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Barack Obama, Phone Home
AFTER his "shellacking," President Obama had to do something. But who had the bright idea of scheduling his visit to India for right after this election? The Democrats' failure to create jobs was at the heart of the shellacking. Nothing says "outsourcing" to the American public more succinctly than India. But the White House didn't figure this out until the eve of Obama's Friday departure, when it hastily rebranded his trip as a jobs mission. Perhaps the president should visit one of the Indian call centers policing Americans' credit-card debts to feel our pain.
Optics matter. If Washington is tumbling into a political crisis as the recovery continues to lag, maybe the president shouldn't get out of Dodge. If the White House couldn't fill a 13,000-seat arena in blue Cleveland the weekend before the midterms, maybe it shouldn't have sent the president there. If an administration charged with confronting a Great Recession knew that its nominee for secretary of the Treasury serially cut corners on his taxes, maybe it should have considered other options. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Well, here we are.
True, the big things matter more than the optics. Unfortunately, they are a mess too.
You can't win an election without a coherent message. Obama, despite his administration's genuine achievements, didn't have one. The good news - for him, if not necessarily a straitened country - is that the G.O.P. doesn't have one either. This explains the seemingly irrational calculus of Tuesday's exit polls. Voters gave Democrats and Republicans virtually identical favorability ratings while voting for the G.O.P. They gave Obama a slightly higher approval rating than either political party even as they punished him. This is a snapshot of a whiplashed country that (understandably) doesn't know whose butt to kick first. It means that Obama can make a comeback, but only if he figures out what he has to come back from and where he has to go.
The president's travails are not merely a "communications problem." They're also a governance problem - which makes them a gift to opponents who prefer no governance at all. You can't govern if you can't tell the country where you are taking it. The plot of Obama's presidency has been harder to follow than "Inception."
Health care reform remains at the root of this chaos. Obama has never explained why a second-tier priority for him in the 2008 campaign leapt to the top of his must-do list in March 2009. For much of the subsequent year spent fighting over it, he still failed to pick up the narrative thread. He delayed so long in specifying his own priorities for the bill that his opponents filled the vacuum for him, making fictions like "death panels" stick while he waited naïvely for bipartisanship to prevail. In 2010, Obama and most Democrats completed their transformation of a victory into a defeat by running away from their signature achievement altogether.
They couldn't talk about their other feat - the stimulus, also poorly explained by the White House from the start - because the 3.3 million jobs it saved are dwarfed by the intractable unemployment rate. Nor could they brag stirringly about a financial regulatory reform effort that left too many devilish details unresolved, too many too-big-to-fail banks standing and nearly all the crash culprits unaccountable.
With a cupboard this bare, Blame Bush became the Democratic message by default. But a message that neither boasts of any achievements nor offers any specifics for the future is a political suicide note.
Blame Bush was also a part of the G.O.P. message this year. When Republican candidates weren't trashing Obama, they routinely deplored the spending excesses of their own Bush-era Congress and ripped into the villainous Bush- Paulson TARP as if their leaders hadn't all signed on to it. The rest of the G.O.P. message - typified by the "Pledge to America" peddled by John Boehner - was as incoherent as the Democrats'. Traditional Republican boilerplate - lower taxes, less spending, smaller government - was chanted louder and louder, to pander to the Tea Party rebels, but with zero specifics of how it might be carried out. The midterm strategy was appropriately labeled "80-20" by the House majority leader in-waiting Eric Cantor - 80 percent attacks on Democrats, 20 percent proposing a G.O.P. plan.
But there was no plan. Even in victory, most Republicans can't explain exactly what they want to do besides cut taxes and repeal health care (a quixotic goal, given the president's veto pen and the law's more popular provisions). A riotous dissection of this empty agenda could be found on election night on MSNBC, where a Republican stalwart, Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, called for "across the board" spending cuts. Under relentless questioning from Chris Matthews, she exempted defense and entitlements from the ax, thereby eliminating some 85 percent of the federal budget from her fiscal diligence.
Pressed about Social Security and Medicare, Blackburn would only promise to have an "adult conversation" with Americans on the subject. That's the new Republicanese for punting. The G.O.P. budget guru, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, also called for a "conversation" in a specifics-deficient op-ed manifesto in The Financial Times last week. Boehner and Mitch McConnell, in their postelection press conference, declared no fewer than 11 times that they were eager to "listen" to the American people. At the very least they are listening to a message guru like Frank Luntz.
