Fear and self-loathing

Progressives probably won't be giving thanks to the most successful Democratic administration in a decade, one that led the passage of universal health care, the Dodd-Frank reform of Wall St. (not totally toothless, despite the best effort of Republicans and a Blue Dog or two), the Lily Ledbetter act, and on and on. All of this against a tidal wave of Republican opposition.

Jon Chait explains why liberal dissatisfaction with their very own is nothing new.

Why are liberals so desperately unhappy with the Obama presidency?

There are any number of arguments about things Obama did wrong. Some of them are completely misplaced, like blaming Obama for compromises that senators forced him to make. Many of them demand Obama do something he can’t do, like Maddow’s urging the administration to pass an energy bill through a special process called budget reconciliation—a great-sounding idea except for the fact that it’s against the rules of the Senate. Others castigate Obama for doing something he did not actually do at all (i.e., Drew Westen’s attention-grabbing, anguished New York Times essay assailing Obama for signing a budget deal with cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid that were not actually in the budget in question).

I spend a lot of time rebutting these arguments, and their proponents spend a lot of time calling me an Obama apologist.

Some of the complaints are right, and despite being an Obama apologist, I’ve made quite a few of them myself. (The debt-ceiling hostage negotiations drove me to distraction.) But I don’t think any of the complaints—right, wrong, or ­otherwise—really explain why liberals are so depressed.

Here is my explanation: Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

So, what if we compare Obama with a real alternative? Not to Republicans—that’s too easy—but to Democratic presidents as they lived and breathed?

Read the whole...ahem...thing.

Repeal amendment

The latest in conservative intellectual movements is the Repeal Amendment. Dahlia Lithwick explains why it is a really stupid idea, a fetish for states' rights, and puts the lie to claims by conservatives that they want to "preserve" the constitution. It turns out, they only want to "preserve" the bits they think they like.

But she also bemoans the fact that liberals are silent on this subject.

Yet what we have heard in response to the Repeal Amendment from liberals is near-total radio silence. And it's not because liberals are eager to see a return to the conditions that led to Jim Crow or the Civil War. We just seem to have forgotten how to talk about the Constitution as if it's ours, too. After years of failing to respond to Reagan-era cries of "liberal judicial activism," and failing to push back against the singular perfection of originalism, it's as if we've ceded the entire document to conservatives—as well as the fight over its history and meaning.

Her point is well taken. Liberals allow these crack pot ideas to fester below the surface without any push back, then they become talking points of the new House majority whip. The Wall Street Journal talks it up favorably, and FoxNews swoons with giddiness. Next thing you know it becomes a real issue rather than the ravings of anti-fourteenth amendment civil war reenacters.

The once weekly Douthat column

Ezra Klein, who each and every day writes the equivalent word-count of a dozen Ross Douthat weekly columns, is, I believe, employing a euphemism when he calls Douthat's latest "interesting." I think he means, "inane drivel."

"Maybe he says 'fine' to everybody"

Michael Tomarsky writes in Democracy that liberals, progressives...whatever...are predisposed to an often ugly combination of defeatism and political cannibalism that constantly sets back attaining the very goals they demand. It's a result, Tomarsky writes, of a political culture that elevates every misstep as a catastrophe to the progressive cause. Every word out of Rahm's mouth is evidence of his treachery and the Obama administration's failure to bend all 59 Democratic Senators as a failure of will, not political reality.

But it's also a result, Tomarsky goes on to say, of a misreading by progressives of progressive political history. We tend to view the great achievements of the 20th century -- the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, the Great Society -- as snapshots, blissfully unaware of the painful political process, the half-measures, the compromises, the back-tracking, the sell outs, that went into finally achieving those great moments.

So Tomarsky is set on helping us see the full picture of history.

The clubs regularly used by liberal critics who hammer the Administration for its tentativeness and caution are the New Deal and the Great Society. He must be more like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson; there were proud liberals who didn’t vacillate, didn’t muck around with this bipartisanship foolishness, and licked their chops at the prospect of a good fight, as evidenced by the "I welcome their hatred" quote, which FDR directed at the "economic royalists." We were also treated, especially in the Administration’s first six months, to regular comparisons to Roosevelt’s famous Hundred Days: "By this time, FDR had . . . "

The Hundred Days were a wondrous thing, there is no denying it. But today, when we ask why Obama couldn’t just do that, we misunderstand the context in which they occurred. Roosevelt took office with an unemployment rate of 24 percent. For Obama the number was 7.6 percent. FDR also became the president of a desperately poor nation. It’s hard to make a precise comparison, because good economic numbers on household income go back only to 1947, but some economists who’ve looked at the question have determined that the median household income in 1933–in today’s dollars–was in the range of $15,000 to $20,000. That figure today is right around $50,000, and the poverty threshhold today for a family of four is about $22,000. In other words, not only were incomes far, far lower then, but most people were poor–if not officially, then effectively. And one in four workers had no work. That is light years away from today’s America, even post-crisis, and it made for a desperate situation in which all manner of experimentation was welcomed by a public that often literally couldn’t eat. So the Hundred Days set about changing that–but did not, at least as regards the unemployment rate, which stayed above 20 percent until 1936.

