The year of Obama

Yesterday was xpostfactoid's first birthday (discounting a couple of false starts). It's been an attempt, as the bio at right suggests, to fathom "how democracy works, how it malfunctions and self-corrects." Self-corrects is the operative word: the capacity to "throw the bums out" is what gives governance in functioning democracies the crooked straightness of a good walking stick.

About ten years ago, while reading a Stephen Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, it occurred to me that the electorate is smarter than I am -- in fact, smarter than any of us. A lifelong Democrat, I realized that the country would not be better off if Democrats always won. Eisenhower, notwithstanding the immoral and destructive coups he authorized in Iran and Guatemala and his abdication on civil rights, was a prudent steward, an able cold warrior, and a constant brake on the military-industrial complex he decried at the end of his tenure. Reagan too has my respect, though I loathe much of what he did to the Federal government's capacity to protect and further social welfare. He did not "win the Cold War," but he did engage Gorbachev with just the right progression from toughness to negotiation to trust. He stepped back and let the Soviet Union unravel itself, providing the right incentives for glasnost and the unwinding of empire.

I had some family evidence of the way democracy works. My paternal grandparents, lifelong Democrats, voted for Reagan in 1980. My father couldn't bring himself to do it, but he voted for John Anderson. Carter's was a failed presidency. Americans recognized it, as they've now recognized Bush's failure. A little late for my taste, but there were reasons for that, beginning with Monica Lewinsky, running through a kink in the Constitution (Nov. 2000), a national trauma (9/11) and a bonding over the year following with a wartime president that was almost but not quite undone by his folly in Iraq.

At the same time, I've wondered through the Bush years whether American democracy retains and will continue to retain the capacity for self-correction. Given the horrendous governance of the Bush team, it's been possible to imagine that a combination of curbs on civil liberties, deregulation, lobbyist empowerment, gerrymandering, media degeneration and advanced political marketing could eventually foreclose the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power -- a truly contested election. 2006 provided major reassurance. Democracy in America is not dead yet. But I still think it's on the endangered list.

The greatest danger to American democracy is the Bush Administration's assault on civil liberties. We've barely noticed, but the Bill of Rights has been gutted. The Administration has successfully asserted the right to deem anyone it wishes an "enemy combatant," hold such people indefinitely, and torture them at will. This has been done to American citizens. Just this week, meanwhile, we learned that peaceful protestors against the death penalty were classified as terrorists by the Maryland State Police. Americans have largely accepted and even embraced this disinheritance. Only a bare majority tells pollsters that torture is wrong--a smaller majority than in any developed democracy, smaller even than in China. This past primary season, the Republican candidates for President were vying do outdo each other in their fervent support of torture and suspension of habeas. McCain, the best of that lot on this crucial front, betrayed his own prior opposition to torture, first by agreeing to loopholes in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, then by voting against a provision that would have ended the CIA's exemption from the prohibition against torture in the armed services.

As of now, the executive branch of the federal government can assert absolute control over the corpus of anyone it wants. Habent corpus - they have the body. If we don't change course, the executive may widen the scope of those over whom it asserts such control at any time -- say, after the next major terrorist attack. McCain will not roll back executive power. It's not even certain that Obama will do it. On this front he's right: it's not about him, it's about us. Lovers of liberty will have to be ready on day 1 to hold his feet to the fire.

Despite these dangers, and all the viciousness of various phases of the presidential campaign, this election season has also been a time of tremendous hope. For me, the (first) year of xpostfactoid will forever be the Year of Obama. I have wrestled with "naivetephobia" -- the fear of looking foolish, and later recognizing the folly, of buying into a presidential candidate's calls for renewal embodied in...himself ("it's not about me, it's about you," is at best a paradox). But Obama is right on this point: we have had great leaders before at times of great peril. We have made great changes -- abolishing slavery, building the core citizen protections of the New Deal, enacting civil rights legislation and making it stick.

For those of us who have dared (sorry!) to hope for great things from Obama, the Lincoln parallel is the great repressed reference point. The New Yorker, in an extraordinary endorsement essay, obliquely invoked this charged analogy:

Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

Like Lincoln, Obama rose to national prominence by sheer force of intellect as evidenced in speeches. Exactly contrary to what his critics claim, his speeches are effective not because of soaring empty rhetoric but because his calls for renewal are underpinned by a clearly articulated reading of American history and an equally explicit enumeration of the priorities that his policy proposals are designed to advance.

