Open Left

Obama's Biggest Failure
by Eli Zaretsky on May 28th, 2010

"Imagine a woman who has been in an abusive marriage for so long that she no longer knows that she is in one. Her husband defines the world for her. She is on her knees all the time, anticipating his wishes, giving him what ever she has, telling him what he wants to hear, working overtime to please him. Her world is grey, depressing, anxiety-ridden and dark. She has forgotten the dreams of her childhood, and she doesn't know there is an alternative."

"One day she meets someone who offers hope - a minister, a rabbi, a therapist, a friend. Suddenly everything brightens and it seems that she can find a way out. She will leave her husband, or transform the relationship. One way or another she will regain her sense of self. But then it doesn't happen. The person who was expected to help her tells her that there isn't much that can be done, and besides he or she has already done so very much for her. That's the way the world is, she is told. You can't really change things that much."

"The American people today, a year and a half after electing Obama, are in the position of this woman. A concentrated claque of banks, insurance companies, corporations, and the Pentagon dominates their entire world. For two thirds of a century, after winning their great victory in World War Two, they have known nothing but war. They have been told, and they believe, that they live in a world overgrown with enemies of their "interests," meaning the interests of their rulers. For most of that time, the enemy was an ill-defined "communist conspiracy," a catch-all phrase that included anti-colonial nationalists, pan-Arabs, Latin American state-builders, and simply those who criticized America. Today there is scarcely a nation in the world in which they have not placed land mines, barbed wire, tanks, and stands of explosives; there is no sea they have not polluted with blustering, oil-dripping ships; no quartile of near space is not surfeited with their satellites; no half-formed nation they have not transformed into their serf."

"Domestically, they live in the same fear. Their government has no sovereignty over the great economic interests that rule them. It can only survive by attracting private investors. Oil has been gushing for over five weeks now in the Gulf of Mexico, destroying plant-life, fish, waterways, beaches, islands, cultures, many industries, whole ecosystems. The government cannot do anything; it has to wait on the people who caused the oil-spill in the first place. This is not unusual. Last winter a major flu epidemic was expected but the government had no vaccine. "The drug companies promised they would have it," whined David Axelrod. Fortunately, the epidemic didn't materialize. This time."

"When the banks get into trouble, the government doesn't use the occasion to strengthen its hand in its relation to them. On the contrary, it makes them all the more powerful. In 1932, Herbert Hoover did everything he could to get Franklin Roosevelt to agree to his policies but Roosevelt insisted that his administration would have its own policies. This was no problem in 2008: the hand-off from Bush to Obama was flawless. Obama appointed Hank Paulsen's assistant, Timothy Geithner, as Secretary of the Treasury just as he reappointed Robert Gates as Secretary of what is misleadingly called Defense."

"Once the country had a tradition of civil liberties that was the envy of the world; today it holds people without trial, tortures (albeit through rendition), and has a President who can order someone killed for what this person says. Once the country had a tradition of independent intellectuals, instinctively mistrustful of both business and the military, who provided a critical alternative to the government's super-powerful propaganda apparatus. Today Paul Krugman and David Leonhardt tell us that this government is going to lessen inequality, whereas the opposite is certainly going to be the case."

"To show how unconscious reasoning works, Freud once told the story of a man who returns a borrowed pot with a hole in it. "I put the hole there to help hold the pot," he explains, "besides I had nothing to do with the hole, it was there when I borrowed the pot." The Obama administration reasons similarly. Look at how much I am doing for you, it proclaims: more laws passed than in the Great Depression, a new Lincoln, I, a new Roosevelt. But, Oh, you have to realize, nothing can really be done. You hoped for too much; expectations were too high. It's the system. Its Washington, It's not my fault that so little has been done."

"This then is Obama's great failure. It is not that he has failed to lead the country in a new direction. It is that he has not tried. He awakened hopes that he had no idea how to fulfill, and, even more, no intention of fulfilling. He remains the thief of hope. And like the Gulf of Mexico, the United States will be a long time recovering from the massive oil swill of an administration whose essential message is that very little can actually be done, and besides it will be doing that little: it will be cutting entitlements."