The New Deal was not a seamless narrative of aggressively liberal steps in which conservatives were sent scampering. It was full of starts and stops, and it took a long time. There were many reasons for this, but a chief one had to do with Roosevelt himself–seen by the more impatient reformers of his day as equivocal and adhering to too few core beliefs, exactly the way some see Obama today. Alan Brinkley, in Liberalism and Its Discontents, reminds us that the general historians’ view of Roosevelt, quite far removed from that presented in the sound bites and summaries employed today, was that of "a man without an ideological core and thus unable to exercise genuine leadership." Huey Long, who sat out on FDR’s left flank, complained of this in a quote in which he invoked his ideological nemesis, the Senate majority leader from Arkansas: "When I talk to [Roosevelt], he says, ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ But Joe Robinson goes to see him the next day and he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ Maybe he says ‘Fine’ to everybody."

Tomarsky also reminds us that 13 of the 30 Republicans in the Senate voted for Medicare. Imagine what that would do for Obama's agenda if he could rely on even a handful of Republicans to support the reform of what is a very broken health care system.

Tomarsky's point is that if you were a "baby boomer," born between 1945 and 1965, you were raised to believe that modern American history was a progressive one. A chain of one progressive victory after another. Then there was Carter's loss to Reagan. An aberration, many raised to revere the New Deal and the Great Society thought. But that flies in the fact of the larger historical picture in which the late 1930s-1980 were really the anomaly. The "interregnum between the Golden Ages," as Salvatore and Cowie quote Paul Krugman. We have been in the midst of an era of a sharply more conservative, more individualistic reading of the Constitution.

Today, as we watch Obama struggle against a unified Republican opposition; as we contemplate a Supreme Court rendering decisions like the one in Citizens United v. FEC; as we witness the rise of the Tea Party movement; as we bear in mind that the financiers of the conservative movement spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on political advocacy of many sorts, several times more than George Soros and his ideological confederates spend on direct political activity; we see that we inhabit a political culture very far removed from those of the 1930s and 1960s. The misery prevalent during the former era allowed for vast experimentation. The prosperity of the latter, and a faith in government that still existed then, provided a basis for collective action. And our time? Think of this: We’ve experienced the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, and the only mass movement to emerge from that reality is a right-wing populist one. Progressives must believe in and work toward a politics of the common good, but we must also be clear about why that is harder today than it once was.

Harder, but Tomarsky's article is titled "Against Despair." We can't let the historical obstacles progressives have always faced, or the new powerful media conservatives now control, force us to give up. We can't let unfair historical comparisons to FDR and LBJ make the current administration's real accomplishments be sold short. And we certainly can't let some people's disappointment that Obama hasn't brought the banksters to their knees, put the health insurance companies out of business, or told Joe Lieberman to go fuck himself, stop us from being engaged in this messy process called "progress." Something was started in 2006 that became glorious one night in Grant Park in 2008. We need a basis in reality combined with an intensity of purpose. Remember, he other side has none of the former but an abundance of the latter (just yesterday I saw an Audi -- an Audi! -- with an "I miss Ron" bumper sticker).

If we wallow in disappointment or let that disappointment morph into rage we only give concervatism more power than it already has.

Anyway, I've lifted liberally from the article (pun intended, of course), but the whole thing is essential reading, especially during what the Times' foremost Concern Troll calls, Liberals' Summer of Discontent.

After MA

No telling what will happen after the polls close in the Bay State this evening, but a couple things occur to me. A health care reform bill has passed the Senate and if Nancy Pelosi has the votes, she'll get it to Obama's desk. Of that I'm sure. And, like Ezra, not to downplay a potoential loss of a "safe" Senate seat, but having the so-called "filibuster-proof" 60 votes did not prove to be such a sure thing in passing a historic health care reform bill on which Obama and the Democrats had placed at the top of their agenda. Those 60 votes will be (or would have been) meaningless on things like Cap and Trade, Banking Reform, etc.

Yeah, I'm whistling past the graveyard.

