To have only one side write legislation offends his ideal of a balanced world where each side counterbalances the other with well drawn, high minded necessary compromise until a finely honed, well proportioned piece of legislation evolves to everyone's eventual satisfaction. This is the way it's drawn up in the civics books.
Republican tactics frustrated him because he sees himself as the guy who comes into the meeting hall with two sides set in stone, red faced, arguing, yelling petulantly, so that he may kindly drape his long arms around their shoulders, one on one side one on the other, and adjust their truculent attitudes to docility, saying "here, here, boys, boys, can't we all just get along." Then with incisive brilliance, playing one side off the other, he elicits a perfectly balanced agreement between them better than either side could have ever envisioned or achieved on their own.
This is "change you can believe in," not a political change so much as a procedural change. Not change complete with enemies lists and back room deals and strong arm tactics. President Obama is a natural conciliator, a persuader, a cozener and cajoler. If he was a practicing attorney he would be the kind who would never try a case in open court. Courtroom situations are far too contentious and chancy and messy. Instead he would always settle, always work out a deal behind the scenes. Especially, if at all possible, if he could split a discernible difference, any difference, between two extremes. To him every good agreement has to begin with a difference that must be split. In Obama's world it takes not two but three to negotiate, the democrats, the republicans and him in the middle. Like Hegel, process is thesis vs. antithesis = synthesis. He is the living synthesis.
Now finally with big republican gains in the midterm elections you can't help but feel that President Obama at last has the opposition to the democratic position he has always perversely required. He seems to prefer this split government more than one with a dominant democratic theory ascendant. So in his recently concluded tax plan which left Bush era tax cuts in place for additional economic stimulus, like a true ameliorator, he seemed to relish the fact that he was able to give more or less equally, as to what each side most wanted, to the participants. This places him where he is comfortable - the man above and in the middle, the arbitrator and mediator of extremes.
2 A Team of Rivals?
There is a flaw in this ideal of himself he harbors, however. Politics is by nature a divisive affray and if he as leader of one of our two parties always plays the middle, soft, let's make a deal politics, and his opponents always play hard ball, my way or the highway or we won't play at all politics, there will be a structural imbalance inherent to every deal he brokers. His "side" which in terms of negotiations, he doesn't acknowledge as being his, will always lose and from the other side he will receive no credit for his benign magnanimity. For the democratic position to be always negotiable and the republicans to never be is an absurdity which leaves the give always going one way, the take the other.
Part of the illusion here may stem from a misconception current at the time of Obama's election - a Team of Rivals - from the title of a book about Lincoln by Doris Kerns Goodwin. The thesis is that Lincoln was a master conciliator with no clear political policy of his own. It's true to a degree but only within the context of personalities and factions within Lincoln's own party, not across the much wider spectrum of two parties. The other party in those days was actually the Confederate Army with which Lincoln was engaged in open, bloody, give no quarter warfare. Lincoln did not arbitrate between these two sides, only among those who constituted his own side, regardless of their political affiliations prior to the war.
He could be benevolent and temperate around the edges of the war but on matters of principle central to it he was as hard and unyielding as anyone we have ever seen. He conceded nothing.
True, Lincoln was also magnanimous in victory. He let Jefferson Davis go. He didn't have war crimes trials or demand reparations. But this was only after a clear victory had already been won. President Obama seems to want to be generous with his enemies and the enemies of his ideals before victory while the confederates are still armed and in the field at war with him. As always, able only to see the world through the prism of their own prejudices the republicans have taken his grace not as a sign of strength and benevolence to be reciprocated with cooperation but as weakness to be taken advantage of with a vengeance.
So Obama's temperament as mediator playing both sides and his well earned position as sole leader of his party often may leave his party in an untenable position and leaves him in a position contrary to his status as titular as well as actual leader of the left. For when he puts his position on an equal footing with the republicans in a negotiation it actually means, as a practical fact, that the bargaining position of the left is effectually co-opted and demeaned in his own overriding mediator's desire to reach an agreement. With himself as negotiator from a median position the republicans are already negotiating not with the left but the middle and the arguments and concessions then are always taking place on the republican side of the net.
Then, to make matter worse, even as he is continuously reviled and castigated on the right who have often received much of what they wanted, President Obama perversely criticizes the confused left for a lack of support even though they have continued to make the majority of the concessions to reach the agreement.
Being simultaneously the leader of one side of the negotiations and at the same time mediator of them is a conflict of interest. Often this would be because the mediator could not be trusted to be an honest broker, his passions being too tied up in identification with his own party. With Barack Obama, however, a natural conciliator, the problem is reversed. In his ardor to make a deal, to get something, sometimes anything, he is always tempted - and usually succumbs - to poach from the left's want list to appease the wants of a far more rigid and intractable right. The right knows this and refuses to budge and the left cringes with every deal made because all the flexibility comes from the left side of the political net over which their own leader ultimately has final control.
In each case where he has been able President Obama has been more than ready to be dismissive of what his own side would have preferred in his willingness to show and earn respect and show deference to even the most extreme right wing wishes of his opponents. This is just human nature but it has also had something of the defeatist about it. To easily criticize your own side without even being willing to criticize - and mean it, legislatively - your political enemies is not only disarmingly counterintuitive but predictably counterproductive. This was surely quite evident in the results of the mid term elections.
