Obama's eloquence and the "Citizens United" decision

I get why some Democrats are enthusiastic about seeing Barack Obama give an eloquent campaign speech for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe on Saturday. And I certainly hope McAuliffe wins that election.

His speech in this video from The Independent starts at 1:32:00, Live: Obama campaigns with Virginia gubernatorial candidate McAuliffe 10/23/2021:

I'm sure the speech will be quoted and celebrated on the Sunday talk shows.

But it came off to me as a nostalgia act. He's a great speaker, and he invoked the hits of yesteryear. And, thank God, he didn't talk about the need for a new Simpson-Bowles Let-Grandma-Eat-Catfood Commission to promote cuts in Social Security and Medicare ("entitlements"). Not all oldies were hits.

He did talk about the importance of protecting voter rights, and good for him that he did. But we should also recall another eloquent speech of his during his first term after the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision in January 2010 that laid waste much of the campaign-finance regulations.

It was actually one of his best speeches, Weekly Address: Fighting for the Public Against Special Interests 01/23/2010:

From the text:

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

Citizens United is still in effect. Obama and the Democrats did make an effort that year to pass legislation called the DISCLOSE Act that would institute disclosure requirements to remedy some of the harm of the Citizens United decision. Senate Republicans killed it with a filibuster. Here is a brief history from Wikipedia:

The DISCLOSE Act passed the House of Representatives in June 2010 on a 219–206 vote, but was defeated in the Senate following a successful Republican filibuster; after cloture motions in July 2010 and September 2010 resulted in 57–41 and 59–39 votes, respectively, failing to obtain the necessary 60 votes to advance. Senate and House Democrats, such as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, have re-introduced variants of the DISCLOSE Act to each succeeding Congress since 2010. An unsuccessful 2014 version of the bill was sponsored by 50 Senate Democrats.

In 2019, the DISCLOSE Act requirements were incorporated into the broader For the People Act (H.R. 1), which passed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on a party-line 234–193 vote, but did not advance in the then Republican-controlled Senate.

The Democrats had a 59-vote majority in the Senate in mid-2010. Fifty of those Democratic Senators plus Joe Biden as Vice President and presiding officer of the Senate could have changed the filibuster rule and passed that law. The same dilemma the voting-rights legislation faces right now.

Although Obama said of Citizens United, "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest," in practice he and the 59-41 Democratic majority in the Senate considered the Senate filibuster rule more important to retain than it was to remedy what declared to be the most devasting thing for the public interest at that moment.

After that, Citizens United became one more item on the Democratic list to use for fundraising letters.

But Obama's January 23, 2010 speech on the topic was eloquent. So there's that.

The Democratic push for bipartisanship and massive Republican resistance during the Obama Presidency

Obstruction works for Republicans opposing a Democratic President. It works because they are willing to do it. And it works because Democrats all too often are unwilling to use entirely legitimate tools at their disposal to overcome the obsttrucion.

In the introduction to their important 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than Itz Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, define the problem as follows. They use an example of what I would describe as really bad economic policy combined with really bad politics, a resolution known as the Conrad-Gregg proposal.

A contemporary article from The Hill described it this way (Gregg: Fiscal panel bill lacks the votes 01/12/2010):

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) told The Hill on Monday that the proposal he’s pushing with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) doesn’t have the 60 Senate votes necessary to pass. An amendment creating the fiscal commission will get a full Senate vote next week during a debate over a bill raising the debt limit.

Gregg and Conrad’s plan would set up a process to come up with a bipartisan fiscal reform package that would be ensured a vote on the House and Senate floors. The commission’s supporters, mainly centrist lawmakers in both chambers, have said that the special legislative process is necessary to any fiscal reform because lawmakers aren’t willing to consider the politically perilous tax increases and spending cuts necessary to bring down the deficit, which hit a record $1.4 trillion last year. The Senate bill has 33 co-sponsors in addition to Gregg and Conrad. [my emphasis]

Obama's push for the Grand Bargain

This effort was part of President Obama's pursuit of a "Grand Bargain," a fundamentally conservative idea that Obama held that was also bad politics. The idea was that Republicans would agree to raise taxes on the wealthy and the Democrats would agree to make cuts to "entitlements," which means primarily Social Security and Medicare, but is also used to include Medicaid. Obama floated this idea during his 2008-9 Presidential transition period, pointedly raising it to a group of conservative journalists. Digby Parton was sounding the alarm about it even at the time. (Fiscal Madness Hullabaloo 01/11/2009)

This is what Obama was telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos on national TV even before he was sworn in as President, but knowing that he was going to have very solid Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate ('This Week' Transcript: Barack Obama ABC News 01/11/2009):

OBAMA: So what our challenge is going to be is identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient.

I'm not suggesting, George, I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace that we had hoped.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me press you on this, at the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of a grand bargain? That you have tax reform, health care reform, entitlement reform, including Social Security and Medicare where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?

OBAMA: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And when will that get done?

OBAMA: Well, the -- right now I'm focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure that we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you describe is exactly what we're going to have to do.

What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government, what are we getting for it, and how do we make the system more efficient?

STEPHANOPOULOS: And eventually sacrifice from everyone.

OBAMA: Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game. [my emphasis]

So Obama first pushed through a stimulus package that economists including Paul Krugman was about half as big as it needed to be to start an adequately strong recovery, and one heavily weighted toward tax cuts whose stimulative value was dubious, and one that despite his compromises with Republicans failed to win any significant Republican support in Congress.

And in a move that was a kind of apology for passing stimulus at all, Obama stressed the need for cutting the deficit, and appointed the notorious Bowles-Simpson Commission, officially called the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, with a charge to come up with an austerity plan. Critics called it the Catfood Commission, as in "Let Grandma Eat Catfood," to highlight the fact that the two programs so critical for older people - and two programs that were and are spectacularly popular and successful and identified with the Democratic Party - Social Security and Medicare - were the prime targets of this austerity project. As Obama told Stephanopoulos, "Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game." Especially people with old skin.

How did any Democrat ever convince themselves that this was good policy or good politics?

The economics of federal deficits

To be fair to establishment Democrats, for a long time even liberal economists held to the idea that the deficit was important to control or eliminate. Even in "pure" Keynesian terms, many liberals held to Keynes' own position that the federal budget should be balanced over the business cycle. That is, the government should run deficits to stimulate the economy in recessions and reduce deficits during expansions. John Kenneth Galbraith explained in his classic The Affluent Society (1958) a very practical problem with this, which is that it's easier for politicians to vote to increase spending and cut taxes during recessions than it is for them to reduce spending and raise taxes during expansions.

His son Jamie Galbraith explained in the same context that Obama was addressing in his 2009 Grand Bargain talk why the deficit obsession of that moment was wildly misguided in terms of real-world economics. (The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008)) Without getting into the weeds, the end of the Bretton Woods international currency system in 1973 meant that the dollar became a de facto international reserve currency, and it remains so. There is an accounting identity which he explained this way:

There is a basic relationship in macroeconomics, as fundamental as it is poorly understood, that links the internal and the international financial position of any country. A country's internal deficit, that is, its "public" deficit and its "private" deficit - the annual borrowing by companies and household - will together equal its international deficit.

Money flows are part of the international deficit, and as long as the US dollar is the world reserve currency, other countries will hold significant amounts of dollars as reserves. Along with the US trade deficits, this means that the US has run chronic international deficits for decades and will continue to do so. So the only way the federal budget goes into surplus, as it did briefly at the end of the Clinton Administration, is if private companies and households are collectively borrowing more than they are spending, i.e., creating a "private" deficit. That only happens at a time of net investment in the private economy, where the borrowing in a given year is higher than the spending.

In other words, the federal government doesn't actually control whether there is a public deficit or not. State and local governments are required to balance their budgets annually. So if spending exceeds borrowing in the private economy, the federal government will run a deficit. (Accounting relations like this sometimes sound downright mystical. But in this case, they reflect real-world macroeconomic effects.)

The 2011 "Grand Bargain" fiasco

Mann and Ornstein in their book describe how the Republicans obstructed the Conrad-Gregg proposal to force a vote on the kind of deficit reductions the Republicans had been saying they themselves wanted.

The true Republican positions on deficits since "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," as the former Bush-Cheney Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported that Dick Cheney told him. The Bush-Quayle Administration did cooperate with Democrats on a tax increase, but it was distinctly unpopular among the Republican base. "Deficits don't matter" has been the real position of the Republican Party since 1980.

How did the Republicans block the Conrad-Gregg proposal? By using the filibuster. With the full support of that legendary Bold Maverick John McCain, who always bragged about his ability to "reach across the aisle," i.e., work in a "bipartisan" way with Democrats:

But on January 26, [2011] the Senate blocked the resolution. Fifty-three senators supported it, but it could not garner the sixty votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Among those who voted to sustain the filibuster and kill the resolution were Mitch McConnell and John McCain. McCain was joined in opposition by six other original cosponsors, all Republicans. Never before have cosponsors of a major bill conspired to kill their own idea, in an almost Alice-in-Wonderland fashion. Why did they do so? Because President Barack Obama was for it, and its passage might gain him political credit.

Even after that setback, the Obama-Biden Administration continued to bang their heads against that wall, in pursuit of the chimaera of a Bipartisan Grand Bargain that was especially unpopular among Democratic voters. (Jay Newton-Small, The Inside Story of Obama and Boehner’s Second Failed Grand Bargain Time 07/23/2011)

David Atkins gave an idea of the wretched politics of this later effort in The New York Times reports. You decide. Hullabaloo 07/22/2011.

It was this political context that gave rise a few months earlier to what I like to call The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)

Mann and Ornstein themselves cautioned in 2011, "Maneuvering tirelessly to stake out some elusive political center, in other words, won’t help Obama win over swing voters. It’ll just set him up for another year of looking weak and ineffectual." (David Brooks’s Awful Advice to Obama New Republic 10/28/2011)

What Mann and Ornstein highlight throughout their 2012 book is the asymmetric partisan polarization of American politics. That involves the continual radicalization of the Republican Party which has not remotely been matched by a similar ideological polarization on the Democratic side. And still isn't today. (See: the January 6 Capitol insurrection directly incited by Republican President Donald Trump.)

And the seemingly eternal conservative Democratic argument for promoting conservative policies that their own Democratic base voters dislike is that it's a way to appeal to swing voters who supposedly love bipartisanship. Obama relied on this argument, although for him it seems to have been more than a cynical political argument. He really did seem to value "bipartisanship" as a good thing in itself. But he also claimed it was good politics. Whatever the ontological virtue of Bipartisanship may be, the latter assumption was clearly wrong in 2011, as Mann and Ornstein relate:

America got [a] crisis-the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression-and a pretty clear signal from the voters, who elected Barack Obama by a comfortable margin and gave the Democrats substantial gains in the House and Senate. What the country didn't get was any semblance of a well-functioning democracy. President Obama's postpartisan pitch fell flat, and the Tea Party movement pulled the GOP further to its ideological pole. Republicans greeted the new president with a unified strategy of opposing, obstructing, discrediting, and nullifying every one of his important initiatives. Obama reaped an impressive legislative harvest in his first two years but without any Republican engagement or support and with no apparent appreciation from the public. The anemic economic recovery and the pain of joblessness and underwater home mortgages led not to any signal that the representatives ought to pull together, but rather to yet another call by voters to "throw the bums out." The Democrats' devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, in which they lost six Senate seats and sixty-three in the House, produced a Republican majority in the House dominated by right-wing insurgents determined to radically reduce the size and role of government. What followed was an appalling spectacle of hostage taking - most importantly, the debt ceiling crisis - that threatened a government shutdown and public default, led to a downgrading of the country's credit, and blocked constructive action to nurture an economic recovery or deal with looming problems of deficits and debt. [my emphasis]

Good policy is often good politics for the policy's supports. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes - far too often, actually - bad policy can be good politics for its supporters, especially in the short run.

But the Democratic Party's decades-long fondness for Reagan-lite positions that were both bad policy and bad politics for their own party is a different sort of thing.

Related: Norm Ornstein on the 2020 Republican Party: "This is a cult" Contradicciones 12/05/2020

Biden, Confederate Republicans, and the heritage (and continuing presence) of Obama

Now that Joe Biden has been elected President, even a thoroughly Both-Sides-Do-It guy like Chuck Todd is now willing to call Trump and at least some Republicans anti-democratic, as he showed on Meet the Press yesterday. But he still brought on loyal Trumpist ally Tennessee Confederate Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander to defend Trump with, you got it, Both Sides Do It. Sen. Alexander seems to think that Georgia's Stacey Abrahms was also a Presidential candidate.

But in the Bruch Liberalism daydream that now that Trump is leaving the White House, we're back to our Exceptional American normality with a Democratic President and a Republican Party with stodgy ideas and bad manners that is nevertheless willing to be a loyal opposition and respect the results of elections. Unfortunately, anyone holding on to that idea has probably been taking the commentary from people like Chuck Todd the last way to seriously in the last 20 years or so.

Because the Both Sides Do It world that mainstream pundits report on is a convenient fantasy to protect their access to shameless partisans who will give them anonymous partisan quotes to use: the world of the End of History in which taking political contests more seriously than sports matches. But that world, to the extent it ever actually corresponded to reality, is not the one we live in now.

At the latest, that world became a zombie haunting corporate media newsrooms sometime between the New York Times' first Whitewater story in 1992 and Bush v. Gore in 2000. Trying to make sense of today's US politics against a backdrop of that fantasy land is about as helpful as trying to learn how parents should approach distance learning for 10-year-old during a COVID lockdown by watching episodes of Leave It to Beaver.

In this Facebook post of 12/13/2020, Dan Rather writes:

But there is of course another deep worry pervasive in this country. It is about America's heretofore unbroken peaceful transfer of power between presidents. It is the notion that all of us, regardless of party, play by and revere the same democratic ideal that we the people have the power to fire our leaders in free and fair elections. This election has revealed a president who doesn't believe any of that, and a party and base that is eager to go along with him. This is not fringe; it is a movement that encompassess [sic] tens of millions of Americans. And to defeat it and preserve American democracy will require resolve, patience, ingenuity, and grit. [my emphasis]

The problem of Trumpism is a particular, symptomatic moment in the Republican Party whose Presidential candidate he was and which has followed him remarkably loyally in his anti-democracy program. The Republican Party is now the Confederate Party, the John Calhoun Party, the Trump Party.

For Democrats and anyone who considers themselves "left" in current, reality-based terms (i.e., not QAnon/One America News/FOX News/Republican Party terms), part of understanding the present is understanding how that, however "classy" and intelligent and compassionate President Obama may come off as a media figure, the combination of his political program during his Presidency and his strategy for the Democratic Party not only failed to achieve the Bipartisanship which he really seemed to value as a good thing in itself. It also left the Democratic Party unable to defeat Donald Trump in 2016 and left their leaders largely dazed and confused on how to politically combat him during the last four years.

Lili Loofbourow's article Barack Obama Sat Out the Past Four Years and It Shows (Slate 12/11/2020) is a timely reminder of this. Obama is not only a popular speaker and media star in his own right. He's also still very influential in the Democratic Party, and very much on the side of Establishment (i.e., conservative) policies and political messaging. She calls attention to one of the most important and persistent characteristics of his political rhetoric:

Barack Obama is ready to come back into the spotlight. After four years spent mostly out of the public eye, right on the heels of Donald Trump’s defeat, the ex-president is suddenly everywhere. ...

But in these recent appearances, the most surprising thing might be that his political remarks about this moment feel stale. Maybe his absence from the fray over these past four years has cost him. Maybe he’s using a different timescale to measure progress (as he sometimes explicitly says he is). But even his harshest remarks about the right don’t capture the hysterical party we’re watching try to steal an election. His recent criticisms of “snappy” leftist political slogans like “defund the police” reflect an abiding faith in a theory of politics that seems passé—as several Black intellectuals and activists have pointed out. Boiled down to its essentials, Obama’s argument is that one shouldn’t “alienate” people who might be converted to your cause if you say things in just the right way. In practice, that means tucking the political self into a package that a “reasonable person”—that usefully unmeasurable political fiction—cannot help but find acceptable and persuasive. [my emphasis]

David Bromwich wrote some useful analyses of Obama's rhetoric and messaging while he was President, although it was sometimes marred by what seemed to be a distinct dislike of the man. But this comment from Bromwich that I quoted in 2012 post is an important observation:

[Obama] has often echoed Lincoln's Second Inaugural, the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama's many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a curious idea. Unity for its own sake will capture neither votes nor lasting loyalty among people who crave an explanation of the elements of political right and wrong. [my emphasis]

That post of mine was David Bromwich looks again at Obama's words and speculates about his personality 07/12/2012, in which I also looked at how Obama rhetoric fit so well with the neoliberal policy preferences. As I noted there, Obama distrusted progressives because he's not one, though in 2004-2008 when he first emerged as a national figure, he cultivated the notion that he was. He even regarded progressives with contempt, and I noted there that it was surely in major part because of his identification with the wealthy. I quoted a contemporary speech of his on his tax policies in which he made a point to refer to "the wealthiest Americans -- folks like myself".

In her current piece, Loofbourow observes, "Obama’s commitment to not alienating people is fascinating to the precise extent that it becomes a principle in its own right." (my emphasis)

But that approach has proven to be spectacularly deficient in dealing with the Calhoun-ized, QAnon-ized Republican Party that we now have:

Obama’s personal self-packaging has long been extraordinary. He won two elections with it. But he also disproved his own theory. Despite his extraordinary efforts to perform an unoffending normalcy, he was spectacularly mischaracterized as a socialist, a Kenyan, a Muslim, a criminal, and more. He was demonized by an opposition party whose virulent determination to shove evidence aside has only grown since—they will read Biden as a communist pedophile and Trump as an athletic man of God. This is not an environment where self-editing or careful packaging matters. Nor is it one where bland political slogans gain purchase. [my emphasis]

I'll close by recalling that Obama's "principle in its own right" of non-offensiveness was applied during his Presidency with much more rigor when dealing with hostile Republicans than in dealing with progressives in his own party.

Obama before look-forward-not-backward on Executive Branch crimes

 What Obama had to say about prosecuting criminal actions by members of a Presidential administration when he was running for President in 2008. From Will Bunch, Obama would ask his AG to "immediately review" potential of crimes in Bush White House Philadelphia Inquirer 04/14/2008.

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. ... I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. ... Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law - and I think that's roughly how I would look at it.

This is one of the things that made Obama an attractive candidate to progressives in 2008 and made a lot of people think he was a progressive himself.

And just like other times when he is campaigning or fundraising, he can be eloquent and on point on major issues of concern to ordinary people, including Big Picture issues like democracy and the rule of law, which he was addressing there. If there had been substantive investigations and prosecutions of the torture crimes and various other serious lawbreaking during the Cheney-Bush Administration, the Bush crime gang could not have gone about their criminal enterprise in the way they have.

But from all appearances, he didn't mean a word of it. He was committed to impunity for lawbreakers of the Cheney-Bush government.

Obama on Investigating Bush Crimes: "Need to Look Forward" TPM 01/11/2009:

• David Johnston and Charlie Savage, Obama Reluctant to Look Into Bush Programs New York Times 01/11/2009
• Robert Kuttner, Truth, Reconciliation, and Obama The American Prospect 01/26/2009
• Arianna Huffington, Memo to Obama: Moving Forward Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Also Look Back Huffpost 02/13/2009 (updated 05/25/2011)
• Larry Cox, Obama must prosecute Bush-era torture enablers Christian Science Monitor 06/15/2009
• David Cole, Obama’s Torture Problem NYB Daily 11/18/2010
• Glenn Greenwald, Obama's justice department grants final immunity to Bush's CIA torturers Guardian 08/31/2012
• Thomas Frank, Compromising Positions Harper's Sept 2012
• Robert Parry, How ‘Looking Forward’ Tripped Up Obama Consortium News 03/12/2014
• Timothy Lee, Instead of prosecuting torturers, Obama prosecuted the guy who revealed the program Vox 12/09/2014
• Dan Froomkin, Obama Wanted to ‘Look Forward, Not Backward’ on Torture, But He Failed to Look Either Way Medium 03/13/2018
• Lisa Hajjar, Why Gina Haspel, the Queen of Torture, Was Able to Rise to the Top of the CIA The Nation 03/16/2018
• Adam Serwer, Obama's Legacy of Impunity for Torture The Atlantic 03/14/2018
• Murtaza Hussain, Report to U.N. Calls Bullshit on Obama's 'Look Forward, Not Backwards' Approach to Torture The Intercept 10/30/2014
• Rebecca Gordon, Torture’s legacy of impunity Responsible Statecraft 02/22/2020

Biden and the risk of a no-mandate Presidency

I'm fine with the concept of a united front between conservatives and the left against fascism, Orbanism, or other forms of authortiarianism.

In theory. But politics doesn't happen only in theory. And in the current American political reality, we have two political parties who in some important sense have collapsed. The Republicans are now the Bunker Boy party. Trump is driving the position and tone of the party, and he's generally incompetent at government and knows only demagoguery as a political strategy. And he's a serious authoritarian. Robert Reich puts it this way:

Trump is a fascist. https://t.co/E77DID8hiB

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 7, 2020

But the political scene is defined by asymmetric partisan polarization. Joe Biden, now all but formally the Democratic Presidential candidate, is a conservative Democrat. And he's pursuing what may be the only kind of campaign he's capable of mounting, which is to continually define himself as Not Trump.

But in a country that has been through two weeks of a genuine popular uprising against white racism and militarized policing, this is man who is leading the Democratic Party. Joe Biden Warns Of "Predators On Our Streets" Who Were "Beyond The Pale" In 1993 Crime Speech America Rising PAC 06/18/2020:

Yes, that was 27 years ago. And Biden has enough sense to try to strike a different tone in today's political environment. We have to hope he does! Because trying to out-Republican the Republicans, or trying to sound moew authoritarian than the authoritarians, which is exactly what Biden was doing there, is not only a losing strategy for 2020. It also would leave the new Democratic President with no mandate but a Republican-but-not-Donald-Trump one.

It will be interesting to see if the Republicans and/or other pro-Trump groups will try to use this videa to depress Democratic turnout in some areas. Because this whole segment drips with racialized fear-mongering. He didn't need to be specific about the race of the incorrigible evildoers he was talking about her. This was a period in which violent crime really had peaked. But the political context was heavily racialized by blaming crime on dishonest and demagogic images of degenerate, conscience-less black young men - who came to be labelled by a pseudo-scentific label of "superpredators". So when Biden says in that clip after 2:50, those scary monsters need to be "in jail. Away from my mother. Your husband. Our families," he didn't need to hold up cartoon from a Citizen Council magazine to show people who he was talking about.

A sad contemporary documentation of this assumption around that time came from Thomas Edsall with Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991). Allegedly taking a liberal perspective, Edsall argued that whichever party was seen as the most anti-black party would dominate American politics for the foreseeable future. The 1992 Presidential victory of Bill Clinton provided convicing evidence against that argument. But Joe Biden, working with the Clinton Admnistration, was still on that bandwagon.

The attractiveness of that position for the Democrats of that day was in no small measure a function of the fact that California at the was considered a safe Republican state in Presidential elections, and therefore Democrats needed to win votes from conservative Southern whites in national elections. Clinton and Gore actually carried California in 1992. And California Gov. Pete Wilson permanently tarnished his own reputation and made California a safe Democratic state by his successful passage of Proposition 187 in 1994. The law itself was overturned by the courts as unconstitutional. And it boosted Latino voting rates in California and shifted Latino voting preferences significantly more to the Democratic side.

So even the supposedly hardheaded, pragmatic calculation driving that brand of Democratic politics in the early 1990s was highly questionable.

And yet, here we are in 2020, with the Democratic Party still trying to sound as bland and accomodating as possible to Republcian positions. Of course, the Democrats still have a long list of policy positions they recite that makes the eyes of even the staunchest Democratic partisans glaze over after a few seconds. But the define their themes and images around a bland moderation rather than developing themes that build support for Democratic reforms.

For instance, Barack Obama did a "virtual town hall" last week. (Obama holds virtual town hall on policing and civil unrest PBS Newshour 06/03/2020) He was clear and comforting and thinks things have mostly gotten better over the last ten years on the white racism front. And talks about task forces. [Deep sigh!]

I've missed the protest signs saying, "We Demand a Task Force!" That's like a throwback to those long-ago days of, oh, a month ago when people were scandalized at talk about a "revolution" in the form of, well, national health insurance and higher voter participation.

The 1 1/3 hour-long event also features legendary freedom fighter and Wall Street lawyer Eric Holder. Who was Better Than Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions. He quotes Richard Pryor saying that "you don't see many old fools". Does this guy not talk to anyone over 35? Did he pay any attention at all to the age patterns among white people who voted for Bunker Boy in 2016?

It also features Phillipe Cunningham, who sits on the Minneapolis City Council and who according to his Wikipedia profile "identifies as black, queer, and transgender." He gives a (to me) strangely chipper pitch about all the constructive things they've been doing to reduce police violence in, uh, Minneapolis. That same city council just passed what sounds like a bold "abolitionist" reform of their police forces. But after Minneapolis cops touched off a nationwide peaceful revolt by murdered George Floyd, I'm not sure how much they have to bring in the way of successful police reform ideas at theis moment.

The Democrats do seem to be using Obama as a major surrogate for Biden. Which is smart politics.

But we still need to be concerned about what a government can accomplish whose only political mandate is We're Not Trump. Rick Perlstein has this take on the moment (Michawel Finnegan, Biden vows police reform after sealing Democratic nomination to challenge Trump Los Angeles Times ):

Historian Rick Perlstein described Biden, a U.S. senator for 36 years, as a “bellwether politician” who — like Johnson before he ascended to the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination — is not easily seen as a leader of major structural change in American society.

But the “interlocking catastrophes” of COVID-19, a historic surge in unemployment and now racial upheaval could well force Biden, should he unseat Trump, to rise to the occasion and pass laws as sweeping as the New Deal adopted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to overcome the Depression, he said.

“The kind of sink-or-swim ideology of America is not going to cut it,” said Perlstein, author of “Nixonland,” a book on the social turbulence of the 1960s and ‘70s in the United States. “So it is in a lot of ways a New Deal moment, and it really demands a president who’s willing and able to build a coalition for structural change, or else we’re going to face all kinds of catastrophes like the ones we’re going through now.”

Barack Obama and crimes of the Bush-Cheney Administration

This story is an excellent example of a serious problem, not only for Obama himself as a President but also for the Democratic Party more generally: their acceptance of Presidential impunity for criminal actions and the larger circle of immunity that flows from that. Obama Voices Concerns For Dropping Charges Against Gen. Flynn In Private Call MSNBC 05/09/2020:

Obama's own Administration was remarkably free of corruption based on what has come to light. And that should be a model for other Presidents to follow.

But one of Obama's most consequential Presidential legacies is this: David Johnston and Charlie Savage, Obama Reluctant to Look Into Bush Programs New York Times 01/11/2020, Bush's criminal torture programs in particular are referred to here:

In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”

Mr. Obama added that he also had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

“And part of my job,” he continued, “is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.”

The Bush administration has authorized interrogation tactics like waterboarding that critics say skirted federal laws and international treaties, and domestic wiretapping without warrants. But the details of those programs have never been made public, and administration officials have said their actions were legal under a president’s wartime powers. [my italics and bolding]

The only thing Dick Cheney couldn't give his Unitary Executive experiment under the Bush Administration was a subsequent Democratic administration that granted de facto immunity from prosecution for serious crimes committed by Bush-Cheney officials. Barack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder from 2009-2015 gave him that. The same was true of his successor under Obma, Loretta Lynch.

This wouldn't have to have been a "political" investigation and prosecution. There are a variety of laws and organizational structures intended to prevent politicized prosecutions. The case of Michael Flynn which has been prominently in the news the last week was one in which a former Trump Administration official was investigated, prosecuted, and convicted by the Justice Department under the Trump Administration.

Eric Holder could have directed such investigations to be done in the regular Justice Department structure. He could have recused himself from decisions on such prosecutions to minimize the effect of inevitable Republican accusations that the investigations were partisan. He could have established a Special Prosecutor like Robert Mueller's investigation on Russian election interference. Obama could have asked Congress, which had Democratic majorities in both Houses in 2009. to establish and Independent Prosecutor, although the reckless and irresponsible Ken Starr tarnished that idea badly. He really did run a crassly partisan investigation.

But regardless of the particular organizational approach used, the Obama Administration had the most serious kind of responsibility to investigate and prosecute crimes committed in the torture program and the deliberate deceptions the Bush-Cheney government engaged in to persuade Congress to approve the invasion of Iraq based on phony claims made to Congress in knowing bad faith.

Instead, Obama adopted a policy of de facto impunity under the slogan of looking forward not backwards. Which, of course, is not the standard applied to crimes not committed by CEOs or senior government officials.

That was a real failure. Trump as President would have been corrupt and otherwise criminal. Because that's who he is and what the Republican Party is now. But it would not have been so easy if crimes during the Cheney-Bush Administration had been professional investigated and prosecuted.

See also:

• Mark Thompson, Obama's Growing Dilemma on Torture Prosecution Time 04/22/2009
• David Cole, Obama’s Torture Problem New York Review of Books 11/18/2010
• Glenn Greenwald, Obama's justice department grants final immunity to Bush's CIA torturers
• The Guardian 08/31/2012 Adam Serwer, Obama's Legacy of Impunity for Torture The Atlantic 03/14/2018

Trump is now suggesting that his Administration will concoct some kind of completely bogus charges on which to prosecute Obama himself. So his generosity to officials of the preceding Republican Administration is apparently not reciprocated by the subsequent one. The result: Republicans think they are free to break the law in their official positions, including ginning up phony charges against Democrats.

But that particular tradition of granting immunity for criminal acts of torture was continued under Bush-Pence, and expanded to include what seems to be the entire government: Michael McGough,Like Obama, CIA nominee [Gina] Haspel wants to ‘look forward’ on torture questions Los Angeles Times 05/09/2018.

The Democratic Party and the real existing American left

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti use the example of Viriginia, which has a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature, as a warning about how anti-labor the establishment Democrats have become, Previewing the hellish future of a Biden administration Rising/The Hill 04/16/2020:

So far as I'm aware, Krystal Ball has a solid progressive record. And she does good analysis from a left-progressive perspective. The setup of their show Rising is to have a dialogue between her and the Republican-libertarian position of Saagar Enjeti. Or, as he puts it in another segment, "a mission of this show is to put the populism in dialogue with [the] populist right."

I think that may have been a Freudian slip, because he probably meant to refer to her position as "populist left". Instead he called it "the populism" versus the "populist right", which is actually more accurate because the "populist right" is demagogic against immigrants, minorities, and women, but definitely not pro-labor. Some of the European far-right parties make a somewhat better pretense of being in favor of pro-labor positions on economic issues.

Krystal is walking a difficult line right now with her stance. The Republicans have an interest in publicizing left criticism of Biden and the dominant corporate wing of the party. But on the other hand, if the pro-labor left wants to push the Democrats more toward that position, they have to advocate for those positions. On the other hand, there's a risk that a well thought-out left position like hers can give undeserved credibility to more dubious partisan plugs from the "right" half of the dialogue. But then, politics is about differences between positions.

Part of politics is also the "convert" posture, and of course the conversion is sometimes sincere. The NeverTrump Republicans are the most prominent example right now. The mainstream media love apparently "counterintuitive" positions, like Republicans criticizing Trump. Ronald Reagan worked that "counterintuitive" angle for decades after he had switched from a vaguely left-leaning Democratic position to hardcore rightwinger. One of his most famous lines was, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left me."

An undated Time article on Reagan, who formally became a Republican in 1962, as one of the "Top 10 Political Defections" recounts this bit of history:

An F.D.R. fan, the Gipper [Reagan] campaigned for Helen Gahagan Douglas in her fruitless 1950 Senate race against Richard Nixon and encouraged Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for President as a Democrat in 1952. While he was working as a spokesman for General Electric, however, his views shifted right. "Under the tousled boyish haircut," he wrote Vice President Nixon of John F. Kennedy in 1960, "is still old Karl Marx." [my emphasis]

Yes, rightwing Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists and communists for a long time, no matter what their actual positions were.

