September 13, 2010
With mid-term elections approaching, the articles are turning up all over the place. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman calls them pre-mortems: advance analyses of why the Democrats will lose power in November. Some of us saw the handwriting on the wall quite a while ago. Before President Obama had completed his first year in office, it was becoming clear that his campaign theme of “hope” and “change” was just a ruse to con the electorate. On September 21, 2009, I wrote a piece entitled, “The Broken Promise”, based on this theme:
Back on July 15, 2008 and throughout the Presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised the voters that if he were elected, there would be “no more trickle-down economics”. Nevertheless, his administration’s continuing bailouts of the banking sector have become the worst examples of trickle-down economics in American history — not just because of their massive size and scope, but because they will probably fail to achieve their intended result. Although the Treasury Department is starting to “come clean” to Congressional Oversight chair Elizabeth Warren, we can’t even be sure about the amount of money infused into the financial sector by one means or another because of the lack of transparency and accountability at the Federal Reserve.
In November of 2009, Matt Taibbi wrote an article for Rolling Stone entitled,“Obama’s Big Sellout”. Taibbi’s essay inspired Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns to write his own critique of Obama’s first eleven months in office. Beyond that, Mr. Harrison’s assessment of the fate of proposed financial reform legislation turned out to be prescient. Remember – Ed Harrison wrote this on December 11, 2009:
As you probably know, I have been quite disappointed with this Administration’s leadership on financial reform. While I think they ‘get it,’ it is plain they lack either the courage or conviction to put forward a set of ideas that gets at the heart of what caused this crisis.
It was clear to many by this time last year that the President may not have been serious about reform when he picked Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as the leaders of his economic team. As smart and qualified as these two are, they are rightfully seen as allied with Wall Street and the anti-regulatory movement.
At a minimum, the picks of Geithner and Summers were a signal to Wall Street that the Obama Administration would be friendly to their interests. It is sort of like Ronald Reagan going to Philadelphia, Mississippi as a first stop in the 1980 election campaign to let southerners know that he was friendly to their interests.
I reserved judgment because one has to judge based on actions. But last November I did ask Is Obama really “Change we can believe in?” because his Administration was being stacked with Washington insiders and agents of the status quo.
Since that time it is obvious that two things have occurred as a result of this ‘Washington insider’ bias. First, there has been no real reform. Insiders are likely to defend the status quo for the simple reason that they and those with whom they associate are the ones who represent the status quo in the first place. What happens when a company is nationalized or declared bankrupt is instructive; here, new management must be installed to prevent the old management from covering up past mistakes or perpetuating errors that led to the firm’s demise. The same is true in government.
That no ‘real’ reform was coming was obvious, even by June when I wrote a brief note on the fake reform agenda. It is even more obvious with the passage of time and the lack of any substantive reform in health care.
Second, Obama’s stacking his administration with insiders has been very detrimental to his party. I imagine he did this as a way to overcome any worries about his own inexperience and to break with what was seen as a major factor in Bill Clinton’s initial failings. While I am an independent, I still have enough political antennae to know that taking established politicians out of incumbent positions (Joe Biden, Janet Napolitano, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, Kathleen Sebelius or Tim Kaine) jeopardizes their seat. So, the strategy of stacking his administration has not only created a status quo bias, but it has also weakened his party.
Mr. Harrison’s point about those incumbencies is now being echoed by many commentators – most frequently to point out that Janet Napolitano was replaced as Governor of Arizona by Jan Brewer. Brewer is expected to win in November despite her inability to debate or form a coherent sentence before a live audience.
Bob Herbert of The New York Times recently wrote a great piece, in which he blasted the Democrats for failing to “respond adequately to their constituents’ most dire needs”:
The Democrats are in deep, deep trouble because they have not effectively addressed the overwhelming concern of working men and women: an economy that is too weak to provide the jobs they need to support themselves and their families. And that failure is rooted in the Democrats’ continued fascination with the self-serving conservative belief that the way to help ordinary people is to shower money on the rich and wait for the blessings to trickle down to the great unwashed below.
It was a bogus concept when George H.W. Bush denounced it as “voodoo economics” in 1980, and it remains bogus today, no matter how hard the Democrats try to dress it up in a donkey costume.