Being the leader of a party not only means sharing in many of their core beliefs but sometimes standing up for what the majority of the party members believe in even if you don't. And standing up for them means to a greater degree of commitment than as a simple rhetorical bargaining chip to be tossed away when the other party objects - even if they object very strenuously. This is true even if you know the policy you are pursuing is not entirely popular or has little chance of success. Sometimes it's worth it to lose merely to make a larger and more enduring case. And eventually, since you can't win anything by not even trying, some of these improbable causes may actually start to fall your way unexpectedly.
Some defend President Obama's negotiating policy, as they have with each and every individual aspect of it, as pragmatic and realistic, but taken collectively, as was proven in the mid term elections, it is supremely self-defeating. To consistently work harder to please your enemies at the expense of your friends is neither completely rational nor entirely salutary and every one in the country, on one level or other, knows it.
Just about every policy agreement he's made fits into this pattern. From his dealings with the banks to the suppression of any investigations of the Bush administration excesses, to his relationship with the military and the intelligence community, to cases pursued by the justice department, to his administration's relationship with the oil companies (prior to the off shore disaster in the Gulf), on to tax policy and Guantanamo etc.,. All have been more or less continuations of republican policy with just a few variations.
The democrats and the country wanted a president who would right the wrongs and lay down the law and reform a government that has grown far out of intellectual disproportion and ethical discipline but got a compromiser in chief instead. It wanted someone to change the fundamentals of the country but has someone who defers every crisis and debate to federal arbitration instead. We wanted someone to lead the charge to correct the wrongs and imbalances and injustices that exist on all sides around us and reverse years of misrule which culminated in the Bush years. Instead we got a laid back let's let bygones be bygones type before the bygones have even gone by. They are still with us becoming more rancid and entrenched every day.
So the question is who will lead the the charge for change, who will stand up for what the left and most of the rest of the country believes in? If not the leader of the democratic party then who? If it has not yet shown up in the president of the United States they elected to effect the change in his first two years in office, then when will it?
3 The Best and Brightest Syndrome
Make no mistake, Barack Obama is a good, competent president and with a second term may even be ranked someday as well above average, above ordinary. The problem is we need extra-ordinary now. It's unfair but true.
President Obama is a rarity. He is calibrated to a different time frame. He doesn't wear his emotions on his sleeve and sees a longer road ahead than most politicians. He is unusual for an American president in this because, in allowing so many other politicians take the lead, especially Congress, he has let them exhaust themselves while still demonstrating that he is the indispensable man. This is why he was successful in the lame duck session of congress just past and this also means that he may actually gather strength as his terms in office progress unlike most presidents who lose strength as they go. However, at some point longer has to also translate to deeper. So far his legislative triumphs have been rather superficial to the deeper problems which face the nation and he has done little to redress the structural imbalances that the republicans have spent nearly thirty years trying to rig into the system which have not only led to unjust policies but are leading us on a collision course with catastrophe.
This is where Obama's Harvard ties bind him. Harvard people in general don't think outside the box. They think they are the box, and can't imagine anyone anywhere who could be better. They are the quintessential establishment. Like Larry Summers they are very good at moving pieces around on the upper deck of the passenger liner to nowhere but not so great at imagining a much better cruise destination than the one that leads toward the iceberg ahead. Obama is figuratively of this school as much as he is literally.
Unlike Roosevelt who was of this school too, but through personal tragedy managed to transcend it, President Obama's highest goal in life was to reach the point which was Roosevelt's point of departure. As an outsider, having spent his entire life impressively mastering the system, flaws and all, and reaching its summit, he is not now ever going to be the one best suited to reform it. Obama, like the other Harvard types, hasn't learned that the vast majority of the best ideas in the nation come from outside the Washington to Boston power corridor not from within it.
Therefore, he has been unable or unwilling to incorporate and leaven a large enough representation of the entire spectrum of the latent genius of the country into his administration through his appointments. For instance, there is no one like Harry Hopkins evident in Obama's too tightly wound inner circle, nor could there ever be. His appointments to the Supreme Court as well have been far too inbred socially and intellectually. They are fine and intelligent people and capable of superior things but rarely can sense or speak to a healthy breath of change wafting through the nation.
This inbred quality is evident in both President Obama's management style and his legislative record. He has depended on ideas currently available to him in Washington to arbitrate among. But Washington is currently the most unenterprising and constipated, most self-serving, most corrupt and most short term oriented hole in the country. Its residents are notoriously out of touch. A legislative record based on compromises drawn between available republican and democratic ideas is by definition going to be parsing one mediocre idea with another and then, probably after watering both of them down to a degree of limpness even Viagra can't revive, will not possibly lead to anything exceptional. Trying to arbitrate between two badly constituted, lobbyist ridden points of view - somewhere in the vast wasteland between big government and no government at all -in search of middle ground cannot but lead to a lesser level of mediocrity as a result. It's as if from among all the cars on the road you are always forced to decide between a hummer and a yugo. The car you can afford won't run and the one that runs you can't afford.