Since the right tends to support the power of large corporations enthusiastically , there's generally more money and career opportunity in switching from left to right than vice-versa.

The part of the American left that identified in some way with the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 - and that basically includes everybody who sees themselves as "left" - have a general if vague understanding that the current Democratic establishment is basically conservative, although more committed to classical liberal small-d democratic values than the Republicans (a very low bar), but far from being a labor party or New Deal party any more. At the same time, there seems to be a general recognition that the American election system with its winner-take-all districts creates heavy pressure for a two-party system.

Which means that building an actual left majority requires takeover of the Democratic Party, which in turn requires an inside-outside strategy that requires building a left infrastructure from media to stronger labor unions to cultural institutions.

There's always a temptation to expect that crises will bring about some kind of political realignment. But there's nothing automatic about it. The Great Recession that officially began in December 2017 did produce an historic rejection of the Bush-Cheney administration. But it's hard to disentangle the effects of the financial crisis from the mess of the Iraq War and the spectacularly bad handling of the Katrina disaster. Obama was very much the favored candidate of the Democratic left in 2008. That was partly because that's how he pitched himself, especially the fact that he opposed the Iraq War prior to beginning his Senate career. It was generally assumed, I think it's safe to say, that an African-American Democratic President would be inclined to lean left. But Obama kept his public profile famously in his no-red-America-no-blue-America conciliatory posture. When he became President, he immediately adopted essentially the same neoliberal economic policies of the Clinton Administration, tailored of course to the economic crisis of the moment. And he literally turned foreign policy over to Hillary Clinton as his first Secretary of State.

But the Republicans had no use for Obama's fantasies of Bipartisan Harmony and the party continued its self-radicalization. Which meant they treated the Obama Administration as a radical left entity to be bitterly opposed. Perhaps ironically, the shift of the Republican Party after the Great Recession was far more dramatic. The Democratic Party staged a restoration of the Clinton Administration complete with the ridiculous celebration of austerity economics. The Republican Party became the openly authoritarian party of Donald Trump. Who, by the way, is our current President and Obama's successor in the White House.

Obama himself as President identified himself explicitly and publicly as aligned with the corporate, neoliberal wing of the party early on in his first Administration (Carol Lee and Jonathan Martin, Obama: 'I am a New Democrat' Politico 03/10/2009, less than two months after his Inauguration):

“I am a New Democrat,” he told the New Democrat Coalition, according to two sources at the White House session.

The group is comprised of centrist Democratic members of the House, who support free trade and a muscular foreign policy but are more moderate than the conservative Blue Dog Coalition.

Obama made his comment in discussing his budget priorities and broader goals, also calling himself a “pro-growth Democrat” during the course of conversation.

The self-descriptions are striking given Obama’s usual caution in being identified with any wing of his often-fractious party. He largely avoided the Democratic Leadership Council — the centrist group that Bill Clinton once led — and, with an eye on his national political standing, has always shied away from the liberal label, too.

"Resistance" Democrats are fond of quoting Maya Angelou, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time," at least when they are using it to refer to Trump. It would have been a good concept for more Democrats to keep in mind back in March, 2009. Digby Parton was paying attention at the time, and was already calling attention to Obama's pronounced conservative bent.

So it's a good thing that progressives this days are paying closer attention to what the actual Democratic leadership is about.

Was the Obama Presidency a "last chance"?

Trump is threatening to use an actual Constitutional power that he does have to full some appointive vacancies and de facto deprive Congress from reviewing it. (Brett Samuels and Jordain Carney, Trump threatens to adjourn both chambers of Congress The Hill 04/15/2020)

What legal complications there might be, I don't know. And, yes, someone other than he came up with the idea because it's unlikely in the extreme that Trump himself has ever read the Constitution, much less understood what he read.

I'm very concerned about the overextension of Executive power in the US, especially in foreign policy and intelligence matters. John Dean's Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (2004) focused heavily on how the Cheney-Bush Administration abused government secrecy during their first term. They continued to do so afterwards. Al Gore's book The Assault on Reason (2007) was largely an highly critical look at the abuses and dangerous expansion of Executive power throughout that Administration.

The exaltation of the Executive Branch longs preceds the neoliberal era identified with the Reagan Administration. Andrew Bacevich writes in The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (2020):

Today, with Donald Trump occupying the office that was once Kennedy's, it is useful to recall how, in the decades after World War II, the president became something bigger than a head of government and grander than a chief of state. Entrusted with the authority to order a civilization-obliterating nuclear attack, he served by common consent as "leader of the Free World."

By and large, Americans approved of this development, deeming it necessary and perhaps even fitting. After all, who better than a white heterosexual God-fearing American male to shoulder such awesome responsibilities? Presiding over the West's most powerful nation, the president was, by common consent, the most powerful man anywhere outside the Communist Bloc. The Free World obviously needed a leader. Who but our guy could possibly do the leading? [my emphasis]

But the Executive Branch today operates in a context of asymmetric partisan polarization.

Which means that the Republicans are both more aggressive in using Congressional power to stymie Democratic Presidents (Clinton and Obama) and employing election chicanery (segregationist voter suppression, stealing the 2000 Presidential election in Florida with the help of a partisan Supreme Court) and in aggressively expanding Executive power under Republican Presidents. While the Democratic leaders have to be dragged kicking and screaming into fighting the Republicans, as we saw in the Trump impeachment.

And when we look at the current Trump threat on appointments - it's difficult to even imagine Barack Obama or Joe Biden making a comparable threat against a Republican-dominated Congress.

And that brings my mind back to real lost opportunities from the Obama Administration:

• Obama ran for and won the President in 2008 using a movement-building model. When he became President, he folded the Obama for America organization into the Democratic Party structure and discontinued the "50 state strategy" that Howard Dean as chairman of the party had used to build the party organization nationwide.
• When he took office, he proposed a notoriously "pre-compromised" proposal for stimulating the economy after the 2008 crash, at a time when he had maximum popular capital taking over in the middle of the Great Recession much to the chagrin of more progressive economists like Paul Krugman.
• As Ryam Grim describes in detail in We've Got People (2019), Obama's team was ready to throw in the towel on the Obamacare program, and had to be pushed by grassroots organizers and Nancy Pelosi (!!) to keep pushing for it. And he tossed the public option overboard, never seeming to take it seriously. (Hillary Clinton had supported a public option in the 2008 primary race, Obama had not.)
• Obama was at his eloquent best in denouncing the disastrous Citizens United decision early in 2010. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he declared. "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest." But his response amounted to a half-hearted attempt to get a legislative fix which the Republicans quickly shot down. After that, the issue was essentially just added to the standard list of issues on Democratic Party fundraising appeals. I don't see how anyone could seriously argue that Obama's response on Citizens United and campaign financing more generally even came close to taking his own initial rhetoric on it seriously: I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.
• When the death of rightwing Justice Antonin Scalia presented him with a Supreme Court vacancy in early 2016, Obama nominated Merrick Garland. "Widely regarded as a moderate, Garland had been praised in the past by many Republicans, including influential senators such as Orrin Hatch of Utah." But, "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared any appointment by the sitting president to be null and void." (Ron Elving, What Happened With Merrick Garland In 2016 And Why It Matters Now NPR 06/29/2018) Did Obama bring anything like the pressure on the Senate Trump is threatening over Administration appointments this week? Not remotely.

And now we have Joe Biden as the Democratic Presidential candidate, ready to continue the asymmetric polarization, looking for compromises with a continually radicalizing Republican Party, without remotely attempting the partisan pressure that Republican apply against Democrats. Here are Michael Brooks and his team discussing Obama's endorsement of Biden, with the Obama video included, Obama’s Biden Endorsement: Talking Left, Walking Right (TMBS 135):

Although I take it for granted that Obama's Administration was far better than the low bar set by the Trump Administrtion, he was much more a transactional rather than transformative President. And it could be many years before the Democratic Party has the chance that Obama clearly had to change the asymmetric partisan polarization in a way that favored Democratic and progressive priorities. But that was not what he or the Democratic establishment wanted.