Those priorities are to restore "fairness" in our tax code, roll back rising income inequality, and revive effective regulation; to invest in projects essential to prosperity in the next century (alternative energy, universal healthcare, education); to reduce the power of lobbyists and change the tenor of political discourse; to recenter our antiterror efforts on Afghanistan/Pakistan; and to re-establish diplomatic engagement and nonmilitary aid as pillars of our foreign policy. He spells them out repeatedly, and he has won over what looks to be a majority of Americans with this multi-pronged pitch. That's not to say that Obama's campaign is free of hokum and pandering. But the outlines of what he aims to accomplish are clear.

If this blog has any value, it's mainly in the year-long attempt to listen to Obama, to highlight the internal logic of his metapolitics, his foreign policy, his economics, and his political strategy. If he wins and is immediately whipsawed by events, if he proves as feckless as Carter or as slippery as Clinton, the blog will serve to remind only myself (who else will read back?) of my own folly. If he does indeed prove to be a transformational president, an instrument of democratic self-correction and American renewal, I'll be proud to have tuned in early.

"So what is Obamaism?"

In his recent Obama and the Death of Clintonism, Slate's John Dickerson notes that a major part of the Clintons' pain is that Obama ran against Clintonism, equating the Clintons' "triangulation and poll-driven" politics with a broken system that needs to be reformed. Having sketched out the critique, Dickerson asks, fairly enough:

So what will Obamaism (or is it Obamology?) look like now that the Democratic Party is his to shape? There are a few specific, if not overarching, data points. As an antidote to the secrecy of Clinton's 1994 health care plan, Obama has promised his health care negotiations will be on C-SPAN for all to behold. When Hillary Clinton offered a gas-tax holiday, Obama argued against it, framing the plan as vintage Clintonism—a small meaningless sop confected only for political advantage. He said that if elected, it was just this kind of nonsense he'd avoid.

These are only hints, though. The larger promise of Obama's truth-telling has still not arrived.

So what is Obamaism? Today, Obama gave a big piece of the answer. Assuming effective control over the Democratic National Committee, he announced that the DNC, like his own campaign, will not accept contributions from lobbyists. He's thus reasserted the core premise of his campaign: "we need to do more than turn the page on the failed Bush-Cheney policies; we have to turn the page on the politics that helped make those policies possible."

In a nomination fight marked by broad agreement over policy, Obama ran what was to a large extent a meta-campaign, focused less on what policies to pursue than on how to get them enacted -- in fact, on how to create a political process in which legislation would not be destroyed in the making. The single most important step is to weaken the grip of lobbyists on legislation. His March 27 Cooper Union speech on the housing crisis contributed what amounted to an extended case study to this pitch for process reform. Acknowledging, pace his famous assertion that Republicans were the party of ideas for a period, that there was a real need for bank deregulation in the 1990s, he asserted that a broken political system distorted reform:

Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one – aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight. In doing so, we encouraged a winner take all, anything goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy.

That's a fully rounded argument: a corrupt legislative process helped to widen the wealth gap and created an unsustainable bubble economy. The metapolitics here creates a framework that moves the political center to the left: redistributing wealth and risk becomes a matter of restoring simple fairness, without which economic growth is unsustainable. In one of his most memorable formulations of the campaign, Obama asserted in this speech, "What was bad for Main Street was bad for Wall Street. Pain trickled up (my emphasis).

So, lobbying reform is really the centerpiece of the "Obamaism" Dickerson seeks. A key corollary is the fund-raising revolution that Obama has already executed. Without it, unilateral disarmament on the lobbying front would be political suicide. Raising $40 million in a month from small donations holds tremendous promise to change the foundations of power in the U.S.

Another element of Obama's metapolitics on which he's already in large part delivered is his promise to elevate political discourse -- that is, to tell the truth and avoid the politics of personal destruction. Obama's handling of the Clintons' withering attacks showcased this 'new kind of politics.' Repeatedly, when Hillary was hellacious, Obama was gracious -- praising her as a formidable opponent, affirming her right to stay in the race, dismissing the import of her RFK comment (after his campaign lit a one-match fire with their terse and more than justified "no place in this campaign" statement) -- all the while maintaining his attack on Clintonian triangulation and distortion.