And this is true even when the best of what the republicans and democrats have to offer is incorporated in the final legislation passed. Unfortunately that is not generally the case. It is invariably an accumulation of the very worst ideas of each side which are finally cobbled together into law. Because generally speaking the congress of today doesn't do difficult things, they only do easy ones, the ones which wind up costing them the least effort and the taxpayer the most money.
How then can a government based on compromise and finding and taking the path of least resistance between two extremes ever expect to rise to excellence and a high level of accomplishment? Compromise and pragmatism are fine and necessary attributes but only as one element of a larger political set of tools and principles. There must be a great infusion of energy, innovation and ideals from outside this process to reinvigorate it. The process must not be merely made more civil, it must be overturned. To set forth compromise and bipartisanship as not only an end in itself but as the apotheosis of change itself will turn into shorthand for settling, complacency and business as usual. And once you begin to compromise on most things, even small ones, you will be expected to compromise on all things, even big ones.
To paraphrase a sign board in front of a nondescript little church I used to drive by, "the path of least resistance is the short road to perdition."
Predictably then, even President Obama's greatest victories, such as health care, have had about them a faintly superficial air of the anticlimax, with a mix and match, shell game aura to them, until at the end of the day no one is really satisfied with the result. None of this administration's policy initiatives have done anything to really rearrange the status quo or to creatively address the long term structural problems of the country. No matter how far down the road ahead we can see there is nothing but systemic decline evident as the future inheritance of the country.
It only seems as if larger issues are at stake in these debates because of the
shrillness and wildly exaggerated tantrum throwing of the participants. But in fact no
fundamental shifts in direction are evident anywhere in the Obama plan. His
administration has the small bore goal of righting the ship and changing the mood
of governance while rectifying a few long overdue issues like health care and the
overturn of "don't ask, don't tell," which are not really novel ideas but merely old dirty
laundry which (if the government had been working properly) should have been
cleaned up long ago.
According to the Obama administration's mindset when just a few of these things are done all will be well once more, when we have returned to the status quo the righted ship will sail on happily into the future. No essential change of course or fundamental overhaul of government was needed after all. This is decidedly contrary to what most people in the country believe today. They think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Everyone in the nation sees this except those in the Washington establishment who, frankly, don't even really care. After all it is their moral and intellectual lethargy which in large part has authored our current problems. Far from worrying over this dilemma, they are profiting from it.
So despite the massive job drain, the growing disparity between rich and poor, our failing education system, the lack of an energy policy, the tyranny of Wall Street, ruinous defense spending, no plan to corral the debt or introduce equitable tax reform or limit the shameful influence of lobbyists on congress that critically influences, always corrupts and usually destroys literally each and every piece of legislation it produces (when it bothers to produce legislation at all), Washington soldiers on oblivious to all the long term needs and interests of the nation they are sworn to protect and serve.
Now to be sure, structural change is not something that can be effected overnight. Preparations, consensus building and care are required and tactics and strategies must be cleverly marshaled and diligently employed. It is also indisputable that the Obama team inherited a raft of ongoing problems which necessitated short term solutions and made it difficult to craft something of longer duration. It is also true that there are entrenched interests which have no interest in the long term future of the country as long as they are lining their pockets today. These will and have and do oppose everything no matter how obviously useful and necessary it may be to the health of the country.
Having said this and admiring the Obama administration for its ability to manage and focus on our most pressing problems so far, to see that it continues to choose its democratic priorities from the same business as usual, tired legislative smorgasbord available to them from the usual pressure groups, is disappointing.
Is it too much to ask them to do more? Probably, yes. Especially as the
president has just lost one house of congress to the opposition. And this opposition
has proven itself to be the most cynical collection of incompetents and recalcitrants
we've ever experienced. Not only has their greed and stupidity created the largest
of the problems we now face but they can think of nothing better to do for their
country in response but spend every waking hour of every day trying to stand in the
way of those we've hired to fix them.
But if crisis leads to great challenge it also leads to great opportunities. The crisis we face today is to make a fundamental shift in our operations to attack the problems that led to all our problems in the first place. So far the Obama team has not succeeded in this, they have lacked either the will or ideas or time or support or imagination to apply solutions to these accumulating problems that embody within them the inevitability of long term structural decline. They have not captured the mood and imagination of the country. Many of their ideas have seemed as cold and stale and unappetizing and uncreative as the food facing late comers to the buffet at the country club.
But what Barack Obama absolutely must learn if he is to be a great president, if we are to reverse this slow slide America has slipped into, is that he must be tougher and delineate policies with greater creativity and clarity. He cannot always play the statesman and remain above the fray and keep splitting differences if he is really to alter the odious slide from destructive status quo to perfect oblivion which is starting to look irreversible. He needs to broaden his horizons considerably beyond the establishment of Harvard yard and congress and study the fundamentals more closely and resolve that from here on out, every proposal his administration makes must embody within it a greater hope for the future than we have heretofore seen from them.
Otherwise we will continue to have an administration of very good housekeepers which is doing nothing to arrest the unsound structure of the house they are keeping from someday falling in all around us.