Demobilizing the base - standard operating procedure for corporate Democrats

Jamie Galbraith did an essay for Jacobin's academic journal Catalyst 1:3 (Fall 2017) titled The Predator State that points to an important part of how the Democratic Party during the Obama-Biden Presidency consciously weakened itself as an organization willing and capable of responding to popular pressure against the policies associated with the neoliberalism that became the dominant economic paradigm in the US and Britain during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the early 1980s.

Neoliberalism is characterized by its general orientation toward business deregulation, financialization of the economy, reductions in government services and social insurance, privatization of government property and key functions including education, a priority for reducing taxes on the wealthiest while accepting a radical increase in the maldistribution of wealth and income, and an negative emphasis on "individual responsibility," so that the weak and the poor are condemned for their failure to successfully manage their own personal "portfolio" of skills. It is associated with political demobilization and a dominant media with a strong affinity for oligarchical interests.

Galbraith gives us this summary:

This political dispensation [neoliberalism] was initiated in the late 1970s, strongly advanced under Reagan, and fully formed by the middle years of the Clinton administration. It was the heart of politics in the Bush years. There might have been some reason to hope, when President Obama was elected, that it would be contained if not reversed in the wake of the financial crisis. Unfortunately there was no such luck either in the financial sphere or in the way health care reform was designed. The result has been an embedding of predatory encroachment of corporate interests in government on a bipartisan basis, with intellectual consequences that include the subsumption of public administration into such topics as outsourcing, transparency issues, civic engagement, performance metrics, and the like - anything to disguise and distract from the erosion of an autonomous public power. Related phenomena include the public-private “trans-actors” - a wonderful word - and “shadow elites” which have been described by the anthropologist Janine Wedel. [my emphasis]

The Obama-Biden version of the neoliberal approach was not as grim, vicious, and lawless as that of Trump. Although Obama and Biden and their Attorneys General were adamant that there would be no priority on criminal prosecution of members of the Bush-Chene3y Administration for criminal actions they committed in office. And the Obama Administration was also famously unwilling to seek criminal prosecution of criminal actions by major bank executives that originated the financial crash of 2008 and left millions of people with the homes foreclosed.

And Galbraith describes how the Obama team consciously went about guarding against an activist party base being able to bring intra-party pressure against such policies. It's important to remember here that Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee 2005-2009 had pushed hard to develop a "50-state strategy" aimed at challenging the Republicans even in conservative congressional districts and building a new bench of Democratic office-holders, political leaders, and activists at the local and state levels.

President Obama was elected on a surge of pan-racial popular enthusiasm in 2008, and he assembled a very adept campaign at the time, effectively using new technologies with every prospect of building a renewed popular and participatory base for the Democratic Party. However, that prospect would have been lethal for Wall Street. It would have put in place a power base that was not prepared to tolerate the preservation or resurrection of conditions that had led to the financial crisis, and therefore for that and perhaps other reasons, it was not pursued.

Instead, over eight years the party was allowed, even encouraged, to wither away, abandoning whatever popular organization and base it could have developed or was developing in the last years of the Bush administration. What was left by the time Hillary Clinton assumed her role as the party’s nominee was largely a coterie of policy professionals, of in-and-outers from finance, law, the Ivy Leagues, and the think tank world, whose focus was largely on mission-specific, career-building trajectories, and backed by a political operation whose major focus was advertising and polling. [my emphasis]

Marshall Ganz, a longtime organizer for the United Farm Workers union, headed Obama's field operation in 2008 and took a movement-building approach that helped Obama successfully bypass much of the "coterie" of party operatives and cautious campaign professionals that Galbraith describes. But once elected, Obama quickly folded his "Obama for America" campaign organization into the regular party structures. And ousted Howard Dean as DNC chairman in favor of safe corporate Democrat Tim Kaine, who became Hillary Clinton's running mate on the 2016 ticket which they lost to the Malicious Orange Clown Donald Trump.

Back in late 2010, Ganz argued in How Obama lost his voice, and how he can get it back Los Angeles Times 11/03/2010 that the times in which Obama became President called for transformational leadership. But what the Obama Administration has provided had been transactional leadership: "The nation was ready for transformation, but the president gave us transaction. And, as is the case with leadership failures, much of the public's anger, disappointment and frustration has been turned on a leader who failed to lead."

Obama and his team made three crucial choices that undermined the president's transformational mission. First, he abandoned the bully pulpit of moral argument and public education. Next, he chose to lead with a politics of compromise rather than advocacy. And finally, he chose to demobilize the movement that elected him president. By shifting focus from a public ready to drive change - as in "yes we can" — he shifted the focus to himself and attempted to negotiate change from the inside, as in "yes I can." [my emphasis]

"Yes I can" instead of "Yes we can" is a good brief definition of the neoliberal ideological meaning of "personal responsibility."

During the presidential campaign, Obama inspired the nation not by delivering a polldriven message but by telling a story that revealed the person within - within him and within us. In his Philadelphia speech on race, we learned of his gift not only for moral uplift but for "public education" in the deepest sense, bringing us to a new understanding of the albatross of racial politics that has burdened us since our founding.

On assuming office, something seemed to go out of the president's speeches, out of the speaker and, as a result, out of us. Obama was suddenly strangely absent from the public discourse. We found ourselves in the grip of an economic crisis brought on by 40 years of antigovernment rhetoric, policy and practices, but we listened in vain for an economic version of the race speech. [my emphasis]

More on the chronic moderation temptation in the Democratic Party

Obama biographer David Maraniss in an interview with Chauncey DeVega discusses Obama moderate politics and how it functioned in our era of asymmetric partisan polarization in the US. (Biographer and journalist David Maraniss on Trump, Obama and history turned "upside down" Salon 01/03/2020.

Barack Obama had a special capacity to appeal to people’s better instincts. But Trump has the opposite ability, to appeal to people’s worst instincts — and those worst instincts are racist.

... Barack had his own flaws, of course. But in terms of dignity, intelligence, reliability, and honesty, he was at the top in all of those categories. That probably infuriated people who were racist even more. The whole attack on Obama began with the most racist claim of all, that being “birtherism.” Trump was at the root of those claims and he certainly took advantage of them.

Am I being too hard on Obama? I was disappointed that he was not more forceful and direct about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He knew what was going on but chose not to be more public in his intervention.

Obama was playing by rules that the other side was not. That has been a dilemma for the Democrats for a while now. The Democrats are still playing by normal standards and the Republicans have only one thing in mind, and that is to wield and hold onto power, period. [my emphasis]

I'm very familiar with the chronic centrist defensive crouch which has dominated the Democratic Party for decades. A great deal of it is the price the Democratic Party pays for the support of big-money donors. So it's not quite the psychological mystery it might seem on the surface when we see the Democratic Party backing off fighting for their own official positions. Still, even in a really cynical view, the Democratic and Republican parties are separate, competing organizations. They have different voting bases, separate defining themes, even separate industries among wealthy donors each party tends to favor despite the broad consensus of both parties on a neoliberal, market-fundamentalist economic dogma. And the parties' elected officials and party activists also have career interests that push them to try to be effective partisans.

All that said, left-progressive positions on a wide variety of policy issues from Social Security and Medicare (including expanding the latter) to environmental issues to consumer protection to infrastructure expansion to support for science to women's rights to sane immigration policy to opposition to the Forever War to support for nuclear arms control are consistently more popular than the standard bipartisan neoliberal assumptions and particularly more popular than the Republican Party's positions. So why should there be any significant support among the party base for defensive positions that favor timid solutions presented with Republican framing?

I recently posted about an essay by David Edward Burke that I characterized this way:

In other words, Democrats should have no grand visions. No serious commitments to reform. No willingness to address serious existing and developing problem head-on. And, most importantly, they should be acting like they intend to fight for their own positions.

This is the asymmetric polarization on full display. The Republicans are willing to pursue radical positions, even ones that are unpopular, and fight to push them through. They haven’t been shy about pursuing a Reagan Revolution or a Gingrich Revolution.