In themselves, these procedural reforms do not tell us whether Obama can find a wy to pass landmark legislation. Here's how Dickerson describes Obama's proposed alternative to Clintonism:

The Clinton people call building a majority tailoring your convictions to appeal to particular blocs you need to win—independent voters, or the soccer moms of yore, or blue-collar white men. Obama critics decry this as a triangulation-ready watering down of principle. The alternative approach is to boldly state your convictions and convince people to move to your point of view.

It's true, Obama has basically proposed to build what he's called a "working majority" by sheer communicative force -- and by seizing a moment when the country seems ready for a democratic agenda (Obamaism?), as he's said the country was once ready for Reaganism. That's a tall order, and in some ways success seems less likely now than in January and February, when much of the country fell under Obama's rhetorical spell. But Obama was also right when he said back in January, in what now feels like electoral prehistory:

And, you know, so the truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

Lincoln had that power. Roosevelt had it. Maybe Kennedy had it, though he died before its promise could be enacted. In some measure, Reagan had it. Obama is asking us to believe that he has it, and that the country has the power to respond. As he never tires of reminding us, it's not as if the country has never embarked deliberately on constructive, transformative change before.

58 minutes later: the good part of Hillary's SD interview

An irony of Hillary's assassination gaffe is that she was at her very best (notwithstanding that on the tape she looks ready to drop) throughout the rest of a substantive, wide-ranging discussion with the Argus Leader. From Native American policy to the varieties of potential ethanol sources to western water policy, she was Clintonian in her mastery of policy detail. You can understand why she thinks she's 'ready' to be President. If it weren't for her long sequence of duplicitous, predatory, Rovian tactics and comments, I would agree.

In fact the interview contained a Clintonian answer to Obama's metapolitics - his pitch that we've got to change the way our political system functions before we can enact good policy. Obama's argument is that the U.S. government can't put the common good first as long as lobbyists control legislation, and that we can't have serious policy debates until we break through the Rovian politics of personal destruction and distorting attacks. In this debate, Hillary said that we can't engage in serious long-range planning and policy-making until we change the mindset bequeathed us by Ronald Reagan -- that government can't solve anything, that the business of government is to shrink and undermine itself.

The two diagnoses are related. The anti-government stance goes with a messianic faith in the marketplace, a belief that business unleashed and unregulated will create the wealth that government only inhibits. Those holding that belief system naturally enough opened the lobbying floodgates. Not that there wasn't plenty of corruption and interest-driven legislation in the long era of Democratic control of Congress -- but it metastasized with the advent of the Gingrich-Delay crowd and their K Street Project, and it took over the executive branch in the Bush era. So Obama and Clinton are both right. The antigov mindset created a system in which legislation is for sale and political 'debate' becomes a cover for positions essentially dictated by lobbyists.

Robert Reich, in Supercapitalism, suggests that it's the hyper-competition of global capitalism that created the pressures that brought this system into being. Reaganite antigovernment ideology, from that point of view, is more result than cause. Reich has few answers as to how citizens and politicians can take the government back. Hillary's answer is reverse engineering: get a mandate for the right policies, and the attitude toward government will change. Obama's approach is a frontal assault: remain personally free from lobbyist money, get a mandate to write legislation to reign in lobbyist influence, change political discourse by personal example. Will either (or any of their successors) get anywhere? It may seem naive to say yes. But there have been periods, as both like to say, in which the U.S. government has risen to enormous challenges and successfully engaged in long-range planning. Democracy's saving grace, as long as there's a critical mass of power remaining with voters to throw one crowd out and bring new people in, is self-correction. We're in the midst of an attempted course correction. We'd better get there.

