So. In response to a Politico piece in which the authors and White House whine about the left wing blogosphere not being happy with all of Obama’s “wins” and not caring about potential losses in 2010, Kevin Drum writes:
Here’s the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here’s the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.
Here’s the thing. What matters is whether policy works. It does not matter if what Obama did was more left wing than anything that’s been done in a while (though in absolute terms I would argue it mostly wasn’t left wing, the health care plan, for example, was essentially a Republican plan from the 90s), what matters is if it was left wing enough (big enough stimulus, smart enough health care plan) to improve people’s lives enough that they noticed.
It wasn’t, and that’s all that matters. Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn’t even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.
Sometimes half doesn’t work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama’s half assed “left wing” policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a “socialist” this means that Obama’s policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.
I don’t want Obama doing anything I agree with, because he will screw it up and discredit it. In this respect he is like Bush. He is poison because he is incompetent at policy.
As for the original Politico post, the hysterical ranting at the peanut gallery the authors clearly don’t even read, says more about them and the White House than it does about the left wing blogosphere they try to blame for Democrats own failures.
lambert strether
Ian writes:
More good reasons for the left to abandon the Ds to their Darwinian fate as rapidly as possible. And heck, lefties — He’s not that into you anyhow.
Tom Hickey
I am not so sure that Obama is “bad at policy.” I suspect that he is actually for what progressives regard as bad policy.
The president seems to want a bill that he can put a progressive frame around but which is basically trickle down. He apparently believes that what is good for Big Business is good for America, and also for Democratic coffers. As far as he is concerned, this is good policy and he has chosen advisors that will serve it up.
BTW, economist Randy Wray has a great blog today.
Goldman Vampire Squid Gets Bitch Slapped: JP Morgan Bitch Slaps the Dow; and Geithner Tries to Bitch Slap Elizabeth Warren
Fester
I won’t go into Obama’s motives, I don’t know the guy, but Kevin Drum’s comment had me scratching my head. There have been three Democratic presidents in the last forty years, including Obama. One was a first term governor who didn’t know inside the Beltway that well, put Georgians with only state political experience on his legislative relations staff, and is legendary for having bad relations with his own Congressional party, probably the worst of any president. The second was even more shameless than Obama in getting his Republican predecessor’s legislative agenda passed in his first two years, and deservedly had a Republican Congress to deal with in the other six. Then you have Obama. All the other presidents in the last forty years have been Republican (there is a reason for this, look at the records of the three Democrats).
No wonder I know longer read Kevin Drum.
anon2525
Here’s the thing. What matters is whether policy works…It wasn’t, and that’s all that matters.
Because the policies have not been working, they (the policies, Obama, and the democrats) are unpopular. And this concerns them because they would like to win (re-)elections in November. The complaining and foolish blaming are an implicit admission that some of them recognize that the policies are not working. If the policies had been working, they (the policies, Obama, and the democrats) would be popular, and they wouldn’t care whether some small minority liked them or not.
The good news is that some of them actually still care about what the population of the country thinks, at least to the extent that it affects elections. They are not all simply passing time until they can get a non-gov’t. job. The bad news is that rather than admit failure and change the policies, they go running to a reliable media outlet to complain.
Cujo359
Yes, and another nobody predicted this would be the reaction (prediction number four, if you’re in a hurry.) The only thing I, er, I mean “he”, was wrong about was the timing. The whining has started already.
Not that I’m terribly surprised.
Cujo359
I should say “Not that I’m terribly surprised. This is going to be a bad election year and the more they make this the meme that the mainstream news repeats, the more people who will accept it as true.
Ian Welsh
Well, motives or not, he is seen to have done left wing things “health care reform” and “stimulus” and is seen to have blown them thus discrediting those left wing things.
We are going to pay a great price for that.
S Brennan
Obama Record so far; The short Story.
PUT A LIBERAL SOUNDING LABEL ON RIGHT WING POLICY.
…and call it good.
In truth Obama is the most successful Democratic President ever.
Obama was put in place during a reform year:
1] When the Democrats could have won with a broken tennis racket,
2] when the country was posed for real reform of the last 35 years of “Friedmanism”
3] Barack snatched corruption from the jaws of reform and delivered a decade more of failed right wing policies that could very well end the US as we once knew it.
Heck of a job Barry…heck of a job Barry
The Raven
Barack Herbert Hoover Obama. Who knew?
myiq2xu
the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years.
Kevin has a funny definition of success. Obama’s “progressive” victories are similar to Bush’s “Clean Skies Initiative” – the labels are deceptive.
Bill Clinton gave us eight years of peace and prosperity, including the largest peacetime economic expansion in our history. During six of his eight years he faced a GOP Congress and during the other two he had one controlled by unsupportive Democrats.
That’s what I call success.
lambert strether
Drum’s definition of success is one that a “process Democrat” — items on a list of legislation that get checked off. Like any process Democrat, Drum takes no account of:
1. The “success” of the legislation relative to the scale of the problem. (That’s why the metric of past Presidents is meaningless.)
2. The “success” of the legislation in terms of likely outcomes from the policies embodied in the programs. (Ditto.)
b.
“He is poison because he is incompetent at policy.”
As the Preemptive Health Insurance Bailout Bill proves, he is not at all incompetent at policy. That you disagree with his actual policy goals (distinct from his publicly professed policy goals) does not imply that his goals and his accomplishment are different enough to warrant the excuse of incompetence.
Obama had a well-run campaign, he successfully and over many years build himself a career as the leading candidate for the Retainer-In-Chief and received the funds and seal of the corporate elite, he has preserved the financial industry, Federal Reserve, health insurance industry, the unitary executive of state secrets, detention, torture – and now assassination – he saved the telecom industry from FISA liabilities, the executive, CIA and DoD from torture prosecutions, and ensured the DOJ will stay a corrupt organization beholden to the president’s political apparat. That’s a lot of accomplishments for 18 months, in the midst of the most severe crisis in two or three generations. Most importantly, he will succeed in preserving his personal power for another term, because he also succeeded in convincing the vast majority of his voters that he is well-meaning – if, according to “some”, not too effective and competent.
Hostis humanis generis. The man is a law breaker, a torturer, and a murderer, and it would be worse than foolish to explain with incompetence what is properly attributed to sociopathic personality traits. That he stands in a proud bipartisan tradition of presidents only supports the case for malevolent competence.
Lori
b – perfect. That’s it. No one has said it better.
lambert strether
The “incompetence” meme is a hardy perennial. b does a great job uprooting it here, but it seems indestructible.
Ian Welsh
B. Can’t say I necessarily disagree. I sway back and forth between the two arguments.
Ian Welsh
I put this up at C&L as well. Just read the comments. Wow. Just wow. Still a ton of denial.
anon2525
As the Preemptive Health Insurance Bailout Bill proves, he is not at all incompetent at policy. That you disagree with his actual policy goals (distinct from his publicly professed policy goals) does not imply that his goals and his accomplishment are different enough to warrant the excuse of incompetence.
B. Can’t say I necessarily disagree. I sway back and forth between the two arguments.
Although I agree with ‘b’, the Incompetence charge still applies because Obama, Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Emmanuel, et al. while competently protecting their socioeconomic class, believe that by the actions they have taken they will bring about the results economically and politically that the anonymous complainer was talking about.
They want and expect those (secondary) results, and (at least some of them) think that they only reason that they are not getting those (especially the political) results is that people are writing criticisms of them. It is incompetent of obama&co to think that protecting the medical services industry, the fossil fuel industry, the weapons maker industry, the financial industry, and others that ‘b’ listed will lead to a sustainable, growing economy (yes, they want that as a goal — a growing pie, not dividing a stable or shrinking pie).
Again, this goes back to Jared Diamond’s observation about one of the common factors leading to collapse, namely, the decision makers protecting themselves from the consequences of their decisions. If you eliminate feedback in a system, then the system will shake itself apart (or somehow break itself) and fail.
anon2525
Shorter version: obama&co are competent neo-liberals. But neo-liberalism has been demonstrated to be incompetent economics.
David H.
Ian — thanks, I think, for sending me over to C&L! Holy mother of god (some, or most, of) those people are deluded. Wow is pretty much the only way to describe it. I guess that’s what happens when you spend your evenings watching MSNBC. Glad I gave that up.
Ian Welsh
People need to feel hope. They also have sunk costs they are protecting (aka. their belief in Obama).
But, well, as with an argument I’m having on Facebook with some folks, really, half-assed isn’t good enough. I need to rewrite a version of the “bear chasing you/all that matters is what a man can do” post for C&L, I guess. (With a timely hook.)
The truly maddening thing about being a pundit is that you have to say the same thing over and over and over again, and as one friend says “about the time even thinking about writing it again makes you nauseous, most of the audience is just barely beginning to get it.”
Mandos
Y’all may not believe in electoral politics anymore. But electoral politics still believes in you!
b.
Here is another data point:
“Arne Duncan has already cost teacher jobs by holding back $3.7 billion for a year and a half to try and entice more desperate states to change their policies.”
It might be a race to the bottom, but if they really want something, it is usually something noxious – like Pharma money for re-election ads – and they will play hardball to get it. I agree that Obama’s policy choices are poison for the best of The People, but I am getting really hung up on the Incompetence Dodge these days.
Germany was ruled for over 16 years by a chancellor whose name translates to “cabbage”. It pleased the German People – including many of his supporters – to deride him for pretty much his entire reign, drawing satisfaction from the perception that, quite obviously, most of them were smarter than he. The contrast to Schmidt, no liberal but competent beyond doubt, was staggering. Yet Kohl got re-elected, and reign he did – he jumped into the Yugoslavia break-up before it turned into all-out civil war, circumvented the constitutional mandate for a national convention on the occasion of the re-unification, implemented a disastrous re-unification of “currency before policy”, rushed into a corporatist monetary EU while sabotaging political unification and EU voter representation, and committed Germany to a decade-long program of privatization of tax funds through “economical aid” for the former DDR, most of which never reached the people that needed it. Germany is still paying for his reign, and is still discovering misdeeds and even criminal behavior. The current chancellor, Merkel, is his hand-picked and personally sponsored successor. I am not sure that the German People went on laughing, but they might still feel superior to the man who continues to rule their lives, 12 years after his official terms finally ended.
In a democracy, minimal competence might be nothing more than getting what you want, but that competence level is not only necessary , it is unfortunately quite sufficient. Obama is the perfect embodiment of this, and the distrust he is causing between voters – especially first time voters of 2008 – and the indispensible political class will shape elections for many terms to come.
Race To The Bottom:
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/07/15/duncan-barnes-reiterate-veto-education-jobs-funding-if-race-to-the-top-cut/
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/07/17/americas-dilemma-teachers-or-food/
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/07/02/the-war-supplemental-a-rundown/