Were they to listen to Americans, they'd learn that they favor budget cuts mainly in theory, not in fact. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this summer found that three-quarters of Americans don't want to cut federal aid to education - high on the hit list of most fiscal hawks - and more than 60 percent are opposed to raising the Social Security retirement age to 70. Even in the Republican-tilted electorate of last week, exit polls found that only 39 percent favored extending the Bush tax cuts to all Americans, including those making $250,000-plus. Yet it's a full Bush tax cut extension that's the entirety of the G.O.P. jobs program in 2010. This will end "uncertainty" among the wealthiest taxpayers, you see, and a gazillion jobs will trickle down magically from Jackson Hole.
Obama has a huge opening here - should he take it. He could call the Republicans' bluff by forcing them to fill in their own blanks. He could start by offering them what they want, the full Bush tax cuts, in exchange for a single caveat: G.O.P. leaders would be required to stand before a big Glenn Beck-style chalkboard - on C-Span, or, for that matter, Fox News - and list, with dollar amounts, exactly which budget cuts would pay for them. Once they hit the first trillion - or even $100 billion - step back and let the "adult conversation" begin!
Better still, the president should open this bargaining session to the full spectrum of his opposition. As he said at his forlorn news conference on Wednesday, he is ready to consider policy ideas "whoever proposes them." So why not cut to the chase and invite Congressional Tea Party heavyweights like Jim DeMint, Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann to the White House along with the official G.O.P. leadership? They will offer the specifics that Boehner and McConnell are too shy to divulge.
DeMint published a book last year detailing his view that Social Security be privatized to slow America's descent into socialism. Paul can elaborate on his ideas for reducing defense spending and cutting back on drug law enforcement. Bachmann will explain her plans for weaning Americans off Medicare.
Maybe some of the big Tea Party ideas will be as popular as the Tea Partiers claim them to be. We won't know until Congress tries to enact them. Nor will we know Obama's true measure until he provides a coherent alternative of his own about how he intends to put Americans back to work and keep them in their homes. If he has such a plan, few, if any, Americans have any idea what it is.
To do this, he'll have to break out of the White House bubble he lamented again last week. He can no longer limit interactions with actual working Americans to photo ops on factory floors or outsource them to a "Middle Class Task Force" led by Joe Biden. He must move beyond his Ivy League-Wall Street comfort zone to overhaul his economic team. If George Bush could announce Donald Rumsfeld's replacement the day after his 2006 midterm thumping, why is the naming of Lawrence Summers's much-needed successor receding into eternity?
In the 1946 midterms, the unpopular and error-prone rookie president Harry Truman, buffeted by a different set of economic dislocations, watched his party lose both chambers of Congress (including 54 seats in the House) to a G.O.P. that then moved steadily to the right in its determination to cut government spending and rip down the New Deal safety net. Two years after this Democratic wipeout, despite a hostile press and a grievously divided party, Truman roared back, in part by daring the Republican Congress to enact its reactionary plans. He won against all odds, as David McCullough writes in "Truman," because "there was something in the American character that responded to a fighter."
Surely there are dozens of supporters reassuring Obama with exactly this Truman scenario this weekend. But if he lacks the will to fight, he might as well just take his time and enjoy the sights of Mumbai.
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43 Comments so far
Show AllI have another explanation for "the seemingly irrational calculus of Tuesday's exit polls", but you'd never get to read it in the New York Times.
MEDIA CONTROL?
I was thinking more of election theft and/or voter suppression.
We all know that massive cuts to defense spending could free up the funds to pay for universal healthcare across the board and actually lower taxes in the process.
We also know that by eliminating the CIA and Homeland Insecurity, we could provide the funds necessary to have improved education and less expensive education for colleges and universities.
We all know that by pledging the funds to alternative energy, we could wean ourselves off of oil once and for all while retaking the lead in advanced technologies.
We all know that ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while simultaneously closing all of our imperial bases abroad would make the U.S. as well as the rest of the world a much safer place to live in.
We all know that by increasing corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthiest Americans, we could seriously tackle the problems of poverty and unemployment.
But none of these issues are even mentioned by any of the candidates. No such visions are forthcoming simply because these are messages that corporate America don't permit corporate media to address. The end result is Americans being stuck with the current broken system while misdirecting their anger with the help of the mainstream media.
Right on! Very few have addressed the fact that the wars are causing this country to go broke, and not to have universal health care that even second world countries have. Even Turkey has a system! Yes, there were bank and mortgage problems, but we've also been at war for close to a decade with no end in sight! Also, for you complainers: If you have a job, don't complain, if you have health insurance don't complain, if you have a home and a support system, don't complain, but for once in yur lives think about others. What about the animals, land and water that are being sacrificed for big business? What about the people who have died or have been injured in wars? What about the homeless who are there through no fault of their own? Other countries (yes even Canadians can't believe "we" are fighting against health care reform or single payer. For those non thinkers, we already have some form of government insurance called medicare. Also, it is Western society who puts the elderly into nursing homes because people are too busy working. Did work become a support(other than a paycheck) system? For those who want to stay home and take care of parents, there is "family leave" . Guess what? It is unfunded. I understand that in certain European countries a system such as this is funded. Clinton had the right idea, and I believe he wanted to fund it, but congress is against it and still is. For the 7% of the weathiest, good for you. Your sole mandate and reason to exist, is not to pay taxes. For those by the way, if you just want to lie down and give up go right ahead. The real activists will keep fighting for what they believe in. People fought hard for a century to get everyone the right to vote. Do you think change would be easy? Do you think Martin Luther King just sat at a computor? Of course not! Do you think unions were formed in five minutes or the equivalency of one election? Did they give up? Of course not! Did a women's right to choose happen overnight? Of course not! If everyone gives up, we will be very disappointed in this new generation of activists. Guess what works best? Education, and not the type that just involves using a computor. Get out there, and meet your neighbor. Go to another part of the country and find that not all people in a "red" state think that way, and vice verse. Divided as a nation, we will fall, but united we will prevail. We all need to fight against corporate greed, and question why the supreme court now allows corporations to donate, and oh yes as Noam Chomsky said, in so many words, as long as big money has a hand in elections, then we won't be a true democracy. Let's all remember, money can "buy" us a false sense of security, but it can't buy us happiness. Many poor people are happy because they have support systems, and many rich people are unhappy but "secure" because only have money. You can't kiss or talk to money. Money does buy shelter and other necessities that's true. For some it can buy travel and even luxuries. but it can't buy a support system or spirit. When I get on this post, I see mainly pessism which is shameful. If you are at a computor, then you have shelter. If people would wake up and realize that we are not "regions" or "parties" then I believe we have hope here. Remember , there are many politicians, but very few statesmen.
Space Cadet; if only, if only the truth would set us free. What you brought up is the biggest, most baddest ass elephant in the country and Rich is still saying barry did somethings right for the people; Bullshit! Tony
Bravo! You have identified the elephant in the room, while simultaneously exposing the emperor's nakedness. A brilliant task indeed.
The US inteeligence gathering appartus had a cost of 80 billion alone to US taxpayers last year. This more then any other countries spends on its Military.
It is absolutely nuts and out of control.
The 144 BILLION paid in Bonuses to those Bankers on wall Street is larger then the total size of some 50 world economies.
Its a pig-out at the trough by the richest and wealthiest and the people want to keep blaming "illegal Immigrants" and the people on Food stamps.
Americans are almost by nature biased toward the rich, I think it's drummed into them that rich=good and poor =bad. It's a stupid simplistic and wrongheaded notion but most buy it because hating the poor has no real downside since the poor almost never fight back or even can. The rich on the other hand can and do fight back as we've seen. The playing field is so tilted now who knows what's going to happen next? Maybe, a return to slavery?
It is important to remember that for two years in a row, there has been no cost of living increase for those on fixed incomes in the U.S. During the same time, the price of gold has gone from about $730/oz to about $1400/oz. Or, put in terms of REAL DOLLARS, people who live on fixed incomes have been cut almost 50% in two years! (People such as those living on social security or veterans compensation.) To back this statement up, even though the Canadian dollar has strengthened as against the American dollar during that time, Canadians living on fixed incomes HAVE gotten increases each of these years! If that isn't proof of U.S. providing LYING STATISTICS about the COLA, I don't know what is.
To verify what I have said here, check Yahoo's graphs on the Canadian dollar, and check: http://www.goldprice.org/spot-gold.html for a two year graph of the price of gold.
Bottom line: it won't be very long before a lot of people in this country will be experiencing third world conditions and scratching just for a bare existence. Time to hunker down.
Forget about National politics and look to the state you live in, because that's where the real pain will come from. Here in Washington state, the voters rejected tax increases and told the politicians to cut spending. Now, facing a $4 billion shortfall, the state must cut, and who gets hurt? We all know the answer to that. So, lets start with eliminating state employee pensions. Then, lets close public libraries, because they're socialist any way. Then let's start closing down universities, because there are too many college graduates in this country. So that's a start, I'm sure everyone can come up with other great ideas!
Local seems to be all we have left, I am just glad my local mileage passed and money for parks in SE Michigan, the state level in Michigan and the national level were disasters as they have been for the last 40+ years.
he has will alright, will to con the world, that is.
or at least he's trying to.
" . . . the seemingly irrational calculus of Tuesday's exit polls. Voters gave Democrats and Republicans virtually identical favorability ratings while voting for the G.O.P."
This is neither insanity nor gullibility. It's just plain stupidity.
It's the public recognizing the choice between genuine factory republicans and after-market, wannabe republicans, and opting for the real thing.
Genuine factory republicans or not, they all seem to be selling us all out to foreign corporations, with the exception of SOME democrats. I don't see any way for common people to have any kind of decent life in the future - the U.S. is being taken for everything the bankster class can get, and there is nothing we the people can do about it because "democracy" has become more and more obviously a myth, just smoke and mirrors. The value of the dollar has fallen almost 50% in two years. Just look at things and you have to realize the country is being economically gutted.
Yawn... another Dem apologetic by the do nothing wing of the Dem party; the only thing left is beltching meaningless platitudes on behalf of their corporate masters.
I second. Frank Rich is an idiot!
Accomplishments?! What f*%3@ accomplishments? Wealthcare for the healthcare industry. Wealthcare for the criminal banking class. Warfare and appropriation for countries that have stuff we want or that don't follow our psychotic economic and political examples.
And why do people continue to call what is the 'Greater Depression' the 'Great Recession?' Lies and propaganda all! Save 3 million jobs? While losing how many million? This is truly 1984.
Obama is not a leader and was chosen by the powers that be specifically for that reason. I'm sure his psychological profile assured his 'handlers' that he would present no problem or resistance for them and would amount to nothing more than a second rate Hoover.
Our 'leaders' have all been co-opted. Or didn't you know. All weather vanes and no compasses, turning in the winds of legalized bribery and extortion. America has become a failed empire and a failed state, beholden to greed-mongers, war-mongers and psychopaths.
Clearly mass insanity is the final phase of a collapsing empire.
Cheers all.
AMMON: I agree. The pundits tasked with dressing up Obama's presidency and "achievements" remind me of Karen Hughes' Public Relations assignment: that of making the bombing of Iraqis into a feel-good movement winning approval for blatant policies of destruction. Keep in mind she was intended to sell THIS to the very people seeing loved ones and communities decimated.
Whoever flagged that comment is most likely a Democratic Party partisan idiot defender. I thought that it was a great way to counter this idiotic article. What say the partisan idiots now that Obama and Reid promise to "work with the Republicans" ? By the way, AmmonRah, you're not alone in correctly calling the "recession" what it really is, DEPRESSION.
I don't know who spite-flagged the post.
But a resident "Democratic Party partisan idiot defender" is busy elsewhere on this site, spamming threads with massive pasting of rote pro-Obama talking points for all he's worth. ;)
If you're referring to that idiot who posted 5 useless comments on "Obama's accomplishments" under that Freeman article, I hear you. It's the same propaganda that shows up on other sites too. If you think the Obama loyalists are losing out on Obama after this recent election, the worst is yet to happen. Already, Obama's supporters and a few progressive writers are bringing up race in to the picture. I had a tough fight with another party idiot who lied about being "independent" and then tried to frame the results as voters being racist and supporting the tea baggers. They're warming up for making 2012 not about hope and change but about race. They are very nasty and very difficult to talk to as it is. I've been called "Newt Gingrich" and "David Duke" of all names for my attempts at explaining why Obama will lose not because of race but because of what he did as president. Yeah, the teabaggers won because of race my arse ! Buckle up and load up those political firearms. The war between the progressives and the party idiots is about to get worse.
By the way, as it's still the case, I can't help but read and learn more from those great comments of yours and most others here. I use the great ideas and analysis presented here to fight back the partisans elsewhere and to defend a minority of independent progressives who are just like most posters here. It beats watching television passively because I like to think and get involved online and then use it to bring new ideas to the table in my community. In many areas of the country, progressive/liberal thinking is nearly non-existent even it's needed and I think that passing ideas and thoughts from this site to outsiders has made a difference. Even a conservative war veteran finds himself lamenting that he could have been at least 50% progressive after listening to what I share with him about what progressive thinking beyond partisan party talk.
Just like this empire, the Democratic Party is crumbling and we will need the right progressive and liberal ideas to build or rebuild a new progressive party.
Thirded! Nothing but revengeful spite which is all the DIms have now. :(
Reporting on Obama's visit to India, the New York Times notes in a subheading to that story, and without a trace of irony, that Obama is a "Gandhi fan". With alleged disciples of peace like Obama it is a wonder that any under developed countries are able to function with their infrastructures and people still in one piece.