Pause, refresh: Obama's core case against Clinton

After several weeks' full immersion in what Obama calls the "silly season" of our politics, it's clarifying to look afresh at the core of Obama's case for himself rather than Clinton. Here's how he put it on April 22 in Evansville, Indiana, after congratulating Clinton on her win in the PA primary:

We can be a party that says there's no problem with taking money from Washington lobbyists - from oil lobbyists and drug lobbyists and insurance lobbyists. We can pretend that they represent real Americans and look the other way when they use their money and influence to stop us from reforming health care or investing in renewable energy for yet another four years.

Or this time, we can recognize that you can't be the champion of working Americans if you're funded by the lobbyists who drown out their voices. We can do what we've done in this campaign, and say that we won't take a dime of their money. We can do what I did in Illinois, and in Washington, and bring both parties together to rein in their power so we can take our government back. It's our choice.

We can be a party that thinks the only way to look tough on national security is to talk, and act, and vote like George Bush and John McCain. We can use fear as a tactic, and the threat of terrorism to scare up votes.

Or we can decide that real strength is asking the tough questions before we send our troops to fight. We can see the threats we face for what they are - a call to rally all Americans and all the world against the common challenges of the 21st century - terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That's what it takes to keep us safe in the world. That's the real legacy of Roosevelt and Kennedy and Truman.

We can be a party that says and does whatever it takes to win the next election. We can calculate and poll-test our positions and tell everyone exactly what they want to hear.

Or we can be the party that doesn't just focus on how to win but why we should. We can tell everyone what they need to hear about the challenges we face. We can seek to regain not just an office, but the trust of the American people that their leaders in Washington will tell them the truth. That's the choice in this election.

Three interlocking points here. First, metapolitics: we can't change our policies until we change our political process. On one level, "Washington is broken, we need an outsider" is the oldest schtick in our politics. But Obama has done something about it, almost singlehandedly. He's refused lobbyist money, and pac money, and opened the floodgates of small donations. He's changed political funding forever. We tend to forget what a tremendous accomplishment this is. His argument is simple: change the money flow, and you'll change our politics. Why should we believe he can do this? Because he's accomplished part one already.

The second point is also simple, but true: I opposed this war from the start. I offer a clean contrast with McCain. Clinton can reduce this difference to "a speech he gave in 2002," but the fact is that Obama spoke out repeatedly against the war from October 2002 through to the day of invasion, March 20, 2003, and beyond. And the contrast has bite because there's resonance to the charge that Hillary supported the war primarily to preserve her own political viability. Why else would she neglect to read the NIE before voting to authorize force? Why else would she rally round in early 2003 when Bush "rushed to war" precisely as she warned him against doing in her Oct 10, 2002 speech supporting the resolution authorizing force?

Finally, there's the "truthiness"argument, which Obama grafted onto his "change our politics" argument back in January, when he first started calling the Clintons out for distorting his record -- and suggesting that these Rovian tactics undermine voter trust. Here's how he put it in the Jan. 22 CNN debate:

there's a set of assertions made by Senator Clinton, as well as her husband, that are not factually accurate. And I think that part of what the people are looking for right now is somebody who's going to solve problems and not resort to the same typical politics that we've seen in Washington...the larger reason that I think this debate is important is because we do have to trust our leaders and what they say. That is important, because if we can't, then we're not going to be able to mobilize the American people behind bringing about changes in health care reform, bringing about changes in how we're going to put people back to work, changing our trade laws. And consistency matters. Truthfulness during campaigns makes a difference.

In yesterday's Washington Post, Clinton's new chief strategist Geoff Garin tried to cast this three-pronged critique, which Obama has stuck to and sharpened for months, as a character attack. What it is in truth is a penetrating critique of Clinton's campaign and of her decisions and actions while in office. The attack is on "character" only insofar as Clinton's campaign and tenure in office express her character. Obama never suggests that Clinton is a bad person. He does argue explicitly that she is enmeshed in those elements of the political process he's trying to change. The attack also remains in bounds -- not violating Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment -- because Obama states repeatedly that Clinton will make a far better President than McCain (or Bush).

There may be 80% overlap in Obama and Clinton's written policy proposals. But the differences outlined above are real, and they're fundamental. The Obama campaign remains on focus.

Related posts:
Obama endorses Hillary!
Changing 'the rules' on Clinton
Debunked! Obama spanks the Clinton Kids again
Truth and Transformation
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him
Obama: Man, those Clinton Kids are Something