I think for some Democrats, Obama's Administration reinforced the notion that being modest and technocratic in approach in a particular way. I think for some white liberals even more than for African-American voters, the election of an African-American President was seen as more transformative of politics more generally than it was in reality. Given America's history of white racism against blacks in particular, it was a tranfsformative moment that reflected a historical shift in white racial attitudes. And it wasn't "only" symbolic, as important as political symbolism is. Obama was not a "token" or a figure like Clarence Thomas or Ben Carson who becomes a prominent political figure by adopting pro-discrimination slogans and arguments uswed by Republicans as anti-black propaganda.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about one major aspect of Obama's moderate confrontation with a Republican Party that was in a continuing process of radicalization and fanaticism (Fear of a Black President The Atlantic Sept 2012):

What we are now witnessing is not some new and complicated expression of white racism - rather, it’s the dying embers of the same old racism that once rendered the best pickings of America the exclusive province of unblackness. Confronted by the thoroughly racialized backlash to Obama’s presidency, a stranger to American politics might conclude that Obama provoked the response by relentlessly pushing an agenda of radical racial reform. Hardly. Daniel Gillion, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies race and politics, examined the Public Papers of the Presidents, a compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances—­proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders—and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961. Obama’s racial strategy has been, if anything, the opposite of radical: he declines to use his bully pulpit to address racism, using it instead to engage in the time-honored tradition of black self-hectoring, railing against the perceived failings of black culture.

His approach is not new. It is the approach of Booker T. Washington, who, amid a sea of white terrorists during the era of Jim Crow, endorsed segregation and proclaimed the South to be a land of black opportunity. It is the approach of L. Douglas Wilder, who, in 1986, not long before he became Virginia’s first black governor, kept his distance from Jesse Jackson and told an NAACP audience: “Yes, dear Brutus, the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves … Some blacks don’t particularly care for me to say these things, to speak to values … Somebody’s got to. We’ve been too excusing.” It was even, at times, the approach of Jesse Jackson himself, who railed against “the rising use of drugs, and babies making babies, and violence … cutting away our opportunity.” [my emphasis]

I think a lot of white liberals came out of the years of Obama's Presidency thinking something along the lines of, the policies of the first black Presidency represented the outer limits of the feasibility in terms of political goals and tone. And his rhetoric could be inspiring. His initial verbal response to the Citizens United decision was on point. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he wrote. ""I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest."

But after a seemingly half-hearted attempt to enact legislation that would address the problem he identified, he pretty much dropped the issue as any kind of serious priority. A rhetorical dodge that establishment Democrats are still employing today.

Eight years of Obama's Presidency brought the Presidency of Donald Trump. This is not a good outcome. And a Democratic program of Making American Boring Again is not theright approach to get a better result. Nor will fantasizing about Bipartisdanship as some kind of governing principle:

Until recently I wondered whether Joe Biden's seeming naivety about the GOP, his insistence that he could work with Rs, was a pose. But it's now clear that he really was clueless about the ruthlessness of his opponents. Not a good sign https://t.co/UsznZjGfzN

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 6, 2019

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 3 of 4)

The same month this book was published, the United States and Iran veered very close to immediate war over the ill-considered and likely illegal assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Obama’s drone wars and Clinton’s cavalier statement about Gaddafi’s death made it mor difficult for Democrats to make straightforward criticisms of Trump’s action – to the extent they wanted to do so at all.

The Emerald City Presidencies, continued

He also notes that the “armed intervention in Libya [was] nominally justified to prevent genocide, but actually intended to overthrow longtime Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi,” i.e., yet another regime change operation with a bad outcome.

Bacevich makes a Niebuhrian judgment on the mentality that led to the Iraq War, which could also apply to general hubris of the Emerald City US period he defines by neoliberal globalism, militarized global dominance, a privatized expansion of personal freedom, and the ever-growing significance of Presidential power:

... a conviction that God has bestowed on the United States unique prerogatives is deeply embedded in the nation's collective consciousness. Yet this particular variant of American Exceptionalism incorporated three distinctive themes: unvarnished militarism, missionary zealotry, and extreme nationalism. Prior American experience had offered glimpses of each. Distinguishing this particular recurrence [the Iraq War] was the chain reaction they produced as they came together.

Just as the neoliberal illusions crashed repeated in the 1990s and 2000s in the developing world and most spectacularly for America and Europe as well in 2008, Bacevich offers us a narrative framework to understand similar processes playing out in US foreign policy and the elevation of Donald Trump to the Presidency, which joined the most irresponsible version of narcissistic personal freedom (Trump’s general decadence and corruption) with the dangerous unilateral power of the US Presidency.

Bacevich’s political perspective

Bacevich is not a politician or an ideologue. He has a complex combination of perspectives. Although much of his analysis of the world is consistent with a progressive viewpoint, his also has perspectives that would fit into a reasoned conservative viewpoint. Though in the age of Trump and Citizens United, in practical politics such a viewpoint effectively doesn’t exist. As we see daily with the parade of Republicans and alleged conservatives cheerfully defending Trump’s violations of the Constitution, his contempt for American electoral laws, and his crass criminality.

But he definitely is not promoting some “third way” or “beyond left and right” perspective. Because people promoting those kinds of notions are most often promoting some variation of hard right politics or occasionally some feel-good fantasy that we can have democratic politics without conflict, controversy, or partisanship.

He has a forthcoming book called American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition, featuring a variety of readings from American conservatives. Reinhold Niebuhr, much of whose perspective had such an influence on him, was in the 1950s a realist Cold War liberal who became very much a critic of the Vietnam War. In Bacevich’s earlier book American Empire (2002), he draws carefully on two critics of American foreign policy, the Progressive historian Charles Beard (who sadly in his later years became a dogmatic rightwing isolationist ) and the left historian William Appleman Williams , both of whom gave particular attention to the domestic sources of American foreign policy.

A Trumpist interregnum?

This book appeared in the final month of Trump third year as President, and the text of course dates from earlier. So Bacevich is cautious in in his assessment of Trump’s work-in-process Presidency.

He believes that Trump’s election was a rejection of the Emerald City conventions across the board, even though neither Trump’s campaign messages nor his actual policies can be described as particularly coherent:

Himself a mountebank of the very first order, Trump exposed as fraudulent the triumphalism that served as a signature of the post-Cold War decades. On this score, Trump mattered and bigly.

With Trump in the White House, claims that the fall of the Berlin Wall inaugurated an era of American political, economic, military, and cultural ascendancy became impossible to sustain. In fact, End-of History boosterism, backed by the conviction that America had perfected a system of political economy, mastered war, and discerned the true meaning of freedom, has turned out to be utterly wrongheaded, doing untold damage to Americans and others. The genius of Trump's "Make America great again" campaign slogan derived from its implicit admission that assertions of greatness made in the wake of the Cold War had turned out to be both empty and perverse. [my emphasis]

Democrats who style themselves as The Resistance critically miss the most important lesson that can be currently drawn from Trump’s Presidency. As he puts it with two of his book’s most important metaphors, “the Emerald City consensus is as defunct as the Boone City consensus that preceded it.” And, echoing the Book of Daniel (“Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”. 5:27), he makes this Owl of Minerva judgment:

The post-Cold War recipe for renewing the American Century has been tried and found wanting. A patently amoral economic system has produced neither justice nor equality, and will not. Grotesquely expensive and incoherent national security policies have produced neither peace nor a compliant imperium, and will not. A madcap conception of freedom unmoored from any overarching moral framework has fostered neither virtue nor nobility nor contentment, and won't anytime soon. Sold by its masterminds as a formula for creating a prosperous and powerful nation in which all citizens might find opportunities to flourish, it has yielded no such thing. This, at least, describes the conclusion reached by disenchanted Americans in numbers sufficient to elect as president someone vowing to run the post-Cold War consensus through a shredder.

His “Acknowledgements” at the book’s end is dated April 2019, so he might well word some of his assessments about the Trump Presidency a bit differently in January 2020, when it was published. Not many people would be writing at the time of publication, for instance: "Despite U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran and the other signatories to the agreement remained in full compliance with its terms. If Trump's action was intended to provoke the Iranian government into some action that could be construed as a casus belli, as Iranophobes clearly hoped, it failed."

