On the eve of the State of the Union address, things are not looking sanguine for Mr. Obama—to say the least. The fury of the hard right (which is to say, the entire GOP as it now exists) was to be expected. What I don’t think many of us anticipated at this point in what seemed an extremely promising new presidency was the sharp sense of betrayal and outrage among the Democratic party’s progressive base—as well as among many of the independent swing voters who helped elect Barack Obama with high hopes that he represented a departure from business as usual in the American political context.
A sampling of some of the commentary in the past two days:
At Huffington Post, Michael Roth comments on the apparent inability of the administration to understand why so many of us are angry—why we feel deeply betrayed. As Roth notes, citing Adrienne Rich, anger can provide cleansing clarity.
But the new administration seems unable to perceive this, and is responding to the anger of many members of its base and many independents with futile gestures of incremental change right out of the Clinton playbook—gestures that were tired even when the Clinton administration used them. As Roth notes:
President Obama and his advisors seem bewildered by this vehement anger, not appreciating how this passion is related to the joy and exuberance of a year ago. "Yes We Can!" has become "No You Don't!" I realize that many of the people who are now expressing fury are not those who believed in hope for change. Be that as it may, the dominant tone of political discourse has shifted so dramatically because hopes had been so high. What is fueling much of the public display of anger are feelings of optimism dashed and hope betrayed.
On his blog at New York Times today, Paul Krugman laments that the new president has liquidated himself. To be specific: Krugman finds the announcement of a spending freeze by the administration appalling.
As he notes, as a response to the election of Mr. Brown in Massachusetts, this response makes no sense at all—particularly when it seems evident that Brown’s election is fueled by widespread discontent that the new administration has given the company store to the banks and Wall Street while citizens are suffering tremendously from unemployment and the bottoming-out of the economy. Krugman’s assessment:
And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”
At HuffPo today, Robert Reich echoes Krugman’s analysis. As he notes, solving the economic crisis confronting the nation requires more than liberal tinkering and blustering rhetoric about hope. At the very least, Reich proposes, if the president’s serious about addressing the current economic woes of citizens, he needs to 1) enact a second stimulus, and 2) help homeowners in mortgage distress by allowing them to include their mortgage debt in personal bankruptcy. But instead:
Yet instead of moving in this direction, Obama is moving in the opposite one. His three-year freeze on a large portion of discretionary spending will make it impossible for him to do much of anything for the middle class that's important. Chalk up another win for Wall Street, another loss for Main.
For Bob Herbert, it’s all about character: who is the man we thought we were electing? The twists and turns this president has taken politically—he’s “all over the political map”; the obsessive focus on health care reform while job loss has been completely ignored; and, above all, the president’s lack of candor in a number of instances: these all raise serious questions about credibility and trust.
And, ultimately, about character. About values. About what drives this administration and its platform, about what lay behind the promises of change we could believe in. And about his choice to surround himself with advisors who appear to many of us morally vacuous and character-challenged. As Herbert asks,
How can you look out for the interests of working people with Tim Geithner whispering in one ear and Larry Summers in the other?
Herbert’s conclusion:
Mr. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address Wednesday night. The word is that he will offer some small bore assistance to the middle class. But more important than the content of this speech will be whether the president really means what he says. Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation.
They want to know who their president really is.
Will the State of the Union address pull the chestnut out of the fire? My prediction: no. This administration is committed to a philosophy of calculating political pragmatism that eviscerates its claim to be about progressive change. It’s playing from a playbook that put such calculating political pragmatism front and center in the Democratic party in the 1990s.
As Robert Reich says, it’s possible that the calculating pragmatism of the Clinton administration, and its concessions to the Republican party and big business, may just barely have made sense at the time the Democrats chose to move in that direction.
But today? After the atrocious betrayal of democratic values and human rights of the Bush administration, which many of us expected Mr. Obama to reverse? And with the most serious economic crisis after the Depression placing millions of citizens in acute distress?
The fatuous promises, blowsy rhetoric, and band-aid reforms, when the serious systemic problems creating the economic crisis go unacknowledged and unaddressed: it’s like trying to treat colon cancer with a poultice and a prayer.
And if it continues, the Democratic party doesn’t have a prayer’s chance of retaining power in either the White House or Congress, come 2012.
