You've been through all of F. Fitzgerald's James Baldwin's books
You're very well read, it's well known.
But something is happening here, and you don't know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?
President Obama is not a psychopath, unlike George Bush. And yet he seems to sleepwalk like one. There is a profound disconnect between the man he hints at being around the edges--the man he pretended to be during the campaign--and the things he does day in, day out. Friday, George Lakoff posted a diary that's most illuminating, both for what it accurately says, and for what it mistakenly assumes about Obama. The title, "Obama's Missing Moral Narrative", is spot on. So, too is the basic message: that Obama needs to fiercely embrace the moral narrative that he seemed to invoke when he was a candidate. But having so sagely diagnosed the what of Obama's failing, I'm afraid that Lakoff has unfortunately mis-dignosed the why.
David Kaib did a quick hit on Lakoff's diay, and commentator Vlaszlo linked to a May 2008 piece by Adolph Reed (black activist academic) in the Progressive magazine, arguing that Obama's always been a neo-liberal, rather than a progressive, at least since he began running for office. This rings increasingly true for me. The longer I see him in action, the harder it is for me to believe his post-election actions are anything but expressions of his "true self", even if there is also a piece of his true self that doesn't quit fit and that spills over sometimes.
Lakoff's piece starts slowly with some obvious, but sharply accurate observations:
Barack Obama may be one of the best communicators of this generation, but he is not living up to his own talents. In a year of disasters, communication failure doubles the disasters.
If, as he says, the monster spill was his highest priority from Day 1, he needed to communicate that from Day 1 - or at least Day 3 or 4. It took five weeks for him to tell the nation what he and his administration were doing.
The result was visible in the press conference yesterday. He was on the defensive. He needed to be on the offensive - from early on. The choice is not doing or communicating. It is doing and communicating.
His narrative: This is a tough, unprecedented situation, but I'm in charge, and I've been very busy, in the Situation Room where I belong, not on tv. I'm fully competent. I'm a good policy wonk - ask me any question about details. I'm honest. I admit my few policy mistakes. I think about the details day and night. Don't think I'm oblivious.
It's defensive, trying to overcome criticism that should never have been allowed to accumulate. But worse, it's weak when it needs to be strong.
The president did do the required minimum. He placed a moratorium on offshore drilling and cancelled oil leases in the Gulf and off Virginia. He appointed a commission to make safety recommendations. And he is reorganizing the Mining Management Service. All to the good, but ...
In the above, Lakoff has very precisely pegged Obama's cautious neo-liberal modus operandi. He then really hits his stride with the following:
On Monday, Chris wrote a diary responding to a piece at Think Progress, wherein Jamelle Bouie singled me out as a stand-in for all progressives who "understate or dismiss most of the work Congress and President Obama have done over the past sixteen months". I've got a much longer piece I started writing during the week, digging down into what I regard as the bowels of argument that I'm making--which Bouie seems utterly ignorant of. But before doing that, I want to put up a quick diary to take on the broader notion that progressives in general who are critical of Obama have something to be ashamed of.
The reality is exactly the reverse. It's those who are trying to defend Obama who have nothing substantive or substantial to say. After 16 months it's still a matter of hope in "change we can believe in" that is nowhere to be seen, except as a result of enormous pressure, as with DADT, which only has massive landslide support among the general public.
In the comments to Bouie's piece, for example, one commentator wrote the following:
Wow. If I had more time, I'd parse every dim-witted remark in this post, but let's start with this one:
The Affordable Care Act will provide health insurance to 32 million Americans, protect the insurance of millions more, and eventually guarantee health insurance to every American regardless of employment status.
Yes, that's the Party Line, eh? But what this pseudo-reform does is provide Americans with a mandate to buy ever more expensive, crap insurance from for-profit companies. For each and every "reform" there is a set of loopholes which makes those "reforms" in name only. But you know that, don't you?
More generally, there is a very long list of ways in which the Obama Administration has not only defended the Bush Agenda, they're expanding on it.
* Has let the War Criminals escape prosecution. Has expanded on legalizing those same war crimes to his own administration. Indeed, they're even increasingly privatizing those war crimes to corporations.
* We're still kidnapping and torturing innocent people. See Horton's piece on Bagram's black prison site.
* The administration is arguing in court that "evidence" gained through torture is perfectly OK. Add in attacks on habeus corpus, the 4th and 5th Amendments. This list could be very, very long indeed.
* Has actively argued against every single amendment to the FinReg bill that would do any good in terms of actual reform. Ergo: they're in the hip pocket of Wall Street, very much at odds with the Public and National Interests. How very "liberal!"
Salon's front-page subhead for Glenn Greenwalds's mid-week post after the underpants bomb scare, "Craving melodrama", put it perfectly:
The calls for Obama to act with more hysteria and panic every time Al Qaeda sneezes are just plain stupid
The immediate tactical purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. And every government everywhere in the world understands this. Responsible governments therefore act to minimize the spread of fear and panic. This is the only play that counters the terrorists' intent. Only governments who welcome expanded control over a frightened citizenry fan the flames of fear that the terrorists set. Such governments are in de facto collusion with the terrorists who attack their citizens, whether consciously or not.
So, tactically, Obama understands how to combat terrorism and is interested in doing so, while the GOP, still following the Bush/Cheney line, continues colluding with the terrorists, consciously or not.
Unfortunately, that's as far as it goes. Strategically, there is virtually no difference between Obama and the GOP. And that's why we're in big, big trouble.
If the immediate tactical purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, the strategic purpose is to initiate a cycle of attacks and disproportionate responses that increasingly angers the terrorists' intended constituency significantly more than the attacks themselves, gradually moving them from near-pariah status to the political vanguard. This is precisely what al Qaeda has done, first with modest success under Clinton, then with spectacular success under Bush, and now apparently with just as much success under Obama.
On Friday, vastly overshadowed by the push for "health care reform", Obama announced his plans for "education reform," dubbed "Race To The Top". In it's coverage, the Boston Globe was depressingly typical of the shoddy reporting around education that greases the wheels for this travesty.
The "Race to the Top" initiative is designed to identify new, effective ways to teach, reward states for innovation, and give state authorities a chance to patch rapidly widening holes in education budgets.
It also spurs states to voluntarily make sweeping reforms the administration wants - including linking teacher pay to how well students do on tests, and expanding the role of charter schools in public education.
"This competition will not be based on politics, ideology, or the preferences of a particular interest group," Obama said, flanked by Education Secretary Arne Duncan at an afternoon press conference in the Department of Education headquarters. "Instead, it will be based on a simple principle - whether a state is ready to do what works."
Of course, as I blogged recently, there's no evidence that charter schools "work"--they do not differ dramatically in performance, but rather slightly underperform standard public schools. Nor is there any substantial research showing that merit pay tied to test scores is an effective way to improve educational outcomes. Thus, Obama's competition is based entirely on ideology--an ideology that is primarily about shifting control of education as far out of the classrooms and into America's boardrooms as possible.
In fact, Obama is stabbing his union allies in the back:
