This morning began with another indictment of Obama on the breakfast table: condemned for compromising too much, for looking too hard for Republican support, for failing to understand the true nature of modern Republicanism. This time it came from David Bromwich, a professor of literature and political thought at Yale, in the London Review of Books. Obama is naive and afraid, Bromwich says:
“His reason for waiting doubtless has something to do with fear. Obama receives four times as many death threats as George W. Bush did. Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one’s enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?”If you think that all this effort is just about winning over Olympia Snowe, then it probably does seem a bit much. I am as disappointed with anyone over the compromises Obama has made on the vexed questions of the secret services, abuse and secrecy; and I think he could have been smarter in his dealings with Wall Street and been more willing to use the stick (why has anti-trust made no appearance in this debate, yet?).
Nevertheless, may I venture the suggestion that perhaps the clever man is not so stupid, that the accusation of delusion in politics usually equates to a failure by one individual to comprehend why another doesn’t think or act the same way as they do. Underlying this is a further failure: a failure to understand that Americans do not live in a dictatorship, that politics is not in the hands of any single individual – even the president – to direct according to his whim, and that we should probably be glad about it, since every Obama will, sooner or later, be followed by a Bush.
First, it is an astonishing and insulting statement coming from a comfortable academic (who I presume has neither been threatened with assassination nor had direct experience of Obama under fire) to conclude that the president's political decisions are being driven by fear of physical violence. I suspect that once you rise above a dozen ongoing assassination attempts on your person at any one time, then having two times, three times or four times more nutbags training their gun sights on you probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. Without evidence to the contrary, I see no sign that the president is a coward, and think it’s a bit cheap to suggest so.
Second, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to think that Obama is seeking to conciliate the hard-right Birther Teabagging Rush Limbaugh Glenn Beck shoot-yourself-in-the-forehead wing of the Republican party. Bromwich claims that Obama fails to understand that Republicans today are like John C. Calhoun. But it is beyond belief to conclude that a man who has to work near to (and often with) several hundred Republicans every day does not understand “what Republicans are like” as well as, if not better than, Professor Bromwich.
Conciliating the hard right was never the goal, nor is it now. It is an easy straw man to burn, to say that it was and is. The key battle was and is the centre ground. And against the image perpetuated by most of the world’s media, including the American media, most US citizens don’t actually resemble the loony-tunes on the far right. Most of them like the ideas of reasonableness and compromise, and are driven more by self-interest and a desire to protect their lifestyles and families than anything else. But they’re also nationalistic, and tend to buy into a fair amount of the fear-mongering put out by the right over the past half century. This is why President Bush ran as a compassionate conservative in 2000, but could shift to a hard right line after September 11.
The message, then, is addressed at the centre of American politics, not so much in terms of the Democratic party structure and congressional membership (although there is some of this), but more importantly at moderate voters. These individuals not only share many concerns over the size of the state and the size of the deficit, but they also wish to see their politicians behave in a reasonable manner toward one another. And, like it or not, unlike the Democratic left, these voters have somewhere else to go.
I can’t remember a president that didn’t talk about governing for all the people; even Lincoln did as he was going to war against a section of them! Even though the truth was far more complicated, President Lincoln went to great lengths to paint himself as the compromise party so that the Confederates would appear as the aggressors. The South, of course, did exactly the opposite.
Moreover, the structure of the American two party system gives a prominence to ideologically-driven activists within the parties, and this can often disguise the inclinations of the far-less politically driven public at large or the size or importance of the “bulge” of normal voters in the centre. As I’ve said before and will no doubt say again, the divisions within the modern Democratic party are a product of its breadth of reach over left and centre of the political spectrum and thus a sign of strength, while the unity within modern Republicanism is a product of the party representing no more than a third of the country, and therefore a sign of weakness.
Failing to understand the real purpose of the compromise strategy ensures that Bromwich sees successes as failures. During Obama’s astonishing health care speech on 9 September, as we all know Joe Wilson gave his own, less carefully articulated two word response. “So the discord that the 9 September address was meant to salve showed its face again at the speech itself,” Bromwich writes.
Obviously not. The speech was not intended to help with whatever personal or psychological difficulties that drive Mr. Wilson’s Tourette’s. It was designed to speak to the unconvinced third of the population who had been scared by the August protests, who already had health care coverage, and who were not convinced of the benefits of a trillion dollar spending bill in the midst of the worst financial crisis in living memory. Right or wrong, these people exist and Obama would be a fool to ignore them and focus only on speaking to the uninsured, who also tend to be the least likely to vote. Not only did Obama’s speech help to assuage those concerns, but Mr. Wilson’s outburst did so even more, further placing the Republicans outside the pale.
It’s also worth emphasizing that some of the values that liberals decry as hopeless compromises with the Republican right fit comfortably within Democratic party philosophy. Not all economic liberals are social liberals. Not all economic liberals understand the same thing by the term. Hostility toward outsiders is expressed more violently in the Republican party, and tends more often to be associated with images of armed minutemen patrolling the Mexican border. But many Democrats fear the effect of outsiders on jobs and wages and domestic industrial production. It is not so easy to say that the Republicans are the anti-immigrant party and the Democrats are all free marketeers and Latinos, as Bromwich implies. Or, as he states more clearly, that Obama’s softness on Israel is a product of pandering to the Republican right. Many Democrats are also strongly committed to a pro-Israel policy, even if the most anti-Israel attitudes do tend to cluster on the left.
Presidents sit atop a pyramid of politics. Very occasionally they can shape what they work with. But more often than not they are shaped by what they are given. Imposing a line from above without regard to the beliefs of different constituencies is almost destined to failure.
President Franklin Roosevelt, so regularly praised as the single most successful left-of-centre president in the twentieth century, so often used as a foil with which to beat Obama, was persistently criticized during his presidency for refusing to support an anti-lynching bill. But FDR believed that putting his weight behind such a bill would have immediately alienated the Democratic South and put to an end the rest of his reform programme. Similarly, with the Social Security Act, he was criticized for excluding many of the most vulnerable groups (such as domestic servants and agricultural workers). But he got the bill through, and in such a way that in seventy years its opponents have made not a dent on it. Roosevelt shifted to the left in the year or so before his 1936 re-election fight, and it is not impossible that we’ll see similar shifts under an Obama administration. But this was impelled by a militant labour movement capable of delivering him electoral victory, itself being pushed forward at breakneck pace not by radical leaders but the militancy of rank-and-file workers in industries across the country.
Today, with a weak labour movement and no meaningful alternative source of left-wing strength, the Democrats will continue to need middle class centrists to get into power, to pass reform laws, and to fulfil their agenda. Leftists who oppose this are at their most clear-sighted when they focus on building new institutions from the grassroots, as the right has been doing since the 1960s, not when they spend their time attacking the president. Attacking the president in a climate of structural, systemic weakness on the left, is little more than transference, blaming him problems that, in truth, we all own.
