The tribute Obama deserves

has been delivered by Jonathan Chait:

What can be said without equivocation is that Obama has proven himself morally, intellectually, temperamentally, and strategically. In my lifetime, or my parents’, he is easily the best president. On his own terms, and not merely as a contrast to an unacceptable alternative, he overwhelmingly deserves reelection.

Chait understands that true pragmatism is the rarest and most powerful lever of leadership:

Obama’s résumé of accomplishments is broad and deep, running the gamut from economic to social to foreign policy. The general thrust of his reforms, especially in economic policy, has been a combination of politically radical and ideologically moderate. The combination has confused liberals into thinking of Obamaism as a series of sad half-measures, and conservatives to deem it socialism, but the truth is neither. Obama’s agenda has generally hewed to the consensus of mainstream economists and policy experts. What makes the agenda radical is that, historically, vast realms of policy had been shaped by special interests for their own benefit. Plans to rationalize those things, to write laws that make sense, molder on think-tank shelves for years, even generations. They are often boring. But then Obama, in a frenetic burst of activity, made many of them happen all at once.

It's not about him

George Packer's blog posts are relatively rare, and I always look forward to them.  He usually brings new information and a deeply informed perspective both to international affairs and to domestic politics. But I think he's simply off his rocker about Obama in his latest:

His campaign was based on the man more than any set of ideas or clear vision of the future. Everyone knew what Reaganism stood for. No one knows what Obamaism means, which has allowed his enemies to fill in the blank.

That is complete malarky.  No one ever campaigned on a set of policy proposals more coherently situated in a conceptual framework than Obama did. He laid that framework out in speech after speech after speech, not to say in The Audacity of Hope. When I get my hands on the book this evening, I will fill in an early manifesto here.

"Obamaism" is liberalism on a diet, with programs subject to outcomes assessment, undertaken with awareness that overtaxation kills the golden goose, and biased toward creating the right incentives, as in the Race to the Top education program. It's mainstream  liberalism chastised by Reaganism: government as part of the solution but aware of its limitations and the law of unintended consequences. It is a liberalism that, thus chastened, bids to move a commitment to shared prosperity back to center of American politics:

But through hard times and good, great challenge and great change, the promise of Janesville has been the promise of America - that our prosperity can and must be the tide that lifts every boat; that we rise or fall as one nation; that our economy is strongest when our middle-class grows and opportunity is spread as widely as possible. And when it's not - when opportunity is uneven or unequal - it is our responsibility to restore balance, and fairness, and keep that promise alive for the next generation. That is the responsibility we face right now, and that is the responsibility I intend to meet as President of the United States (Janesville, WI, Feb. 13, 2008). 

Obamaism focuses on long-range foundations of economic growth: improved education, renewable energy sources, a repaired safety net, control of healthcare costs, a rollback of the growing income inequality of the past 30 years. (Perhaps it's that long view that hurting him now. People know what he stands for; not enough yet trust that what he and the Democrats deliver will help them.) Here, for example, is Obama laying out his economic program in February 2009 (after outlining what went wrong in the runup to financial crisis):

We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.

It's a foundation built upon five pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another American century: new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation; new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and industries; new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations. That is the new foundation we must build. That must be our future – and my Administration's policies are designed to achieve that future.

While "New Foundation" has been largely written off as anodyne politispeak, the chosen metaphor is in sync with Obama's propensity toward thinking long-term and thinking big: changing the trajectory, moving the battleship by degrees. In the campaign, Obama stressed the results he would pursue.  As President, starting from the deep hole of a hellacious recession and pleading for patience, he has often stressed process:

The Faith-based initiative is absolut Obama

Obama's recent call to expand and renew George W. Bush's government outreach to faith-based charities has been widely denounced as one of several expedient quick-steps to the center.

Unlike his stark reversal on FISA legislation, Obama's faith initiative is consistent with longstanding tenets of Obama's thinking -- or, if you want to be cynical about it, of his positioning. His speech in Zanesville Ohio introducing this plan touched several interlocking core Obama themes.

Let me say at the outset that the conceptual coherence outlined below does not by any means prove that religious organizations can effectively abide by the ground rules Obama sketches out in this speech, or that government money can be effectively deployed by funding religious charity. My point is simply that the thinking behind the initiative is absolut Obama, not some sudden departure. Here are the Obamaist elements:

1. unity and universalism: Obama burst on the national scene at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 with a lyrical assertion that what unites Americans is stronger than what divides them. He said then: "It is that fundamental belief -- that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper -- that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family." The claim to unity is cast in religious terms -- but religious on his terms, which in their ethical dimension are universal. While Obama professes and encourages personal and particular religious belief and expression, in the public square he insists on a kind of ethical Unitarianism. Here's how he put it in the Audacity of Hope (p. 219):

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason.

