Obama on polarization: I failed, we will succeed

I found the first half or so of Obama's final SOTU pretty anodyne, and I did not like the scalp-waving -- 'just ask Osama,' etc.  But there were two points on which I thought he got intensely real -- both involving the dangers of what we as a country might do to ourselves.

The first was putting the threat from ISIS and other terrorist networks (current and future) in its place:

But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands.  Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped.  But they do not threaten our national existence.  That’s the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.  We don’t need to build them up to show that we’re serious, nor do we need to push away vital allies in this fight by echoing the lie that ISIL is representative of one of the world’s largest religions.  We just need to call them what they are – killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed.

In effect: this is the Barbary Pirates, not World War III.

The second was an extended warning about the road to oligarchy -- paved with polarization, campaign finance gone wild, voter suppression and demagoguery. There were two parts to it: the emotion of dysfunction, and the machinery of it. First, the emotion:

Change I still believe in

As both sides gear up for tax-and-spending battles at the edge of the fiscal...slope, and as Obama quite noisily proclaims that public opinion is on his side with regard to raising taxes on the top 2%, I want to repost my best recent attempt to understand Obama's current stated theory of how 'change' gets done. Hint: it's not a matter of trying to sway public opinion -- Obama is as aware as Brendan Nyhan that that's a futile enterprise. It's a matter of deploying public opinion that's already on his side -- as he did with some modest success in 2012.  Here's the argument, engaged (one-sidedly, natch) with Ezra Klein six weeks ago.

Sept. 21, 2012

Ezra Klein, noting that Obama has recently revamped the way he talks about "change," attempts a massive debunk.  Obama is now claiming that he's learned, "you can't change Washington from the inside..you can only change it from the outside. That's how I got elected. That's how the big accomplishments like health care got done."

Nonsense, protests Ezra. All the change that Obama effected was the result of inside baseball -- buying off corporate interests, herding Democratic cats, striving (mostly unsuccessfully) to win opposition buy-in. Obama brought policy change, but not change in the way Washington works. The latter is an impossible goal for a president or any one person.

In my view, Klein is viewing this question too narrowly. Obama is well aware of the limitations of the bully pulpit, and he's got to know better than any person on the planet that presidential advocacy polarizes, entrenching the opposing party in implacable opposition to whatever the president proposes. Yet, in presenting a revamped theory of how the presidency works, he's not just feeding us a line of BS.  And if Obama wins reelection, I believe that we will look back five or ten or twenty years from now and recognize that yes, Obama did change the way Washington works. Or at the very least, he kept the US on a sane policy course in a time of extreme polarization and thus gave (will have given...) the system space to self-correct, as it has in the past.

Let's start with Klein's objection to Obama's characterization of how healthcare reform got done:

Is "breaking the fever" Obama's fever dream?

Brendan Nyhan thinks that Obama is blowing smoke when he suggests that his reelection will "break the fever" of reflexive and unyielding GOP opposition to everything he proposes, and when he avers that change will come from outside Washington, via citizen activism, rather than from inside. I find Nyhan's debunking unconvincing on several fronts.  Here's the core argument:

In reality, while Obama will have increased leverage in the upcoming “fiscal cliff” scenario, there’s little reason to think the upward trend in legislative polarization will relent any time soon, or that Obama can magically change public opinion from the bully pulpit or force Congress to act through outside pressure. Similarly, it’s not clear that a president’s re-election creates especially strong incentives for the opposition party to start compromising. It’s true, for instance, that Bill Clinton cut a budget deal with Republicans in 1997, but he was also impeached in 1998. Similarly, George W. Bush faced far more relentless and effective opposition from Democrats in Congress during his second term than his first. Despite John Kerry’s loss, Democrats killed Bush’s proposal to add private accounts to Social Security in the 109th Congress and subsequently won a landslide victory in the 2006 midterm elections. 

First, the points that Nyhan concedes -- that  a reelected Obama would have the whip hand in fiscal cliff negotiations, and that Clinton cut a budget deal (largely reflecting his priorities) after his reelection --  go a long way toward making Obama's argument for him. "Breaking the fever" is not primarily, or initially, about about producing comity between the parties; it's about changing the opposition's incentives. Clinton's reelection did do that; the fact that he later handed the Republicans a sword to gore him in the person of Monica Lewinsky does not negate the leverage he won or the relatively rational compromises he was able to strike with a GOP Congress -- yielding balanced budgets that Gingrich boasted about in the GOP primaries as if he'd been Clinton's right-hand man. Moreover, had Clinton not dallied in the Oval Office, Republicans would have lacked a massive, er, stimulus to total warfare, and polarization may not have advanced to its subsequent apotheosis under Obama.

Ezra Klein's unconvincing theory that Obama misunderstands (or misrepresents) "change"

Ezra Klein, noting that Obama has recently revamped the way he talks about "change," attempts a massive debunk.  Obama is now claiming that he's learned, "you can't change Washington from the inside..you can only change it from the outside. That's how I got elected. That's how the big accomplishments like health care got done."

Nonsense, protests Ezra. All the change that Obama effected was the result of inside baseball -- buying off corporate interests, herding Democratic cats, striving (mostly unsuccessfully) to win opposition buy-in. Obama brought policy change, but not change in the way Washington works. The latter is an impossible goal for a president or any one person.

In my view, Klein is viewing this question too narrowly. Obama is well aware of the limitations of the bully pulpit, and he's got to know better than any person on the planet that presidential advocacy polarizes, entrenching the opposing party in implacable opposition to whatever the president proposes. Yet, in presenting a revamped theory of how the presidency works, he's not just feeding us a line of BS.  And if Obama wins reelection, I believe that we will look back five or ten or twenty years from now and recognize that yes, Obama did change the way Washington works. Or at the very least, he kept the US on a sane policy course in a time of extreme polarization and thus gave (will have given...) the system space to self-correct, as it has in the past.

Let's start with Klein's objection to Obama's characterization of how healthcare reform got done: