Poor E.J. Dionne! He is suffering through the same transition process experienced by many Obama supporters who have been confronted with the demise of the President’s phony “populist” image. The stages one passes through when coping with such an “image death” are identical to those described in the Model of Coping with Dying, created in 1969 by Psychiatrist, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. For example, a few weeks ago, Bill Maher was passing through the “Bargaining” stage – at which point he suggested that if we elect Obama to a second term in the White House, the President will finally stand up for all of those abandoned principles which candidate Obama advocated during the 2008 campaign. As we saw during Friday’s episode of Maher’s Real Time program on HBO, the comedian has now progressed to the “Acceptance” stage, as demonstrated by his abandonment of any “hope” that Obama’s pseudo-populist image might still be viable.
Meanwhile E.J. Dionne appears to be transitioning from the “Denial” stage to the “Anger” stage – as exemplified by his dwelling on the issue of who is to blame for this image death. Dionne’s conclusion is that “Centrists” are to blame. Dionne’s recent Washington Post column began with the premise that “centrism has become the enemy of moderation”. While attempting to process his anger, Dionne has expounded some tortured logic, rambling through an elaborate “distinction without a difference” comparison of “Centrists” with “Moderates”, based on the notion that Moderates are good and Centrists are bad. Dionne’s article was cross-posted at the Truthdig blog, where many commentors criticized his argument. One reason why so many Truthdig readers had less trouble accepting the demise of Obama’s false “populist” image, could have been their exposure to the frequent criticism of Obama appearing at that website – as exemplified by this cartoon by Mr. Fish, which appeared immediately to the left of Dionne’s article on Saturday.
An easy way to make sense of Dionne’s thought process at this “Anger” stage is to replace any references to “centrists” or “centrism” by inserting Obama’s name at those points. For example:
Because
centrismObama is reactive, you never really know whata centristObama believes.Centrists areObama is constantly packingtheirhis bags and chasing off to find a new location as the political conversation veers one way or another.* * *
Yet
the center’s devotees, in politics and in the media,Obama fear(s) saying outright that by any past standards—or by the standards of any other democracy—the views of this new right wing are very, very extreme and entirely impractical.CentristsObama worr(ies) that saying this might makethemhim look “leftist” or “partisan.”Instead,
the centerObama bends.ItHe concocts deficit plans that include too little new tax revenue.ItHe accepts cuts in programs that would have seemed radical and draconian even a couple of years ago.ItHe pretends this crisis is caused equally by conservatives and liberals when it is perfectly clear that there would be no crisis at all if the right hadn’t glommed onto the debt ceiling as the (totally inappropriate) vehicle for its anti-government dreams.It’s time for moderates to abandon
centrismObama and stop shifting with the prevailing winds. They need to state plainly what they’re for, stand their ground, and pull the argument their way. Yes, they would risk looking to “the left” of wherethe centerObama is now – but only because conservatives have pulledithim so far their way.
Toward the end of the piece we see how Dionne is getting some glimpses of the fact that Obama is the problem:
But when this ends, it’s Obama who’ll need a reset. At heart, he’s a moderate who likes balance. Yet Americans have lost track of what he’s really for. Occasionally you wonder if he’s lost track himself. He needs to remind us, and perhaps himself, why he wants to be our president.
In reality, Barack Obama was able to deceive Americans by convincing them that he was for populist causes rather than corporatist goals. The President never “lost track of what he’s really for”. He has always been Barry O. Tool – a corporatist.
At the conclusion of Dionne’s essay we learn that – contrary to what we were told by Harry Truman – “the buck” stops at the desks of Obama’s “centrist advisers”:
His advisers are said to be obsessed with the political center, but this leads to a reactive politics that won’t motivate the hope crowd that elected Obama in the first place. Neither will it alter a discourse whose terms were set during most of this debt fight by the right.
We’ve heard the “blame the advisers” rationale from others who passed through the Kübler-Ross phases at earlier points during the Obama Presidency: There were those who sought to blame Rahm Emanuel when the “public option” was jettisoned from Obama’s healthcare bill. We then heard from the “Hope fiends” who blamed Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Peter Orszag for Obama’s refusal to seriously consider the “Swedish solution” of putting the zombie megabanks through temporary receivership. In fact, it was Obama making those decisions all along.
I’m confident that once E.J. Dionne reaches the “Acceptance” stage, we will hear some refreshing, centered criticism of President Obama.
Dubious Reassurances
There appears to be an increasing number of commentaries presented in the mainstream media lately, assuring us that “everything is just fine” or – beyond that – “things are getting better” because the Great Recession is “over”. Anyone who feels inclined to believe those comforting commentaries should take a look at the Financial Armageddon blog and peruse some truly grim reports about how bad things really are.
On a daily basis, we are being told not to worry about Europe’s sovereign debt crisis because of the heroic efforts to keep it under control. On the other hand, I was more impressed by the newest Weekly Market Comment by economist John Hussman of the Hussman Funds. Be sure to read the entire essay. Here are some of Dr. Hussman’s key points:
As of this writing, the yield on 1-year Greek debt is now 189.82%. How could it be possible to pay almost 200% interest on a one-year loan?
Despite all of the “good news” about America’s zombie megabanks, which were bailed out during the financial crisis (and for a while afterward) Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has been keeping an ongoing “Bank of America Deathwatch”. The story has gone from grim to downright creepy:
It is the aggregate outrage caused by the rampant malefaction throughout American finance, which has motivated the protesters involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Those demonstrators have found it difficult to articulate their demands because any comprehensive list of grievances they could assemble would be unwieldy. Most important among their complaints is the notion that the failure to enforce prohibitions against financial wrongdoing will prevent restoration of a healthy economy. The best example of this is the fact that our government continues to allow financial institutions to remain “too big to fail” – since their potential failure would be remedied by a taxpayer-funded bailout.
Hedge fund manager Barry Ritholtz articulated those objections quite well, in a recent piece supporting the State Attorneys General who are resisting the efforts by the Justice Department to coerce settlement of the States’ “fraudclosure” cases against Bank of America and others – on very generous terms:
In the mean time, the quality of life for the American middle class continues to deteriorate. We need to do more than simply hope that the misery will “trickle” upward.