I was surprised to see that Howard Fineman focused his campaign pre-mortem on President Obama himself, rather than critiquing the Democratic Party as a whole. At a time when mainstream media pundits are frequently criticized for going soft on those in power in order to retain “access”, it was refreshing to see Fineman point out some of Obama’s leadership flaws:
The president is an agreeable guy, but aloof, and not one who likes to come face to face with the enemy. Sure, GOP leaders were laying traps for him from the start. And it was foolish to assume Mitch McConnell or John Boehner would play ball. But Obama doesn’t really know Republicans, and he doesn’t seem to want to take their measure. (Nor has he seemed all that curious about what makes Democratic insiders tick.) It’s the task of the presidency to cajole people, including your enemies, into doing what they don’t want to do if it is good for the country. Did Obama think he could eschew the rituals of politics — that all he had to do was invoke His Hopeness to bring people aboard?
Well, people aren’t on board and that’s the problem. The voters were taken for chumps and they were fooled by some good campaign propaganda. Nevertheless, as President George W. Bush once said:
Fool me once – shame on – shame on you. Fool me – You can’t get fooled again!
At this point, it does not appear as though the voters who supported President Obama and company in 2008 are willing to let themselves get fooled again. At least the Republicans admit that their primary mission is to make life easier for rich people at everyone else’s expense. The fact that the voters hate being lied to – more than anything else – may be the one lesson the Democrats learn from this election cycle.
Where Obama Went Wrong
September 27, 2010
One could write an 800-page book on this subject. During the past week, we’ve been bombarded with explanations from across the political spectrum, concerning how President Obama has gone from wildly-popular cult hero to radioactive force on the 2010 campaign trail. For many Democrats facing re-election bids in November, the presence of Obama at one of their campaign rallies could be reminiscent of the appearance of William Macy’s character from the movie, The Cooler. Wikipedia’s discussion of the film provided this definition:
Barack Obama was elected on a wave of emotion, under the banners of “Hope” and “Change”. These days, the emotion consensus has turned against Obama as voters feel more hopeless as a result of Obama’s failure to change anything. His ardent supporters feel as though they have been duped. Instead of having been tricked into voting for a “secret Muslim”, they feel they have elected a “secret Republican”. At the Salon.com website, Glenn Greenwald has documented no less than fifteen examples of Obama’s continuation of the policies of George W. Bush, in breach of his own campaign promises.
One key area of well-deserved outrage against President Obama’s performance concerns the economy. The disappointment about this issue was widely articulated in December of 2009, as I pointed out here. At that time, Matt Taibbi had written an essay for Rolling Stone entitled, “Obama’s Big Sellout”, which inspired such commentators as Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns to write this and this. Beyond the justified criticism, polling by Pew Research has revealed that 46% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans incorrectly believe that the TARP bank bailout was signed into law by Barack Obama rather than George W. Bush. President Obama invited this confusion with his nomination of “Turbo” Tim Geithner to the position of Treasury Secretary. As President of the Federal Reserve of New York, Geithner oversaw the $13 billion gift Goldman Sachs received by way of Maiden Lane III.
The emotional battleground of the 2010 elections provided some fun for conservative pundit, Peggy Noonan this week as a result of the highly-publicized moment at the CNBC town hall meeting on September 20. Velma Hart’s question to the President was emblematic of the plight experienced by many 2008 Obama supporters. Noonan’s article, “The Enraged vs. The Exhausted” characterized the 2010 elections as a battle between those two emotional factions. The “Velma Moment” exposed Obama’s political vulnerability as an aloof leader, lacking the ability to emotionally connect with his supporters:
Kirsten Powers of The Daily Beast provided the best analysis of how the “Velma Moment” illustrated Obama’s lack of empathy. Where Bill Clinton is The Sorcerer, Barack Obama is The Apprentice:
The American people are hurting because their President sold them out immediately after he was elected. When faced with the choice of bailing out the zombie banks or putting those banks through temporary receivership (the “Swedish approach” – wherein the bank shareholders and bondholders would take financial “haircuts”) Obama chose to bail out the banks at taxpayer expense. So here we are . . . in a Japanese-style “lost decade”. In case you don’t remember the debate from early 2009 – peruse this February 10, 2009 posting from the Calculated Risk website. After reading that, try not to cry after looking at this recent piece by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture entitled, “We Should Have Gone Swedish . . .” :
It has become apparent that the story of “Where Obama Went Wrong” began during the first month of his Presidency. Whoever undertakes the task of writing that book will be busy for a long time.
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