alternet.org
If Obama Had Governed Like This in 2009, He'd Be the Transformational President We Hoped For
For anyone who is curious about what exactly happened during the Obama years, the above article is the best synopsis I have ever read.
Excerpt:.
"I’ve always seen that speech as a key to understanding a certain sort of road not taken by this administration. It’s one that could have led Obama to considerably more success than he has enjoyed, and perhaps even fulfilled expectations that his would be a “transformational” and not a “transactional” presidency—a failure Obama himself seemed to acknowledge by explicitly, almost apologetically, comparing himself unfavorably to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. I agree with him. It’s not that he has not scored important, even historic successes as president: the Affordable Care Act, the Iranian nuclear deal. But a president is transformational when he meets head on, and transcends, the preeminent historical crisis of his times­­—the incapacity of the weak American state to deal with a Depression in Roosevelt’s case, the sectional crisis over slavery in Abraham Lincoln’s. Add Ronald Reagan, who Obama once cited as another model of a transformational president, whose accomplishment was turning “liberalism” into a dirty word. Obama’s historical task was to do the same for conservatism. It hasn’t happened; conservatism has instead thrived. That was not foreordained.Continuing excerpt:
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The strategic situation was propitious, too. By the time Obama gave that speech, senior GOP members of Congress had already met with conservative movement leaders and Republican strategists and agreed to ignore the electoral mandate and commit the party to a course of absolute obstruction, the better to turn Obama into a one-term president.
The Obama White House either never learned about this or didn’t care. With aching sincerity, the president kept extending his hand in bipartisan fellowship, only to have an anvil dropped on it. The parable of Lucy and the football became our modern-day version of the myth of Sisyphus.
At any number of moments he could have staged what Bill Clinton called a “Gary Cooper moment.” The next time they proffered extremism in the face of his invitation to compromise, Obama could do what Clinton did when congressional Republicans offered Medicare cuts as their budget “compromise” in 1995. Clinton told Rep. Dick Armey, as Paul Begala recalled, “If you want somebody to sign this budget you’re going to have to put another president behind that desk, because I will never do it.” Armey responded by shutting down the government. Clinton made that his appeal to the public. He said, effectively, I set the table for a moderate middle course. I did so patiently and evenhandedly. The Republicans responded by flipping over the table. See how childish they are?
Obama has always refused that Gary Cooper role. Not his style: there is no blue America, there is no red America. Consider his reaction to the Tea Party victories of 2010. After that election, political scientists crunched all kinds of numbers to figure out what happened. Here are the only numbers that mattered, I think: (1) by a two-to-one margin, voters surveyed on election day believed that under Obama their taxes had gone up; but (2) in actual fact the taxes of 95 percent had gone down. Given all the right-wingers who won congressional seats crying TEA—“Taxed Enough Already”—it was the perfect opportunity to call out Republican successes, not as a mandate, but a Big Lie.
He could have done what Ronald Reagan did following his own “shellacking” in 1982: offer a full-throated pledge to stay the course. Instead, in his press conference the next day, Obama practically waved the white flag of surrender. He said the vote “confirmed what I’ve heard from folks all across America”—that his presidency was on the wrong track. He was “eager to sit down with members of both parties and figure out how we can move forward together,” because “no person, no party, has a monopoly on wisdom.” He took “direct responsibility for the fact that we have not made as much progress as we need to make.” So it was time to find “common ground.”
He took a Republican lie and chiseled it for all time into the tablets of history.
Why did this keep happening? In 2012 Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker got hold of a series of memos that revealed a White House defined by reactive lurches—a White House, I wrote back then, that “let themselves be guided by clichés made up by Republicans and parroted by pundits.” Rooted, always, in the confidence that he could find reasonable negotiating partners in the Republican leadership, who could discipline their caucuses into going along with reasonable deals.
koan: It is worth reading the entire article. |
