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

The endless argument over Trumpism and "economic circumstances"

Walker Bragman did a tweet this past week that set off a bit of a flap in the quasi-theological dispute over Racism/Sexism vs. Economics, a perennial favorite on the left that constantly morphs in its particulars.

The issues involved are real and have been part of American politics since 1776 or so in some form or another. But they sometimes wind up sounding like the proverbial medieval theological disputes over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. This was not actually a theme in medieval Christian theology, but why spoil a good metaphor? (It apparently evolved as a polemical mockery of scholastic Christian theology including that of Thomas Aquinas.)

Bragman writes as a progressive, including this piece for the social-democratic journal Jacobin, Does Joe Kennedy Still Believe Austerity Is the “Right Blueprint Forward”? 08/26/2020, in which he criticizes Congressman Joe Kennedy's advocacy of austerity economics in the context of his losing campaign against progressive Democratic Sen. Jeff Markley. Nancy Pelosi made a point of endorsing Kennedy in that campaign to attempt to strengthen the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in the Senate. Or "establishment wing," if you prefer.

Bragman reminds his readers in that piece about an aspect of the Obama-Biden Administration that Democrats would prefer not to flag in an election year:

In August 2012, just three years after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression up to that point, Kennedy was a first-time congressional candidate. During a debate hosted by the Martin Institute at Stonehill College, Kennedy told moderators that something had to be done about the debt and deficit and that the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan had gotten it more or less right. That plan — which came out of a White House commission touted by Vice President Joe Biden — proposed cuts to Social Security, along with Medicare and Medicaid. [my emphasis]

Obama in his 2008 campaign against John McCain, and to a large extent in his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, presented a more progressive image than the way he actually governed. From the perspective of 2020, there's a good argument to be made that the 2008 crisis (the recession in the US technically started in 2007) represents a turning point where the neoliberal model of both parties that dates back to the 1978-80 period had run out of steam. Without going off on that particular tangent here, the Cheney-Bush model of governance on the Republican side, of which Trumpism is a direct if bizarre successor, and the Clintonite model of "bipartisan" centrism on the Democratic side, had hit their practical limits within the liberal democratic system.

The 2008 Democratic primary and the feminist/antiracist dichotomy

It requires a bit of effort now to recall, but Obama in 2008 was widely seen as the insurgent progressive candidate opposing the more conservative Hillary Clinton. The late Tom Hayden, one of the most prominent figures on the American left in the second half of the 20th century, evidently found himself torn about the diverging political currents in the Democratic Party. In 2008, he endorsed Obama over Clinton in the primaries. But in 2016, he endorsed Clinton over Bernie Sanders, as Miles Mogulescu describes in an obituary memory, My Last Visit With Tom Hayden and Why He Endorsed Hillary Over Bernie HuffPost 10/25/2016 (updated 12/06/2017).

But his perspective didn't necessarily take such a drastic turn as it might seem on the surface. In Obama’s Position on Iraq Could Put His Candidacy at Risk Huffpost (07/12/2008, updated 05/25/2011), he wrote:

Call him slippery or nuanced, Barack Obama‘s core position on Iraq has always been more ambiguous than audacious. Now it is catching up with him as his latest remarks are questioned by the Republicans, the mainstream media, and the antiwar movement. He could put his candidacy at risk if his audacity continues to shrivel.

I first endorsed Obama because of the nature of the movement supporting him, not his particular stands on issues. The excitement among African-Americans and young people, the audacity of their hope, still holds the promise of a new era of social activism. The force of their rising expectations, I believe, could pressure a President Obama in a progressive direction and also energize a new wave of social movements.

And of course, there is the need to end the Republican reign that began with a stolen election followed by eight years of war and torture, corporate gouging, environmental decay, domestic spying and right-wing court appointments, just in case we forget who Obama is running against.

So he recognized from the get-go that Obama's progressive image was far more style than substance. And he treated that as a practical pragmatic choice. The "identity" aspects of the 2008 Democratic primary had to do with the Hillary campaign trying to emphasize the feminist value of having a female President while trying, relatively discretely, to use Obama's race against him. The "Bernie Bros" label her supporters used in 2016 was proceeded by an "Obama Boys" label in 2008. Rebecca Traister wrote in Hey, Obama boys: Back off already! Salon 04/14/2008:

I received e-mails and phone calls from women voicing various strains of frustration: They told me about the sexism they felt coming from their brothers and husbands and friends and boyfriends; some described the suspicion that their politically progressive partners were actually uncomfortable with powerful women. Others had to find ways to call me out of earshot of their Obama-loving boyfriends.

Actually, Traister's article doesn't really work the racial implication of the phrase "Obama Boys" in the title. And it's a useful real-time account of the antiracism-vs.-feminism theme of that primary.

What we might call the "economic identity" or "class identity" aspect of that 2008 campaign was actually blurred by the dreary conditions of the economy and the general failures of the Cheney-Bush Administration. It was a safe assumption during the primary season that a Democratic Administration would be more proactive in stimulating the economy than the Republicans. And also they would handle emergencies like Hurricane Katrina better.

But as Traister noted with this quote from Mia Brunch, who "points to healthcare as an area in which 'Hillary's policy is the more politically progressive one, but this has somehow been ignored, and Obama was projected upon as the progressive redeemer. It's a political fantasy.'"

In addition, Obama's criticism of the Iraq War when he was a state senator in Illinois contrasted dramatically in the minds of antiwar voters with Clinton's vote for the Iraq War as a US Senator. And that was a really big deal in the 2008 primary.

Tom Hayden in the piece quoted above also referred to "the transforming nature of an African-American presidency." The very fact that enough voters were willing to get enough beyond the still deep-seated white racism to vote for an African-American man named Barack Hussein Obama for President was certainly a sign that lots of them were in a mood for a transformative Presidency after the Cheney-Bush years. And his presence in the White House as a competent, popular President was a living example of the falsehood of still deeply-ingrained racial prejudices.

But Obama presided over a transactional Presidency, not a transformative one. Hayden's caution about how much Obama's actual policy priorities would be progressive and antiwar were well founded. Obama's conservatism in economic policy, symbolized as Bragman rightly observes by the ridiculous Simpson-Bowles austerity plan that Obama and Biden supported, did not become associated with the anti-sexism/anti-racism-vs.-economic-progressivism in 2008 they way it did in 2020.

The 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and "identity" politics vs. "class" politics

Liberal New Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who in the 1990s found themselves in company with the neoliberal Clintonian version of globalization optimism found themselves by 2009 ringing the alarms over the reactionary nature of the austerity politics. Krugman started talking about the destructive effects of the media and establishment economics deference to those he mockingly labeled the Very Serious People. He named Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as being emblematic of the VSPs, who he defined as "someone distinguished by his faith in received orthodoxy no matter the evidence." (Faithocrats New York Times 07/14/2015) He quoted the following observation of John Maynard Keynes in that connection, "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally."

By 2016, Bernie Sanders was able to make a effective primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, campaigning as a "democratic socialist" who put forth an unapologetic New Deal type program emphasizing the need to create jobs and strengthen labor unions while also taking a strong stand on civil-rights and civil liberties. Sanders himself had strong roots in the civil rights movement. But as the representative of the very white state of Vermont, he had not been so prominently identified with civil rights causes over the years as some other leading Democrats. He stressed populist appeals to bring new voters into the active electorate and to shore up Democratic support in traditionally Democratic Rust Belt states where Republicans had gained considerable ground.

Hillary Clinton's campaign, heavily favored by the Democratic establishment controlling the Democratic National Committee (which should by their own rules have been neutral in the primary contest) emphasized civil-rights issues of combatting racism, sexism, and immigrant rights along with a continuation of VSP, Simpson-Bowles type economics, stressing the historic value of having a female President. Their campaign popularized the term "Bernie Bros" to dismiss Sanders and his supporters as racist and sexist, or at least weak on those issues.

Tom Hayden explained his reasons for endorsing Hillary over Bernie in the California Democratic primary in 2016 in I Used to Support Bernie, but Then I Changed My Mind The Nation 04/12/2020. It's a nuanced piece, which as I read it essentially argues in that moment that he going along with what he took to be a more-or-less inevitable Hillary win for the nomination. I voted the other way in that California primary myself. But he clearly was not expecting Hillary to govern as a flaming progressive.

Starting then and continuing to the present day, an establishment Democratic narrative became established which treated left-populist appeals and programmatic goals as inherently sexist and racist. Given Vladimir Putin's demonstrated fondness for the Trump campaign in 2016, Russian interference in American politics inevitably became an issue. Unfortunately, the Democratic establishment tried to package their criticism at times in what strongly resembled stereotypical and superficial Cold War rhetoric. And to a certain extent, that included an effort to smear left-populist Democrats like Bernie as at least vaguely un-American, as well. In one of the Democratic debates in 2019, Joe Biden interrupted Sanders while he was making a pitch for Medicare For All, aka, national health insurance, by injecting, "This is America!" (Biden shrugs off health-care costs when Sanders brings up Canada: 'This is America' The Week 09/12/2019)

That was at least factually true. The kind of national health insurance that is standard in Europe and much of the rest of the world and which produces much better overall public health results than the US private-insurance-based system is something that the United States has never had.

Dancing with the angels on the pin

The Democratic Party definitely has a progressive wing and corporate (more-or-less conservative) wing. The actual voters in the two Democratic camps are not themselves at this moment deeply divided over issues. But the corporate donors are deeply divided from the majority of the base that does want national health insurance, a Green New Deal, a revived labor movement, nuclear disarmament, and a genuinely peace-oriented foreign policy. The corporate donors want their corporate-deregulation international "trade" treaties and, massive subsidies for Wall Street with minimal restraint, and freedom for billionaires from the awful burden of paying taxes to support their country and their communities.

But they are happy to have the Democrats use mostly symbolic positions to show voters they are "woke" on issues relating to racism and sexism. Nancy Pelosi clapping sideways at the State of the Union address doesn't cost Democratic corporate donors a dime.

All this is a way of positioning the political rhetoric around these issues in the present-day US context. The multiple identities of even individual voters is obviously a compliated factor in politics. The notion of "intersectionality" emerged as a way to think about the multiple social identifications that voters have.

Here's where Bragman's tweet put him in the Twitter crossfire on an issue that is not very well suited for clarification on Twitter. (To put it mildly!) He was making reference here to the hardcore radical right. Journalists and political analysts are inclined to roll their eyes at what looks like a superficial "economic circumstances" argument to explain radical-right politics.

For one thing, looking at sociological trends is different than looking at individual motivations of highly engaged political activists. A child of an oligarchical family like Franklin Roosevelt can wind up as a "class traitor" who defended the rights of workers, farmers, and labor unions against the Economic Royalists of the 1930s. A kid from relatively modest circumstances like Paul Ryan who depended on public social insurance (i.e., Social Security) to get through college can winded up as an advocate for the Koch Brothers who wants to force grandmas everywhere to make catfood their principal nutrition.

Economic factors like employment, income levels, extreme of inequality all do affect voters political behavior and attitudes on politics and public policy. So do race, gender, national origin, region, religion, family political allegiances, employment, education, personal traumas like illness and divorce - the list goes on. Then there are psychological factors, like those described by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer in their new book, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020).

Especially after Trump's election, it became a dreary ritual for the New York Times and other mainstream outlets to send reporters out into the exotic heartland diners and interview conservative white people about why they voted for Trump and then did faithful stenography of their complaints about how all the city slickers and Mean Libruls looked down on them and that's why they found Trump's p****y-grabbing and xenophobic ranting about Mexican rapists so attractive.

A scholarly version of this misguided approach is Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right  (2016). She did a kind of participant-observer study of white people in Lake Charles, Louisiana in which she listened to their stories of how they were being picked on by them thar Mean Libruls and uppity black folks. And then she reported it out apparently without adequate inquiry into the factual basis of the claims they were making and also without putting their favorite narratives about the world into the long narrative tradition of Southern white-supremacist assumptions.

What we now calls issues of "intersectionality" are nothing new in left-leaning politics. Just Google German Social Democratic Party and "woman question" or "national question" to discover some of the abundant historical examples with just that one party. Or dig a bit into the history of the American anti-slavery movement to find many examples of how racial assumptions crossed class lines and also how wealthy interests have deliberately used white racism. The pre-Civil War slave patrols in the South are one historical example, which I discussed in a 2016 post (Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 3: Slave patrols and ... "false consciousness"? 04/03/206):

The slave patrols were posses in which non-slaveowning whites were compelled to participate that searched for blacks who were not on plantations. Plantations had their own plantation patrols, as well. The slave patrols were often vehicles of arbitrary abuse. They were also a key social institution by which the slaveowners won the support of non-slaveholders for the Peculiar Institution. The slave patrols gave free whites who might be inclined to political and/or violent anger against wealthy slaveowners the opportunity to vent their anger on vulnerable blacks, slave and free. And that's a key reason that participation was mandatory.

The fear of slave revolts was widespread and ingrained into daily life in the South prior to the Civil War. It was accompanied by periodic panics over them, most of which existed only the in the fevered, guilty imaginations of white people. Though slave resistance and the occasional slave revolt really did occur, too. John Brown fanned those fears with his plan to set up a guerrilla army in the South to free slaves in the years immediately before the Civil War.

The slave patrols were instruments of state terror against slaves and any whites who might attempt to assist escaping slaves. They were also a direct precursor of Reconstruction-era terrorist organizations of which the Ku Klux Klan is the most infamous.

Yes, racism, sexism, and xenophobia, and authoritarianism are all phenemena that are not purely dependent on immediate economic conditions or class identity. But they also exist within economic systems that both shape them are are shaped by them. The details of "intersectionality" will always present particular complications that will get translated into political rhetoric in a variety of ways.