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Obama in Question

2012; Duke University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-1729881

2164-0041

Gary Dorrien,

American Political and Social Dynamics

Four years ago we seemed to take a shortcut to some kind of national redemption. The same nation that enslaved African Americans until 1865 and imposed a vicious century-long regime of segregation and everyday abuse upon them elected an African American to its presidency. The same nation that elected twelve slave masters to its presidency elected a president whose wife was a descendant of American slaves. The same nation that never would have elected a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement to national office fulfilled some of the movement’s most idealistic hymnody. The same nation that made “USA” synonymous with imperial smashing in Iraq and torturing prisoners at Guantánamo made a bid to dramatically change its international image.We elected an inspiring, eloquent, dignified, reflective type who understood very well that his candidacy offered, and rested upon, a series of shortcuts. Politics is always about power and is only sometimes about social justice. It has a relation to redemption — the healing of life and the world (tikkun)—only through its connection to social justice. The Obama movement of 2008, although long on redemptive aspects for a political campaign, wrought nothing like redemption for centuries of U.S. American slavery and apartheid, and it did not change the fact that African Americans are subjected to unemployment, imprisonment, and bad schools at higher rates than other groups. Even as ordinary politics, the Obama campaign was a shortcut. Otherwise Obama would not have been compelled to play down the memories, ideals, and struggles that tied his campaign to the Civil Rights Movement. And otherwise it would not have mattered so much that Obama’s many political talents include his Oprah-scale capacity for making white Americans feel good about themselves and their nation.Obama was only the third African American to serve in the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, and he had been there for only three years when he ran for president. He skyrocketed to national prominence, and then the presidency, on the strength of his once-in-a-generation talent, intelligence, and self-confidence. In the Senate he pleaded with supporters to give him time to accomplish something before they talked up a run for the White House; Michelle Obama was adamant on this theme.All was to no avail. The vast crowds of mostly white liberals and moderates who packed into Obama’s speaking engagements could not wait for him to run on his record. Since Obama had planned all along to run for president as soon as possible anyway, he had only to change his mind about when it was timely to do so. One shortcut led to another.Obama is a figure of protean irony and complexity. He wrote a lengthy autobiography in his early thirties, yet he is short and guarded about what makes him tick. He is decidedly introverted, yet in public settings he has an extroverted charm that is not forced or phony. He is audacious about himself and his career, with enormous ambitions for his presidency, yet he governs with deep caution, even timidity, even as he pushes for huge, risky, historic things. He is disciplined to the point of having disciplined even his feelings. He is almost eerily self-possessed, more comfortable in his skin than any American political leader since Ronald Reagan, who, like Obama, was sometimes described as an actor portraying a politician.Reagan was more complicated than he seemed. Obama, by contrast, is obviously complicated, which unnerves many Americans. Yet Obama’s blend of informality, centered ease, reasonableness, and personal guardedness epitomizes the style of sociability that is prized by American professional and business culture. Obama developed his affable cool in Indonesia and Hawaii — places where being affably cool helped him get along, negotiating his outsider status.Obama had barely been elected president when he had to start governing, and he was in full governing mode before he was inaugurated, pushing a huge stimulus bill that he wanted to sign on his first day in office. A month after he was inaugurated, he signed seven landmark bills at once — the largest tax cut for the middle class since the Reagan administration, the biggest infrastructure bill since the Eisenhower administration, the biggest education bill since the Johnson administration, the biggest antipoverty and job training bill since the Johnson administration, the biggest clean energy bill ever, and huge investments in housing and scientific research.But he wrapped these things together as one bill to ensure that everything passed. He played down the fact that the stimulus contained the best antipoverty bill in forty years because drawing attention to it would have jeopardized it. He settled for a smaller stimulus than was needed, without fighting about it publicly — a sign of things to come. Then he pulled off a colossal antipoverty reform by attaining health coverage for 34 million uninsured people; he rarely mentions this achievement today, because it has become politically toxic.Obama defied his entire senior staff by rolling the dice on national health insurance, an issue with forbidding politics and a record of seven presidential failures. I believe that he made a serious mistake by going for health reform when he did, and I’m convinced that he went about it in the wrong way. He excluded single-payer care as something not worth discussing, and he bailed out on the public option without risking a single speech or fight for it. But for all that he got wrong in this area, Obama