And, about the "national implications" a Coakley loss will sure to inspire pundits to muse upon: if Jesus H. Christ himself had called Curt "Drama Queen" Schilling a Yankee fan, the Son of God would lose the state to the Devil.

The despair of false expectations

The 2008 presidential campaign must have been the most intensely covered one in decades, with myriad new ways to get information on the candidates' positions, no fewer than 300 debates during the Dem primaries in which the candidates were grilled endlessly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomacy with Iran, universal health care, cap & trade, etc. And still, Republicans and their Tea Party supporters are shocked that health care reform has been embarked upon, that the U.S. will be committed to addressing such emergencies as climate change, or that Iran is not already a smoking crater.

Similarly, on the Left, some in their rose-colored ardor for the man from Hope and Changeseemed to have formed an expectation that, miraculously, we'd be out of Iraq completely by now and that in Afghanistan U.S. troops would have already been replaced by Peace Corps volunteers. Or something.

There is a right way and a wrong way to express anger at President Obama for committing more troops to Afghanistan. This is the wrong way (from Tristero at Hullabaloo):

If the Democratic party today doesn't have viable candidates who are prepared to oppose this crazy policy, it sure as hell will have them two elections hence. I realize that opposing the election of Democrats at a time when the opposition party has literally gone off the deep end puts this country at serious risk of another extreme rightwing takeover. But I don't think liberals have much choice but to take that risk. We are talking about potentially thousands upon thousands of human deaths for an utterly pointless war. This liberal - and I'm hardly the only one - can neither support nor excuse what is now officially the Obama/Afghan War.

Similarly, Garry Wills writes at the New York Review of Books blog that "I cannot vote for any Republican. But Obama will not get another penny from me, or another word of praise, after this betrayal."

It's not that I support Obama's decision to escalate in Afghanistan -- far from it, I am intensely skeptical of our ability to find a lasting solution in the country -- but I'm not surprised by the decision either. Not only has Obama been a long-time supporter of the war in Afghanistan, but he has consistently voiced his support for committing more resources to the effort. In July of last year, he gave his big "national security" speech, where he outlined his plans for Afghanistan and Iraq. Here is a brief excerpt:

In fact – as should have been apparent to President Bush and Senator McCain – the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was. That’s why the second goal of my new strategy will be taking the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

[...]

I will send at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, and use this commitment to seek greater contributions – with fewer restrictions – from NATO allies. I will focus on training Afghan security forces and supporting an Afghan judiciary, with more resources and incentives for American officers who perform these missions. Just as we succeeded in the Cold War by supporting allies who could sustain their own security, we must realize that the 21st century’s frontlines are not only on the field of battle – they are found in the training exercise near Kabul, in the police station in Kandahar, and in the rule of law in Herat.

This isn't a one time thing either; throughout the speech Obama calls for more troops and more resources to be directed towards the war in Afghanistan. The simple fact here is that Obama has done exactly what he said he would, and it's ridiculous for liberals to claim that they've been "betrayed." No, they just haven't been paying attention.

I believe that's the first time the "thoughts" of Tristero, whom I have long found to be one of the most pompous, self-absorbed voices in the blogosphere, have appeared on this humble blog.

Also, it would have been great if NRP and other news outlets had focused as much attention on the hundreds of thousands who protested against the war in Iraq in 2002/3 as they do on the 15 who braved the elements to protest in San Francisco last night.

But the question remains: what were these people listening to during the campaign? Themselves? Oppose the policy? Sure. Feel betrayed? Please. And to decide to stop supporting Obama or other Democrats because the former has at least presented some plan to bring to a close our adventures in Afghanistan is just a classic version of cutting off one's nose...

And, of course, my favorites are those that now say, "Well, I voted for Hillary." I for one was unaware she was the peacenik candidate.

UPDATE: Oh. My.

Suck. On.. This.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, I would never join a club that would have me as a member.

Or Fred Hiatt.

Wonders never cease

Every day, the McCain campaign comes out with a new "ad" that is in fact just a video they created to go with a press release to TV news departments. The press release says that they'll be appearing in "battleground states." But the only airing these videos get is on the TV news.

Steven Benen wonders why TV stations keep taking the bait.

But why would major news outlets repeatedly fall for the same trick, even when they realize the ads are created for the sole purpose of free media attention? There are competing explanations, but my hunch is a lot of outlets are just lazy, and video press releases make their jobs easier.

Um, yeah. It's no different then what corporations (and the White House) do in releasing video press releases. TV news stations are supposed to say where the videos come from, but seldom do, preferring to fill out their 30 minutes with moving pictures instead of just a reporter's face.

Sigh.