“And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.”
The WashPost’s Ezra Klein has a terrific column that places the failed climate bill into the political context that has been missing from so much of the recent debate:
If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.
In the climate bill debate of the past two years, Obama and the Democrats embraced Republican ideas in an effort to minimize or avoid the partisanship inherent in other approaches that had been explicitly rejected by Republicans, including a tax and a massive ramp up in clean energy funding, as I’ve argued.
But Klein makes an effective case that it simply didn’t matter how reasonable or centrist or business-friendly a strategy environmentalists and progressive politicians pursued (or might have pursued). The Republicans simply were committed to stopping Obama from appearing bipartisan.
The Dems keeps getting suckered by Republicans the way Charlie Brown keeps getting suckered by Lucy. But the difference is that the GOP’s strategy wasn’t even a secret.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told the NY Times in March 2010, “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out.” Why? As McConnell blurted out right before the 2010 midterm elections, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
So the GOP was perfectly willing to destroy the climate, block efforts to get health care to uninsured people, and generally ruin the economy — as long as they could destroy Obama and not get blamed by the voters or the media by virtue of their superior messaging (which is a reasonable expectation given how lame progressive messaging is).
Klein has more must-read details in each of these three areas:
Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early ’90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. “We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance,” he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans “” including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and a few others still in office “” had signed one individual mandate bill or another.
The story on cap and trade “” which conservatives now like to call “cap and tax” “” is much the same. Back then, the concern was sulfur dioxide, the culprit behind acid rain. President George H.W. Bush wanted a solution that relied on the market rather than on government regulation. So in the Clean Air Act of 1990, he proposed a plan that would cap sulfur-dioxide emissions but let the market decide how to allocate the permits. That was “more compatible with economic growth than using only the command and control approaches of the past,” he said. The plan passed easily, with “aye” votes from Sen. Mitch McConnell and then-Rep. Newt Gingrich, among others. In fact, as recently as 2007, Gingrich said that “if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur .”‰.”‰. it’s something I would strongly support.”
For more on this, see “The GOP flip flops on cap and trade.”
As for the 1990 budget deal, Bush initially resisted tax increases, but eventually realized they were necessary to get the job done. “It is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following: entitlement and mandatory program reform, tax revenue increases, growth incentives, discretionary spending reductions, orderly reductions in defense expenditures, and budget process reform,” he said. That deal, incidentally, was roughly half tax increases and half spending cuts. Obama’s budget has far fewer tax increases. And compared with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire in 2012, it actually includes a large tax cut.
The normal reason a party abandons its policy ideas is that those ideas fail in practice. But that’s not the case here. These initiatives were wildly successful. Gov. Mitt Romney passed an individual mandate in Massachusetts and drove its number of uninsured below 5 percent. The Clean Air Act of 1990 solved the sulfur-dioxide problem. The 1990 budget deal helped cut the deficit and set the stage for a remarkable run of growth.
Rather, it appears that as Democrats moved to the right to pick up Republican votes, Republicans moved to the right to oppose Democratic proposals. As Gingrich’s quote suggests, cap and trade didn’t just have Republican support in the 1990s. John McCain included a cap-and-trade plan in his 2008 platform. The same goes for an individual mandate, which Grassley endorsed in June 2009 “” mere months before he began calling the policy “unconstitutional.”
Joe Conason spelled out more details of the GOP’s Lucy van Pelt strategy in Salon last April when he noted, “There is nothing subtle about the Republican approach to frustrating reform, whether in healthcare, banking regulation or climate change”:
The underlying agenda on the Republican side, from the top down, is to frustrate and humiliate the president and the Democratic majority — and to ensure that no legislation passes. They typically begin with a memo from Frank Luntz, outlining rhetorical tricks that will be used to mislead and anger voters, while obscuring the true content of any proposal that Democrats might consider.
Conason wondered, “How many times will the Democrats fall prey to the same Republican strategy?” Like Charlie Brown, I fear the Dems simply will never catch on.
Klein concludes
This White House has shown a strong preference for policies with demonstrated Republican support, but that’s been obscured by the Republican Party adopting a stance of unified, and occasionally hysterical, opposition (remember “death panels”?) “” not to mention a flood of paranoia about the president’s “true” agenda and background.
So while soul-searching by environmentalists and progressives as to their failings is always worthwhile — and frankly, I’ve never known an environmentalist or progressive to ever stop the soul-searching, even during the rare moments when we seem to be winning — let’s remember that all the internal soul-searching in the world won’t matter one whit if the other side is led by the soul-less (see Joe Klein on the GOP: “How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? “¦ How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?”).
Related Onion piece:
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Fantastic article and analysis Joe. The only way to win at this is to pick up seats and make the Republicans pay – they’ve painted themselves way over to the right.
Obama should just keep pushing them over farther – he can use their strategy against them – so that come election time they would only have the far right of their party wanting to vote for them.
I’ve thought many times how our current president acts more like a republican from 5 or 10 years ago than a Democrat.
Obama is not the only Democrat cratering to the special interests and republicans- in Connecticut, Governor Dan Malloy has gutted the ‘Sustinet’ Health care public option- because of Pressure from the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, as well as the CEO’s from Aetna and Cigna, leaving 400,000 state reisents with no health care acoverage.
Malloy says that we have the Federal health care plan- that is not unitl 2014- what are these people gong to do in Connecticut, with no coverage today. Three years is along time to wait to see a Doctor.
see http://www.courant.com/health/connecticut/hc-buck-sustinet-0426-20110425,0,182773.column
I got a call from the Obama 2012 campaign last night, asking if I would support him again in 2012. I said I would wait until he starts to seriously promote progressive values and policies.
Electing a Democrat that promotes Republican policies, as Obama is doing, is worse than electing a Republican. Obama is creating a situation where Democrats will get blamed for the failures of Republican policies.
I’ve long noticed this same trend among the Republicans. The Onion even touched upon it with their “Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth” spoof. I believe that particular Onion spoof was featured on this site earlier.
Amazing how a little melanin can make others loose all rationality, isn’t it?
As for the Dems, I don’t see enough of them catching on since most of them aren’t that different from Obama (and the Republicans) and believe in “bi-partisanship” as some sort of sacred virtue.
One side has abandoned even the pretense of sanity and the other has abandoned it’s brain and spine.
[JR: I'm glad you reminded me of that. I'll put up the link.]
I don’t recall moderate Republicans of the 1990′s instituting torture, suspending the Bill of Rights, or fighting unending needless, illegal, wars, one after another. Like Obama, they did miss one opportunity after another to mobilize the country to prevent the climate debacle, but they were not in power at that time.
I don’t see Obama resembling anything in the 1990′s. He is the 21st century embodiment of the corporate state. He does not get “suckered” by the Republicans. He serves the same constituency.
[JR: I don't follow this at all. While I'm not certain I would agree with your characterization of what Obama is doing on security, ironically you are just describing Bush policies embraced by his GOP Congress with some Democratic acquiescence.]
Just to clarify my earlier post….
I also think that part of the Republicans’ bizarre behavior can also be traced the problem that the majority of the Republican politicians have essentially stopped being a party that stands for a position and have instead turned themselves into a party that primary defines itself by their hatred/opposition of the Democrats. As Ezra Klein mentioned, rather than trying to declare victory that the Democrats have moved to the right, the Republicans have moved further to the right. Unfortunately this is just in time for the expansion of corporate expansion in political involvement due to Citizens United, creating a “perfect storm” of political stupidity and extremism.
At least that’s my opinion.
Intelligence-Searching vs. Soul-Searching
The relationships among ‘reason’, ‘rationality’, the ‘soul’, and so forth have long been debated among philosophers and others, but that’s not gonna be my point here. Instead, my point is this:
For reasons mentioned clearly in the post, we need much more than “soul-searching” on our side of the matter: We need to do some “intelligence-searching”. In other words, the post has gotten the problem (with Obama’s approach) very much right, at least on the matter it takes up. (There are other problems with it as well, of course.) So the question now is whether Obama, his Administration, the Dems, CAP, and all of us will do something about it. The strategy President Obama has been using has failed, and (as the post says) the reason is no secret. How many times can we sit and watch while Lucy pulls the football away? “Poor old Charlie Brown.” At this point, we should be saying, “Poor old us” and laughing at ourselves. And then, we should change strategy.
This post is a great one. Thanks Joe (and Ezra).
Jeff
Seeing Obama as moderate GOP is not surprising. There was a political vacancy where moderate voices like Ted Kennedy were formerly reaching across the aisle in the public forum. The GOP had moved off to form a coalition of one-issue groups, big businesses, libertarians, and the segment of the tax-payer revolt that has been willing, at least in theory, to give up services.
If I had a more complete list of the groups that actually make up the coalitions called “Democrats” or “Republicans” it might make more sense to me.
Maybe I should study European politics, as the EU states’ coalition building and compromises on policy seem more candid, even if just as bizarre.
It’s pretty normal. http://www.danablankenhorn.com/2011/04/etymology-of-the-crazy.html Political ideas generally go on past their sell-by date, and the followers of those ideas generally don’t take the hint until the new ideas are validated by repeated elections.
Think about what would have happened to Democrats after 1972′s McGovern debacle if Nixon hadn’t done Watergate? It took until after 1984 for the party to adjust back to the center, where most voters are.
Or think about Republicans in the 1930s, many of whom wound up as isolationists or outright Nazi fellow-travelers. And of course the Lost Cause, which just got loster-and-loster for a century.
But it’s hard for a new set of ideas to really come into its own. Crisis leaders, like this President, and like Nixon, FDR, McKinley and Lincoln, tend to have built their careers leaning into the old assumptions, assuming people believe them to still be valid.
New assumptions, a new politics, begins only when those who believe in new things start pushing these leaders, and their successors, from the other side. And that hasn’t really happened yet.
Imagine what Obama would be like if he had a truly liberal and Democratic Congress? Not last year’s conservative Democratic Congress, but one forged deeply in the Netroots, and made up of people who truly believe in a new kind of politics.
Yet, while we are all observing how Obama’s positions match the Republican Party of the 1990s (and are actually to the right of Richard Nixon) the rightwingnutosphere believes Obama is on the extreme left — an actual Marxist.
I’ve never known of a situation in history where such a large segment of the population completely lost touch with reality on virtually every political topic. They believe that Obama raised taxes (he lowered them) and that he’s attacking gun rights (he’s expanded them — guns are now allowed in national parks). They believe in a massive 50-year-long conspiracy to hide origin of his birth, and believe that 10s of thousands of climate scientists are conspiring to enact some kind of Marxist agenda. And of course, they believe that the military is underfunded and that the majority of tax dollars are spend on undeserving poor people.
Clearly racism is a strong component of what holds these beliefs together, but I have to believe that the right wing would be carrying on the same degree of delusional thinking were Hillary Clinton the president. So racism, while present, is merely a mechanism for uniting the right wing and not the cause. No, what is happening is something far worse and unprecedented.
I wonder how Erza Klein would describe Goldwater back in the early 60′s? Compared to todays crop of ‘conservatives,’ I believe Goldwater might also be described as moderate.
In what way is Obama a ‘moderate’ republican? If you want to compare him to a past republican president, your only choice is George W. Bush. Was GW moderate? I don’t think so. I think many people here are stuck on these democrat/republican labels, this article points out the flaw in that kind of thinking. You have the ruling class and then there is the rest of us. Obama is part of the former.
Kochbama is Bush III. (It isn’t what he says, it what he does, that’s the problem.) Name 3 things that Obama’s done that Bush II would never have done. Except, of course, speaking in complete, standard English sentences.
Time for a new political party. If Bill McKibben, Tim deChristopher, and Van Jones are in it, so much the better. Much better.
I’m glad that Mr. Klein posted this piece, but it remains surprising to me that the argument itself comes as a surprise to so many people.
The term a friend of mine liked to use for Obama, back before the 2008 election, is “Rockefeller Republican.” This has actually been pretty obvious for quite some time now.
A credible climate-focussed candidate standing against Obama in the primaries remains the only serious option of:
a/. putting the facts of the climate hazard into the public media during the next two years;
b/. enacting the single potentially effective option for causing Obama to declare and discuss the seriousness of that hazard and the scale of action required;
c/. the only option for getting a president in 2012 who is committed to national and international action on climate rather than to continuing the longstanding ‘brinkmanship of inaction’.
Arguments of how such a candidate would weaken Obama’s prospect of re-election seem spurious –
first, the challenge would not be useful to the right since it primarily concerns the reality of the climate hazard,
second, Obama anyway faces an oil-price spike and recession by 2012 which are predictably lethal to his chances,
and third, given that destabilization due to PO is looming, the 2012 election would actually be a great one for the Democrats to lose with the goal of cleaning house in 2016.
Mounting that challenge to Obama, with somebody of the stature of Colin Powell (but younger) could actually be a game changer.
Regards,
Lewis
Mounting a primary challenge to Obama would ensure that we have President Romney/Huckabee/Trump?. NO. DOUBT. ABOUT. IT. Also, with a weakened candidate at the top of the ticket, it will be all the harder to try to swing the House back around AND hold on to the Senate. Anybody wishing for this scenario is either sorely misled or on somebody’s payroll.
The next presidential term might see 1 or 2 Supreme Court justices retire and a republican president could pack the court with a conservative majority that could last for 20 years. Say goodbye to any chance of healthcare reform being enacted or any hope of annulling Citizen’s United. This alone would cause a negative feedback loop that could gut our entire democratic process with the knife of corporate money. If you care about energy or environment issues, 4 to 20 years of inaction is unacceptable for many reasons.
These are the stakes. The other side is not playing around and they seem to suffer from self-destructive delusions. We have to begin action ASAP and weakening the President is about the LAST thing we should be doing.
The other side is not playing around and they seem to suffer from self-destructive delusions.
Given that they’re fueled by both Wall St. profiteering (which doesn’t care about the long term) and fundamentalist religion (which actively OPPOSES there being a long term), this is a huge danger — some of them could easily create 21st C feudalism or even choose to start WW3. There’s no question Obama’s better than that.
But fielding a genuinely liberal, actively conservationist, science-minded person who can also relate to the people is necessary to help stop Obama’s slide toward even more severe corporatism by showing there IS support for more serious approaches to the problems we face. It is possible that, if Obama wins, he might be able to truly push for such things b/c he won’t be eligible for re-election … but he could also go the other way, depending on where his funds come from. Those of us who care about these issue MUST show there’s another perspective besides the one no getting most of the airtime.
I agree that 4-20 more years of stasis is bad, but immediate action should not depend on the White House, or Washington in general — the government is DESIGNED to move slowly. Each of us has to change what we do on a daily basis and dismantle the corporate system by refusing to play their game. The less dependent we are on the corps and the gov’t, the better off everyone is & the more flexible we are in the face of the coming changes.
The Ice Man drilleth – 100ppm did anyone notice?
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=204992246202179&id=139434822741700
White’s ice-core studies helped reveal two striking facts. The first is that the Earth’s great ice ages are bookmarked by a clear fluctuation in carbon dioxide levels: 180 parts per million (ppm) in the glacial periods, 280 ppm in the warmer periods (the level at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution about 150 years ago). A shift of 100 ppm in CO2 concentrations meant the difference between flowers blooming in the Arctic and ice a mile deep over Chicago.
The second fact is more worrisome, and led to White’s seminal 1989 paper in the prestigious science journal Nature: These global transformations happened fast. Warming trends that forced widespread ice melting and monumental sea-level rise weren’t a millennium-long process. It was decadal.
How about we just start ALL calling ourselves Republicans. Just join the Democrat and Republican parties. That would make the Tea Party (really the Libertarian Party) about 10% of the population and then the rest of us. Do this for about 2 election cycles in order to crush the last vestiges of the extreme. Then later we can sort out who’s who.
Rob Honeycutt, your slip is showing. You write: ” Just join the Democrat and Republican parties.”
The proper word in that sentence is “Democratic”. Except for members of the far right who have been using the term “Democrat” instead of “Democratic” for the past 10 years or so. It started as an epithet, but now its become an unconscious habit.
Green… Sorry. Just tired typing fingers. Really. (I’m a life-long Democrat, as was my father and my grandfather.)
Interesting. When I first read Ezra Klein’s piece, I was not impressed; I thought: “Ezra Klein has finally woken up to what many liberals have been trying tell him for nearly 4 years.” But the context you put it in adds much.
Nonetheless … it continues to disturb (but not surprise) me that so many people believed the right-wing propaganda that Obama was left-wing, for so long.
My broader point is that, given how far to the extreme the Libertarian/TeaParty have gone, even Ronald Reagan would be seen as a Socialist.
This should start to be a fight of the “Republicratic” party (or whatever) against the Libertarians. Those guys clearly and seriously want to dismantle our democracy and replace it with a plutocracy.
If you get a chance watch “Billionaire’s Tea Party.” That documentary does a great job of pulling up information regarding what the Koch brothers want to do.
Obama cares about one thing: reelection. The standard Democratic strategy for reelection has been to run just to the left of their Republican opponents and to govern just to the left of the Republicans. Now, there are modest differences between the Democrats and Republicans. Someone asked, ‘name something Obama’s done that Bush wouldn’t do.’ Well, Obama’s energy policy and climate policies have been better than Bush’s. Remember this:
Obama and the Democrats pushed through the first increase in fuel efficiency standards in almost 20 years. Obama’s tax credits for energy efficiency were huge (and discontinued only after the GOP took the House).
Basically though, the thesis of this post is correct and has obvious for a long time – Obama is corporatist tool. His health care plan left the insurance companies sitting pretty – just what you’d expect if you take single-payer off the table at the beginning. Health care stocks rose even faster off their March 2009 bottom to the day “Obamacare” passed about a year later than did the rest of the stock market.
Guantanamo is still open – and most of the prisoners have no business being there. Bradley Manning is being punished in jail – there’s just no other reasonable interpretation of his treatment.
Iraq is scaled back, but we’re not leaving – perhaps “ever” – and Afghanistan is even worse than before Obama took office.
Given the stakes, I’m glad the President cares about reelection. The specter of Jimmy Carter’s supposedly feeble and defeatist attitude is still used as a club to beat liberal and progressive policies and politics to this day. With a slightly different set of circumstances involving Iran and oil prices/inflation, Ronald Reagan would just be an ex-governor of California. With a slightly less number of true liberals in Florida that got sucked into the Green Party in 2000, the Supreme Court would have had a much harder time appointing G W Bush as president.
My point is elections have consequences. Reagan’s victory and subsequent Supreme Court appointments paved the way for the GWB presidency and combined, the two of them did more to set this country back than anybody at the time could have imagined. We can’t afford to lose an election on principle.
Also, given how narrowly Health Care Reform squeaked through congress, do you honestly believe that Single Payer or anything remotely more liberal than what was passed could have made it? Obama counted the votes and knew pretty much what was going to happen. Seriously, look how they had to bend over backwards just to satisfy Stupak and his blatant pandering to the anti-choice crowd! For an effective climate change law, THE VOTES WEREN’T THERE. Given that senators representing around 12% of the U.S. population can hold up legislation indefinitely, even a bill with 80%+ approval can still get filibustered to death.
What would you do with the Guantanamo prisoners? If they weren’t radicalized before, they definitely are by now! If they are released and one even thinks about joining the Taliban back home, that’s the end of the line for Obama and the democrats. Bradley Manning broke the law and any non-disclosure agreements he signed. He should be treated humanely, but not be set free until he is proven innocent or serves his sentence. Finally, no mention of why we have to stay in Iraq forever and why Afghanistan is so messed up? Who handed those awful situations to the president? This is just like the deficit: G W Bush jacked it up and now people give Obama grief because he hasn’t cleaned up 8 years worth of crap (30 years for some issues) in under 24 months? I have yet to see a valid criticism of the president on policy issues.
two parties – one for democracy, one not for democracy?
I think that votes on the federal debt ceiling will be a real test. Failure to act should really roil the financial markets. Evidently a large majority of the public is against raising the ceiling, presumably because they have not idea of what that means. I read somewhere that Reagan holds the record for raised debt ceilings at 17 during his terms.
I hope that the public does not put up with the extreme right demanding extreme changes just to keep the government running and paying its routine bill. If the debt ceiling is not raised before things hit the fan, the tea party ilk needs to be directly blamed.
RE # 25
sault, say it again and again and again.
“My point is elections have consequences”
President Obama is the Democratic Party’s candidate and, in this second decade of the “Age of Destruction” the single most important objective we climate hawks have to achieve is to assure President Obama’s reelection and Democratic control of the Senate.
If anyone wants to dispute that, convince me we would be better off living under a totalitarian government than one that promises change but cannot deliver.
sault, it’s a long way to election day and we need to be constantly reminded what is at stake.
Thanks.
John McCormick
There is another point of view that I have heard expressed, and perhaps it’s giving Obama too much credit, but it’s worth considering anyway. By occupying the center, and especially the right of center traditionally held by moderate republicans, and also given the knee-jerk reflexivity of the republicans to oppose everything the President proposes, Obama he pushing them further to the right, to the point where (hopefully) they push themselves off the cliff. I would not have given this idea any credit, until the vote over the Ryan budget, which ALL (save a handful I believe) republicans voted for. There is a sense that many might have put the noose around their neck with that one.
In any case, as the saying goes, politics is the art of the possible, and it takes a very strategic mind to navigate through it successfully. Obama was given a very tough hand to play, and I give him the benefit of the doubt.
RE # 29
Christophe, good point of view.
America’s political moment is on very thin ice. This is not the time to be jumping up and down and calling for third parties and primary challengers.
An Obama second term will assure we can hold on to the Supreme Court and many other benefits such as President Obama’s veto power in the event we lose the Senate. However, your comment give me hope the repugs are too blind to see the tea baggers building the scaffold.
John McCormick
sault (@16, @25):
I’ve been seeing/hearing this line “New Democrat” reasoning for 30 years. The unwillingness of liberals to defend their positions has yielded a steady rightward drift of American politics, other than on social issues, for that entire period. Funny thing, it is on social issues that liberals have been most vocal – women’s rights, gay rights, for example. Those social issues are precisely the areas where, despite screaming, gnashing of teeth, and sometimes terroristic tactics from the right, the American public has been moving towards the liberal’s positions.
It has been much more difficult for Liberals to defend their positions publicly over those 30 years for many reasons. Reagan contorted conventional political wisdom towards a blind acceptance of Supply Side Economics and the federal government’s universal lack of efficacy. Now, every politician has to “unleash the entrepreneurial spirit” and “support America’s businesses” to stay electable.
Also, Joe R pointed to a David Roberts article on Grist yesterday that delved into the media’s fascination with “hippie punching” and “hippie on hippie violence”. There’s a strong bias against liberal ideas in the media either through omission, false balance or just plain being Fox News. The anti-Iraq war protests in 2003 were much larger than a lot of the Tea Party rallies, but didn’t receive nearly as much coverage.
Since you didn’t address my points on Guantanamo or Bradley Manning, I don’t really know what other liberal positions are not being defended. There weren’t the votes to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the $250K+ crowd and had Obama stood firm on that, the Republicans could have easily blamed him for raising everybody’s taxes during a recession. Both lies, I know, but look at how they’re blaming him for high gas prices and, OMG, IT’S FREAKING WORKING LIKE A CHARM.
So on rhetoric, Obama is to the right of moderate Republicans from years past, but policy-wise, he is doing the absolute maximum he can get through an antagonistic Congress and a nhilistic Republican Party.
@ sault #32:
Respectfully I have to slightly disagree with your assessment of Obama’s actions.
The first issue is that as long a Obama continues to talk like a moderate (by today’s standards) Republican, it’s that much harder to get any progressive measures passed. That is part of the issue that many progressives have with him. The President has a massive “bully pulpit” in the form of the State of the Union Address, but almost all we get from him are concessions to the Republicans.
The second issue is that even when is does come up with something to counter the Republicans, it is often still basically just a more moderate version of what the Republicans want. Take for example the budget, Ryan’s plan adds six trillion to the debt over 10 years. Obama’s adds seven trillion. Both plans involve some cuts to social programs, it’s just Obama’s does it less.
What Obama could have supported was the “The People’s Budget” from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It would increase funding for the environment, social programs, education, renewable energy, infrastructure, etc., and creates a budget surplus by 2021 (about 20 years before Ryan’s plan does). It makes up for the funding by closing tax loopholes for the rich and corporations, adding a few higher tax brackets, ending fossil fuel subsidies, and cutting the military (after withdrawing them from Iraq and Afghanistan).
The People’s Budget
Instead Obama (and most the of the other Democrats) doesn’t even mention “The “People’s Budget” plan even though public opinion polls nationwide show overwhelming public support (even among Republican voters!) for what it proposes.
Why not even a mention?
As to the “repealing the Bush Tax cuts” I’m afraid that just isn’t correct. Obama just had to let them expire, which they would have done automatically without action. Rather Obama (and many of the other Democrats in congress) voted to extend the tax cuts rather than allow them to expire.
Obama Signs Bill To Extend Bush Tax Cuts
That’s quite a bit different from not having “the votes to repeal the Bush tax cuts” as you stated.
Yes, the Republicans would have blamed him for the economy if he had allowed them to expire automatically but guess what? They still blamed him for the economy anyhow! Only now, thanks to the debt growing, in large part due to the tax cuts having been extended by Obama, they are also now blaming him for the deficit that the Republicans themselves helped create, and are using the growing deficit to push for the Ryan plan!
It was a very, very bad move (for the country) on Obama’s part.
As for Obama being blamed for gas prices, I think that he does deserve some blame there, but not for the reasons the Republicans state. Obama has mentioned that speculation is responsible for most of the increase but he is doing nothing substantive about it. Obama could at least show that he’s trying to act by pushing for speculation limits on oil and overhauling the finance sectors of the market. Instead all we get from Obama is a promise to investigate “criminal” trading/speculation, when most of the speculation involved in the price increase is perfectly legal under the current deregulated system. Where is the leadership there? Where is the challenging the position of the right? Why not even proposing it in public at his town hall meetings?
Please don’t get me wrong. I still prefer Obama over what we would have gotten if McCain/Palin was in the White House. I just wished the USA had a President that acted like an actual progressive once in a while and talked like it in public. It’s disappointing when he doesn’t even try on many issues.
Name one piece of legislation where a more progressive policy was possible but Obama decided to go to the right. Healthcare? NO, barely passed even with legislative contortions and blatant pandering. Tax Cuts? Nope, he’s trapped in a political corner by breaking a campaign promise if they were allowed to expire and he gets the blame for a bad economy anyway. You have to realize that the president has to win most of his political battles to stay viable. Letting the tax cuts expire was a no-win situation for the President and the Republicans knew it. People fault his approach to climate change legislation and the messaging could have been stronger, but it would have been a waste of political capital. THE VOTES WEREN’T THERE for cap-n-trade, a carbon tax or even a weaksauce Renewable Energy Standard. The Republicans are not debating issues nor are they interested in policy, really. They are committed to the destruction of the Obama Presidency and they don’t care what they have to do in order to make sure he is another Jimmy Carter. It’s like they’re trying to have the Second Coming of Reagan or something…
I agree that the main flaw of the Obama Presidency so far is that he has been practically inept at controlling the framing of political debates and always argues in Republican party terms. He’s always backed into the corner with the republicans holding middle class tax cuts or unemployment benefits hostage and his hand is forced towards suboptimal solutions far too often.
@ sault #34:
Name one piece of legislation?
The 2012 budget.
As I already pointed out earlier, the majority of the public (between 60-80% even among Republicans) supports what “The People’s Budget” contains, and it takes away the excuse of fiscal responsibility from the Republicans. But if you listen to Obama, you wouldn’t even know that it exists. Instead we get a more moderate version of what the Republicans are offering with cuts to many social services. It’s the votes of the public that ultimately matter, so why is he effectively ignoring the public and not using them against the Republicans more?
How about passing carrying firearms in national parks? How much of the public wanted that?
How about mining coal in Wyoming? Not many of the public seemed to support that.
Why is there still no prosecution of those responsible for the financial meltdown? The majority of the public wants that, but we’ve had no effort there. BTW, Goldman-Sachs was one of Obama’s campaign contributors.
Why is there no talk about limits on oil speculation? Most people seem to want that, but instead we only get his assurance that those involved in “illegal trading” will be prosecuted, no mention of increasing the regulation of the out-of-control market.
You mentioned cap-and-trade, so where was he in trying to gain support among the public? How many State of the Union addresses did he give where he really laid out the urgency of the problem, and the benefits of cap-and-trade? Did he really support cap-and-trade, or did he just claim to? It’s hard to say, but he was oddly silent even with a Democratic majority (and a majority of the public supporting action on AGW) when cap-and-trade was up for a vote.
He also could have done much more on health care, but by trying to work with the Republicans and the insurance industry he got a confusing mess that was easy for the Republicans to misrepresent to the public and no real cost controls. Why no big push for a simpler single-payer option, even with a Democratic majority in congress and with most people originally supporting health-care reform?
You mentioned that he couldn’t fight signing an extension of the Bush tax cuts even with a Democratic majority in both houses. Why then can he now fight it with Republicans in firm control of one of the houses?
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You seem think that the only way the Obama can ever get anything progressive to pass is if the vast majority of congress is supportive Democrats. That’s just not so. Many forms of progressive legislation have been passed without such circumstances, and had to fight their way to victory. The problem is that it’s up the the president to fight for it and to muster support with the public. If he doesn’t then he fails to have an effective Presidency regardless of how often he “wins” by compromising by going from the extreme far right to the right-of-center. Instead he fails to fight to gain public support even for progressive issues where he did actually claim to support the agenda. The votes won’t just fall into his lap, but they never will, he needs to fight for them by getting the public on his side but he failed to do that even when he had a Democratic majority in both houses.
Either he can’t fight the Republicans, or he doesn’t really care that much about supporting a progressive agenda. Considering his earlier campaign and that we are getting stronger rhetoric from him as we get closer to 2012 I don’t think that it’s that he can’t stand up to the Republicans, nor do I think that he can’t communicate to the public. Rather, I suspect that he just doesn’t want to “rock-the-boat” too much, a common affliction among many high ranking Democrats.
As to the Republicans wanting a second coming of Regan, I’m afraid that it’s much worse than that. The whole Republican agenda since Regan has been to keep cutting taxes, and therefore revenue, while increasing spending and cutting regulations. (Hence the reason why not fighting the Republicans about extending the Bush tax cuts was a mistake.) This is deliberate since the goal has been to push the USA into it’s current financial situation so as to force a cut in social services and agencies while cutting taxes further for the rich/corporations. The goal of such a policy is to force a large number of government workers into the private sector with the intention of the increase in available labor to drive wages down for the poor and middle class. This is also the reason for their union busting push.
Oops found an blatant typo…. the name “Regan” should have obviously been “Reagan”. Sorry about that.
Re your comment on Comment 5, above: Joe, I’m not sure what the misunderstanding is here. Yes, these (instituting torture, suspending the Bill of Rights, and fighting unending, needless, illegal wars) were Bush policies, but Obama has in every case made them his own–and made them worse by making them mainstream. And is there really anything in the politics of the 1990′s comparable in its human impact to the Obama Administration inaction on climate?