Iran just announced it will no longer abide by the terms of the JCPOA. And on the first weekend of January, war with Iran looked like a distinct and immediate possibility.

But his point in this concluding chapter where those sentences appear is that democracy in America still has a immediate fighting chance and that even a clumsy pullback from some of intrusive military policies of the Emerald City consensus is not automatically the catastrophe that military contractors and their lobbyists might want us to believe. It’s always possible that in a couple of years, that might sound like false optimism, i.e., things aren’t all that bad, perhaps the most dangerous self-reassurance for a democracy under immediate threat.

But no one reading this book will think its author imagines Trumpism to be harmless. On the contrary, he’s making a point that Bernie Sanders supporters will recognize and applaud, that Trumpism isn’t a fluke or a singular threat: it’s an understandable and undesirable result of the failures of a neoliberal order and an excessively interventionist and hubristic foreign policy, which Clintonites and Cheneyites and Obamaites were very much part of constructing. And he also takes full account of the fact that much of what Trump claims as his accomplishments are puffery, bluff, and a large quantity of hot air.

In a Niebuhrian world haunted by Original Sin, nobody gets off the hook.

Yet Bacevich isn’t looking for some alternative utopia of easy harmony. In fact, he makes an argument that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (who advocate a 21st-century version of Madison's Federalist #10 theory of democratic polöitical conflict) would appreciate:

... the immediate need is not to impose a new consensus, but to allow serious debate. In a country as deeply divided as the United States, the proximate aim should not be to obscure differences but to sharpen them further and thereby give them meaning. Americans deserve choices that go beyond Trump vs. Clinton or Republicans vs. Democrats or what currently passes for conservative vs. what gets labeled progressive.

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 2 of 4)

Bacevich implicitly uses 1991 as the end of the Cold War, a more clearly defined dividing point than the Owl of Minerva can usually identify. He takes the war that year to push Iraq out of Kuwait as the historical demarcation line, a conflict called at the time the Gulf War. (The beginning of the Cold War is conventionally dated somewhere between 1945 to 1948.)

The Emerald City Presidencies

The press and public perception of that war would prove to be a crucial element of the often miserable US experiences with wars the next three decades:

The conclusion of the Cold War showed that the U.S. military could win without fighting. The Persian Gulf War showed not only that America's armed forces could still fight, but that they were seemingly invincible.

So the nation's military narrative added a chapter: After Vietnam there now came Desert Storm. The latter did not expunge the former. Yet the military failure in Southeast Asia now lost much of its relevance. By putting a ragtag Iraqi army to flight, the United States had emphatically "kicked the Vietnam syndrome," as President George H. W. Bush put it at the time. With that, reticence about using force evaporated, especially in elite circles. In a post-Cold War world that awaited shaping, America's manifest superiority in all things military positioned it to do whatever needed to be done.

This is key to understanding Bacevich’s understanding of what the book’s subtitle describes as the US squandering its Cold War victory and the destructive hubris that was integral to it. Freed from the balance-of-power considerations of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the policy limits imposed by the negative public view of the Vietnam War, the US could now indulge in war after war without the prospect of a major domestic political backlash.

Bacevich quotes a prime example of the American Exceptionalist rhetoric characteristic of the Emerald City era, this one from Colin Powell in 1992:

No other nation on earth has the power we possess. More important, no other nation on earth has the trusted power that we possess. We are obligated to lead. If the free world is to harvest the hope and fulfill the promise that our great victory in the Cold War has offered us, America must shoulder the responsibility of its power. The last best hope of earth has no other choice. We must lead.

In reality, the enormous popularity that President G.W. Bush enjoyed in 1991 after the successful conclusion of the war with Iraq did not prove sufficient to get him re-elected against Bill Clinton in 1992.

As the Owl of Minerva can now clearly see, the “successful” conclusion of the First Gulf War actually meant continuing low-level air war of the US against Iraq, punctuated by the big escalation of the very unfortunately named Operation Desert Fox in 1998. (See: Andrew Corseman, The Military Effectiveness Of Desert Fox: A Warning About the Limits of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Joint Vision 2010 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 02/16/1999)

It led further – by the conscious decision of the Cheney-Bush Administration with the explicit support of leading Democratic Senators including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry – to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, whose very deadly consequences are still playing out in 2020. The Iraq War also dramatically increased the regional power of Iran by removing the balancing power of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Iraq. And, of course, at the time Bacevich’s book appeared in January 2020, the US was on the verge of war with Iran.

Bacevich traces the broad path of US wars and assertions of military dominance through the Clinton Administration and its interventions in the Balkan Wars:

In the ceaselessly updated chronicle of the American military experience, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns - Operation Deliberate Force, lasting just three weeks in the late summer of 1995, and Operation Allied Force, spread across seventy-eight days in the spring of 1999-have long since been crowded out. Both featured what military theorists were then calling "precision bombing." In both cases, American air forces operated at high altitudes and faced negligible resistance, with U.S. losses all but nonexistent.

... during Clinton's eight-year tenure as commander in chief, these were the only victories the U.S. military was able to claim. As such, at least for a time, they shaped American expectations regarding the use of force. Here, it seemed, was evidence that the United States had solved the riddle of making armed might politically purposeful. [The military idea of] Full-Spectrum Dominance was no longer a theory. Bosnia and Kosovo made it fact.

While stressing this feature of the Clinton Administration that continued the hubristic direction of Emerald City, he makes it clear that the Bush-Cheney Administration took a qualitative (and bad) next step:

The central theme of Bill Clinton's tenure in office had been globalization. The central theme of George W. Bush's tenure became war, which some in his administration conceived as a sort of complement to globalization - another approach to bringing the world into conformity with American preferences. While Clinton had dabbled in war, the events of September 11 prompted Bush to embrace it wholeheartedly. Wars that still today follow their meandering course ultimately consumed his presidency.

The name devised to justify those conflicts-the Global War on Terrorism - amounted to an exercise in misdirection. … As an explanation for U.S. policy after 9/11, terrorism comes nowhere near to being adequate. Indeed, much like the shelling of Fort Sumter in 1861 or the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon served less as a proximate cause for war than as a catalyst. [my emphasis]

And he describes the various arrogant assumptions that flourished in the Bush-Cheney foreign policy that “went altogether off the rails”, a task which Bacevich was diligently performing in real time during that Presidency in his published work and public appearances:

The Bush Eschatology struck me even then as vainglorious, if not altogether blasphemous. Yet by no means did it signify a fundamental change in the trajectory of post-Cold War American statecraft. On the contrary, it reaffirmed in the strongest possible terms the premises underlying those policies. [my emphasis]

Noting that he himself voted twice for Obama as President, he carefully points out what he sees as Obama’s positive accomplishment. But Obama did not break from the four elements that Bacevich identifies as characterizing the Emerald City era, despite the symbolically transformative nature of the election of the first African-American President.

Obama “saved globalized neoliberalism”, he writes, but did not substantively transform it. “Sadly, the mendacity and malfeasance that had paved the way for the Great Recession went essentially unpunished.” Through policies like his escalation in the Afghanistan War, the failure to fully extricate American troops from Iraq, his extensive use of drone attacks, and the 2011 intervention in Libya, Obama modified but did not fundamentally alter the kind of militarized global dominance approach of the post-1989 era.

He has a particular criticism of this moment in the Libya intervention when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about the torture-murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi by rebels:

On March 19, Western air attacks on the Gaddafi regime commenced. By October, the regime had collapsed and Gaddafi himself was dead. On national TV, a laughing Clinton bragged, "We came, we saw, he died."

Yet liquidating Gaddafi no more settled the matter than the fall of Baghdad ended the Iraq War. His ouster merely paved the way for a years-long civil war. As Libya descended into anarchy, the United States largely washed its hands of further responsibility. Years later, Clinton was still insisting that the intervention she had done so much to promote exemplified "smart power at its best," the apparent measure of merit being not the results achieved but the dearth of U.S. combat casualties.

... I also found her premature and unseemly victory dance regarding Libya indicative of someone possessed of a dangerously deficient understanding of war. [my emphasis]

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”