abolished the worst abuses of the health insurance companies. It says something important about him as a moral being that he risked his presidency to gain health coverage for tens of millions of poor and vulnerable people.It did not take long to see what Obama’s special problems are. More than one-fourth of the American population claims to believe that Obama is an illegitimate president, a radical Socialist, anti-American, and/or sympathetic with Islamic radicalism. In some polling, up to one-third of Americans have contended that Obama wants to impose Sharia law throughout the world, and over half have tagged him as a radical Socialist.Obama’s election set off a howling alarm of anxiety and fear for Americans who could not see him as an American leader. Within weeks of Obama’s election, “I want my country back” became a staple of Republican rallies featuring an image of America’s first black president.Normal political trading stopped with the coming of Obama, notwithstanding his pleas for civility and political cooperation, and notwithstanding that the nation was in the midst of an economic crash when his presidency began. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was adamant that Republican cooperation with Obama would not be tolerated; his top priority was to take down Obama.The stimulus bill was the first test of that resolution. The United States had lost nearly 3 million jobs the previous year. We had lost 741,000 jobs in the month that Obama was inaugurated. Nearly every economist said we needed a stimulus to save the nation from reliving 1933. But the stimulus bill got zero Republican votes in the House and three expensive Republican votes in the Senate. Somehow, it was horribly wrong to save the nation from free-falling into a depression. On the basis of that absurd argument, the Tea Party exploded into being and won a huge political windfall, which has made the Republican Party more extreme than ever.The Tea Party, the most powerful movement in American politics today, is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and either middle-aged or elderly. It thrives on a deeply felt dichotomy between the deserving and the undeserving. At the grassroots level, much of the Tea Party is not hostile to Social Security or Medicare, unlike the professional ideologues that are exploiting it. Tea Party Republicans are quite certain that they deserve their own Social Security and Medicare. But they are outraged that “undeserving” people get taxpayer-funded benefits from the government, and they are willing to swallow a Wall Street Republican presidential candidate if that is what it takes to get rid of Obama. The right-wing, anti-Obama literature charges incessantly that white liberals coddled an undeserving Obama into and through Harvard Law School, financed his political career, and fawned over him all the way to the White House, where he allegedly betrays America’s national interests and slathers the undeserving with Obamacare and food stamps.Meanwhile Obama has serious problems with his progressive base. Every week on the lecture trail, and nearly every day on radio shows, I meet progressives who are finished with Obama. Many have signed petitions saying they will not work for him or even vote for him. They feel betrayed, or disillusioned, or both. Often they assume that I agree, since I have sharply criticized Obama’s policies from the outset of his presidency and I have been deeply involved in Occupy Wall Street.But I do not feel betrayed or disillusioned, because I never considered Obama to be a progressive movement leader. He could not have been elected president had he been one, and he is not a substitute for the vital progressive movement that we lack. Obama has governed in the centrist, sometimes liberal-leaning fashion that he described while running for the White House. It is imperative that progressives acknowledge his considerable achievements, not repeat the mistakes of 2000, and recognize that electing a more compelling human being to the presidency is not possible in this country.Obama is a centrist politician with liberal leanings on some issues, exactly as he described in The Audacity of Hope (2006). He did not have a single risky position in his 2008 campaign portfolio. He did not promise to scale back America’s military empire, or to get out of Afghanistan, or to break up the megabanks. His campaign supported a public option in health care, but very quietly, and he talked about persuading Democrats and Republicans to work together, not about fighting for social justice causes. But too many progressives and others projected their fantasies onto him, imagining that they were electing Martin Luther King Jr., which set them up for a mighty disillusionment.America and the world would be much better off today had there been a Gore administration. As president, Gore would not have invaded Iraq, launched a perpetual global war, showered the rich with tax cuts, doubled the federal debt, or let the oil companies devise America’s energy policies. The left-liberals who sat out the 2000 election or who supported Ralph Nader in Florida had ample cause to be frustrated with Bill Clinton’s legacy and put off by Gore’s candidacy. But the differences between the Gore administration that should have been and the Bush administration that occurred were enormous, vastly outstripping the reasons that some progressives gave for allowing Bush to win the White House.To be sure, Obama has made brutal concessions that he never promised, mostly in hostage situations. Some are too brutal to be cleaned up even by the hostage explanation. He cut Medicaid to get a budget deal, which is morally indefensible, carrying on the Beltway tradition of bashing poor people first. He offered to increase the entry age for Medicare, which is the opposite of what America needs to do in health care. He extended and heightened some of Bush’s worst policies in the national security area. He cut an atrocious deal in the debt ceiling fiasco as though he lacked the Fourteenth Amendment or any other leverage, giving Republicans (on House Speaker John Boehner’s estimate) 98 percent of what they wanted.On no major issue did Obama plant a flag and fight for something worth risking a legislative defeat. Repeatedly he surrendered in the third quarter, or punted on third down, or whatever sports metaphor one prefers for this objection. Conciliation was not merely his default mode. It was his chief operating mode.Obama is predisposed to the role of mediating reconciler who leads the country beyond its divisions. He got to be president by persuading independents that a likable type like himself could inspire cooperation across party lines to solve the nation’s problems. He wanted to be the Reagan of his party, a forward-looking optimist who changed the course of history. He wanted to do it by winning independents and Republicans to his idea of good government, just as Reagan won over independents and Blue Dog Democrats. Getting people to like him had always worked for Obama, as had his trope about America not being divided between blue states and red states.But Republicans opted for obstruction and took back the House of Representatives. Then they took the nation hostage over the debt ceiling, and Obama, belatedly, rethought what his presidency needs to be about. Any progressive case for Obama has to bank on his commitment to limit the damage from his own concessions and to redeem the promise of his presidency.This promise is still in play; Obama is singularly gifted and he has historic accomplishments to his credit to build upon. He stabilized an economy that was spiraling into a deflationary abyss. His stimulus bill made social investments that will pay off for decades, and it expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which has saved millions from falling into poverty. Obama rescued the automobile industry and the economies related to it. He pushed for a no-exemptions version of the Volcker Rule and eventually signed a halfway decent financial reform bill against an overwhelmingly better-funded opposition. He abolished the United States’ use of torture and the CIA’s secret prisons. He made a historic outreach to the Muslim world. He forced the insurance companies to stop excluding people with preexisting conditions and to stop dropping people when they got sick. He withdrew American troops from Iraq exactly as he promised. He made two excellent appointments to the Supreme Court. He ended the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” mistreatment of gays and lesbians in the military. He terminated the Justice Department’s legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act. He blocked Republicans from eliminating federal funding for Planned Parenthood. He suspended deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants lacking a criminal record. He has supported family unity in immigration policy, interpreting “family” to include the partners of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. He has endorsed marriage for gays and lesbians. And he has represented the United States with consummate dignity.Obama is a pragmatic, liberal-leaning centrist who prizes collaboration and accommodation. He’s a big-thinking ambitious type who wants to leave the largest possible legacy while governing cautiously and taking a few risks. He advocates and exemplifies the communitarian approach of pulling people together to advance the common good. Obama likely hopes that he will inherit a less obstructionist opposition if he wins a second term. He will be a lame duck, the Tea Party will fade, and more Republicans will accept him as a legitimate president. Perhaps something closer to normal politics will resume.But the big issues that loom ahead have to be fought over: breaking up the megabanks, scaling back the global military empire, lifting the cap on the Social Security tax, adding tax brackets at the upper end, abolishing fee-for-service medicine, and building a clean-energy economy. Since the debt ceiling debacle, Obama has belatedly committed his presidency to social investment. But actually doing it will require more fighting than he waged on anything in his first term.For two centuries, Americans have debated two fundamentally different visions of what kind of country the United States should aspire to be. The first is the vision of a society that provides unrestricted liberty to acquire wealth. The second is the vision of a realized democracy in which rights over society’s major institutions are established. In the first view, the right to property is lifted above the right to self-government, and the good society minimizes the equalizing role of government. In the second view, self-government is considered superior to property, and the good society places democratic checks on social, political, and economic power. In the first vision, one tries to attain enough success to stand apart from others, not have to worry about them, and perhaps look down on them. In the second vision, a good society reduces the punishments of failure and the rewards of success.Both of these visions are ideal types, deeply rooted in U.S. history. Both have limited and conditioned each other in the U.S. experience. But in every generation one of them gains predominance over the other, shaping the terms of debate and possibility, telling the decisive story of its time.Today the Republican Right is preaching a very aggressive version of anti-government ideology. The story of our time, in this view, is that a great