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 t
he 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:
