how many commenters on DKos think Obama is doing all he can in the face of an obstructionist Congress and GOP. It just isn't true. Obama blocked repatriation of the Uighurs to the US, formally authorized indefinite detention without charge or trial, furiously resists habeas corpus petitions on the basis of contrived and disingenuous arguments, resists investigation into the 3 GTMO "suicides," put a blanket ban on releasing nearly 100 Yemeni prisoners (just because they're from Yemen), and is trying to force GTMO detainees back to Algeria, where they face probable torture.
But if you think Obama's a genuine progressive, his heart is in the right place, and he's doing as much as he can, then you're more likely to go easy on him. The result is bad news for our prisoners in GTMO. I think it is the same story in several other policy domains.
I agree with you that we have to "fight him when he is doing wrong," but some assessment of his values is, in fact, inseparable from the determination of when "he is doing wrong."
and david mizner added:
And you could insert a dozen issues in the place
of Gitmo. My guess is that about two percent of Kossacks know that Obama worked furiously to weaken the financial reform package. The frontpagers there won't tell them. Rachel Maddow might but probably won't. We can't accept the pro-Obama mythology or we can, you know, tell the truth.
In his own direct response to Mike, david was sympathetic, but... :
I want to agree with you
Like most everyone else, I'm bored by the endless loop of Obama-centered debate in which few minds are changed and many people are smeared.
But alas, it's important, and it's not really about Obama. It's about what progressivism is, what it should be, and how we should go about pursuing it.
It's easy to say let's stop arguing about Obama, until people claim Obama is the most progressive president since FDR, or that the economy is turning the corner, or that the health care reform package is similar to Social Security, or that a progressive is anyone who makes progress, or that Obama is as progressive as possible given the context, or that progressive critics of Obama are undermining him, or that Obama's bailout of the banks saved the country from a depression, or that Obama is an ally of labor...
We ignore such lies at our peril.
Put another way, it's hard for me to imagine progressives making gains when so many progressives don't understand what progressivism is.
And this takes us right back to Ned Resnikoff's piece in Salon.
There were many more fine comments, but I want to just conclude with one from debcoop, whose been a very important, if oftem behind-the-scenes part of Open Left:
Mike, there is a reason to ask about how really progressive he is
I agree we have to help when he's right, work against his policies when they are wrong, and try to figure out how to move him to the better solutions.
If you don't have a theory of how he really feels in his gut about some things, how important different thinga are to him, if you don't have a theory of why he compromises ahead of time, then you actually are in the dark as to what will really move him.
You need to know how high the hill and how steep the hill in order to climb it to the top.
The public option was a case in point. We all had a theory that if the progressives in Congress held in their pledge to vote against the bill, if it didn;t have a publlic option, that the bill would have a public option. I knew if all the pressure at the end would be on progresives, they couldn't be the last Dems in the way of universal healthcare. I knew it required real leadership from the president to take the pressure off of the House and especially in the Senate. If we didn;t get it, there would be no public option. There was no presidential leadership, because it wasn't important enough to him to go out and fight AHIP, the Hospitals and Big Pharma.
I personally devoted tons of energy and time to that campaign, despite the fact that I thought it would only happen with the president.
It is the role of the progressive community to put together ideas of change, programs of change and to create some pressure - push or pull - for the president go with us. But you really have some sense of whre he is before you start pushing. The problem with the public option is lots of people on the left actually thought he was for it, and so they didn't need to do anything but wait for him to do the right thing.
The progressive community is weaker and less effecitve if those people are not mobilizable because they think that the president, they so happily elected, will do the right thing without a push from the progressive community.
"Incrementalism isn't a different path to the same place, it could be a different path to a different place"
Stoller
In the end, I think that Mike is right about the need to put aside the fruitless aspect of this discussion. He's right that it is time for a new discussion. But that isn't a discussion that ignores fine points of political philosophy, it's one that pays a lot more attention to relating the abstract back to the concrete. If Mike doesn't see the point of discussions we've been having, then surely he is not alone, and it's our job--those of us who've engaged in this discussion--to do a better job of making clear just why it matters... not just to us.
In short, it's time to walk and chew gum at the same time. |