people is being throttled by a voracious federal government. Americans are overtaxed; government is always the problem; somehow the federal government caused the financial crash; we have a debt crisis because we have too much government; and cutting taxes again is always in order.But the real story of our time is that the common good has been hammered for thirty years. Wages have been flat for thirty-five years and inequality has worsened dramatically. We need economic democracy more than ever, for when the sum of individual goods is organized only by capitalism, it produces a common bad that destroys personal goods along with society.In conclusion, I’ll make four points about our need for economic democracy. First, Americans are not overtaxed. This year the total tax burden reached its lowest point since 1958. In 1999 Americans spent 28 percent of their income on federal, state, and local taxes, which was the usual amount going back to the early 1970s. Today that figure is 23 percent. As a percentage of GDP, American taxation is at its lowest level since 1950, 14.8 percent.Second, this is how we got in debt. If the United States had stuck with the Clinton tax rates, our national debt today would be minimal or nonexistent. Our nation’s debt exploded because during the Bush years we cut the marginal rate and capital gains taxes without paying for either, we established a drug benefit that we didn’t pay for, and we fought two wars that we didn’t pay for. These expenditures doubled the nation’s debt in seven years, and the record keeps mounting, accounting for three-fourths of the new debt that has accumulated during Obama’s presidency. Most of the remaining new debt is cleanup for the financial crash.Today the wealthiest Americans pay income taxes at Mitt Romney’s rate, 14 percent. Investment managers earning billions per year are allowed to classify their income as carried interest, which is taxed at the same rate as capital gains, 15 percent. Constantly we are told that the investor class would lose its zeal for making money if it had to pay taxes on its actual income or if the capital gains rate were raised. But there is no evidence for this claim. No investor passes on a promising investment because of the tax rate on a potential gain.A tax system that serves the common good would have additional brackets for the highest incomes, as the United States once did. It would have a bracket for those who earn $1 million, a bracket for those who earn $10 million, a bracket for those who earn $100 million, and so on. It would lift the cap on the regressive Social Security tax, taxing salaries above $110,000 per year. It is absurd that someone making $1 million per year pays no more into Social Security than someone making $109,000.Third, a federal budget is a moral document. If we scaled back America’s global military empire and reinstated a progressive tax system, we could eliminate the entire federal debt by 2021 without cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, or research. A morally decent tax and budget plan would tax capital gains as ordinary income. It would cap the benefit on itemized deductions at 28 percent. It would tax U.S. foreign income as it is earned. It would eliminate the subsidies for oil, gas, and coal companies. It would place a tax on credit default swaps and futures and charge a leverage tax on the megabanks.These are not radical proposals. The United States would still be well below European levels of taxation. All of it together only mildly restores the principle that people should pay taxes on the basis of their ability to do so.Lastly, tax rates are not the most important factor contributing to economic growth. Creating a healthy and productive workforce is far more important than the fluctuations in tax rates that we debate in election years. Educating the workforce for twenty-first-century jobs and investing in research and technology are more important. Developing a strong infrastructure and saving for investment are at least as important as tax rates.Today the economy is sluggish because of weak consumer demand caused by stagnant wages, job uncertainty, and the ongoing ravages of the mortgage disaster. Mitt Romney’s answer is a staggering 20 percent tax cut, which would explode the national debt, so he embraces the Ryan plan, which savages Medicaid and Medicare. Obama, by contrast, is talking about tax fairness and creating an infrastructure bank.That is the beginning of a real answer, though merely a beginning. We need to renew the country by making massive investments in a clean-energy economy. Labor costs, equipment costs, and the cost of capital will never be lower than they are today. The United States has under-invested in infrastructure, education, and technology for decades. A national infrastructure bank, once created, would get serious money plowed into infrastructure rebuilding on an ongoing basis.If we can spend trillions of taxpayer dollars bailing out banks and eating the toxic debts of AIG and Citigroup, we ought to be able to create good public banks at the state and federal levels to do good things. Public banks could finance start-ups in green technology that are currently languishing and provide financing for cooperatives that traditional banks spurn. They can be financed by an economic stimulus package approved by Congress, or by claiming the good assets of banks seized by the government, or both.Obama still has an essentially progressive vision of the presidency he wants to have. There is still time to redeem the 2008 election promise, which was and is, to put an end to the Reagan era. To fulfill that promise, Obama has to overcome his own cautious, accommodating temperament, and progressives have to believe it is still possible for him to do so.