In Zanesville, Obama called for this universalism to play itself out in social action:

I'm not saying that faith-based groups are an alternative to government or secular nonprofits. And I'm not saying that they're somehow better at lifting people up. What I'm saying is that we all have to work together – Christian and Jew, Hindu and Muslim; believer and non-believer alike – to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Obama would have us believe that the differences between religious groups can be subsumed in their work toward goals on which all can agree. Whether they can do so without imposing their particular beliefs on those they serve -- or on those whom they pay to serve -- depends on the design and execution of government ground rules.

2. Pragmatism: In a discussion of economic policy, Obama recently told The Wall Street Journal:

I tend to be eclectic. I do think we're in a different time in 2008 than we were in 1992. The thing I think people should feel confident in is that I'm going to make these judgments not based on some fierce ideological pre-disposition but based on what makes sense. I'm a big believer in evidence. I'm a big believer in fact. You know, if somebody shows me we can do something better through a market mechanism, I'm happy to do it. I have no vested interest in expanding government or setting up a program just for the sake of setting one up. It's too much work.

In Zanesville he cast the faith-based initiative in similar terms -- as something to be embraced because it's a practical way to marshall resources toward shared goals.

The fact is, the challenges we face today – from saving our planet to ending poverty – are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need all hands on deck.

3. Liberalism (which in Obama's book is pragmatism): After losing the Democratic majority in Congress, and as prelude to a long series of modest initiatives in social policy, Bill Clinton famously announced, "The era of big government is over." George Bush Sr., announcing the nation had "more will than wallet," touted American volunteerism as "a thousand points of light" -- i.e., as a substitute, or rather an ideologically preferable alternative, to government action to help the poor and needy. Obama, in contrast to both, casts faith- and community-based initiatives as a means to leverage government's power to address social ills. In a sense this is bigger government and in a sense it's smaller.

4. Fairness: Obama habitually casts his liberalism as a return, in the wake of a generation of government favoring the wealthy and powerful, to basic fairness. He presents fairness in turn as the deepest pragmatism, because only shared prosperity is sustainable. In Zanesville, he complained that political favoritism in the faith-based initiative led the Bush Administration to waste resources:

... the Office never fulfilled its promise. Support for social services to the poor and the needy have been consistently underfunded. Rather than promoting the cause of all faith-based organizations, former officials in the Office have described how it was used to promote partisan interests. As a result, the smaller congregations and community groups that were supposed to be empowered ended up getting short-changed.

Obama by way of contrast envisions marshalling every program large and small that proves itself effective:

Too often, faith-based groups – especially smaller congregations and those that aren't well connected – don't know how to apply for federal dollars, or how to navigate a government website to see what grants are available, or how to comply with federal laws and regulations... what's stopping many faith-based groups from helping struggling families is simply a lack of knowledge about how the system works.

Well, that will change when I'm President. I will empower the nonprofit religious and community groups that do understand how this process works to train the thousands of groups that don't. We'll "train the trainers" by giving larger faith-based partners like Catholic Charities and Lutheran Services and secular nonprofits like Public/Private Ventures the support they need to help other groups build and run effective programs. Every house of worship that wants to run an effective program and that's willing to abide by our constitution – from the largest mega-churches and synagogues to the smallest store-front churches and mosques – can and will have access to the information and support they need to run that program.

Again, this is leveraging -- government empowering large religious groups to empower small religious groups, which he sees as embodying creativity and responsiveness to local need.

5. Bottom-up social action: Obama begins this speech by pointing out that his public career began with a church-funded effort "to help lift up neighborhoods that were devasted by the closure of a local steel plant." He might have added that his years an organizer consisted mainly of attempts to marshall church groups to support attainable proejcts conceived by the people they were designed to serve. He is speaking directly from his own experience when he asserts:

You see, while these groups are often made up of folks who've come together around a common faith, they're usually working to help people of all faiths or of no faith at all. And they're particularly well-placed to offer help. As I've said many times, I believe that change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques.

Obama's whole career is based on faith in bottom-up action. His first experience of such action was through church groups. His faith-based initiative is a return to the roots of his public career.

Related posts:
Obama and the vision thing
We've been here before: How Obama frames U.S. history
Audacity of Respect: What Obama Owes to Reagan II
Obama's Metapolitics
Obama gets down to tax brass
Obama brings it back to earth in Virginia
Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's
Truth and Transformation

"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.