I read about Obama's trip to India and I'm very angry with it. That idiot is hurting both more American workers and Indian workers too. It's all about spreading yuppie style capitalism and that could be succeeding. Back home, with unemployment rates climbing and this trip to make it worse, it will be a miracle to see this president win a second term.
"a miracle to see this president win a second term."
A miracle to reelect this corporate sock puppet? The sooner he's gone the better.
I meant to say that it would take a miracle to see this president win a second term. Sorry about the typo.
To boomboom4.
Your blog should be on the front page of every newspaper in the U.S.A.It just about covers every reason why the things are the way they are and tells us all to get off our collective arses and get active.
Congratulations on a meaningful and articulate reply to the Frank Rich story.
We,in Australia,have nothing like your problems,but who knows which political group in power could send us down the American road to disaster?
==Surely there are dozens of supporters reassuring Obama with exactly this Truman scenario this weekend. But if he lacks the will to fight, he might as well just take his time and enjoy the sights of Mumbai. ==
Really, it would be best for the country if, on January 1, 2011 Joe Biden were sworn in as President.
Trylon
"...IF he lacks the will to fight"?? My caps, but that was too much from Frank Rich. Ralph Nader was right when he said Obama has a conciliatory personality. Some might call it a yellow streak down his back. The presidents who took us great distances, in one direction or another, were all fighters. You have to give this to the Republicans, they have a lot of fighters - albeit more than a few with some very loose screws. But how many fighters can you name among the Democrats? As Bucky said in Get Fuzzy, "It's spineless... it's blue... it's slow-moving, yet it leaves a layer of slime on everything it touches. I'm sorry, but in my book, that's a Democrat". In reality there are a few atypical Democrats out there, but the Party has them marginalized.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
"conciliatory personality"?
How about professional puppet?
"if he lacks the will to fight"?
Does a puppet fight his puppet master? Does a corporate PR guy fight his employer? Obama's just an opportunist who's landed the ultimate acting role as President, and Frank Rich is playing a supporting role as the prominent editorialist who says he's not fighting hard enough, and the producers are the billionaires and big corporations.
This piece indicates that Frank Rich is either stupid or playing along, and I don't think he's stupid. I've lost all confidence in his judgment and his honesty.
Demcons lost. Dem Progressives won. The Democratic Party is ours. Dean/Grayson '12
Obama--will to fight? LOL. He is a despicable coward. The sooner he is out of office the better.
I get the feeling Frank Rich's foremost concern is not speaking the truth; calling Obama on his wars, Wall Street sellouts and flawed stimulus. His primary concern is getting Obama reelected so he can continue to do what he's done; sell out to the powers that be on almost all progressive issues, especially war. Even if it means he has to do something progressive along the way to save his own skin.
To me, people like Rich are not news reporters, they are Dim Party propagandists. You'd have to be a propagandist to cheer for the sellouts that completely snatched defeat from the jaws of the 2008 victory.
Rich has bought into the “messaging” theory where Obama failed to take credit for his "accomplishments" and hence the people were too stupid to figure it out on their own, and voted for Republicans instead. To Democratic Party apologists like Rich that is the problem, not the wars, bank bailouts and weak regulations, or lack of single payer health care.
So Rich, true to form, is calling for Obama to continue what won’t work for him; reach out the Republicans and the Tea Party and try to compromise with them. This is advice Obama is likely to heed. I will be amazed and shocked if the Dims obstruct the Republican agenda through filibusters as was done to them. So I look for Democrats to “compromise” and tack further to the right.
What the people really want is something Obama and the Democrats cannot deliver; true progressives that stand on principle and aren't backing down, allowing the chips to fly where they may.
Why do we get such convoluted hot air and from the New York damn Times no less. That's so predictable it's pathetic. Can't we drop this propaganda for the current closet case GOP president. This guy is right in there with Slick Willy except worse. Why can't we just have real Democrats calling the shots for their party? Oh, and this ain't the damn 1990s, Mr Triangulation.
Give us back the "old" and real Democrats.
AD
What can we expect from the NYT when their response to the revelations in the WikiLeaks is to downplay the US crimes and portray Julian Assange as the villain? The NYT, like Obama, are more outraged with whistle blowers than with the crimes they reveal. Whatever merit the Times may have had in the past, they now march lockstep with US imperialism and work to further its goals. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Rich’s dribble was published there.
Obama and Clinton ARE real Democrats, they're duplicitous, criminal and identical to their twins, the Republicans. So what on earth are you talking about?
The Democratic Party has always been known as the War Party, so WHAT real Democrats are you expecting to call the shots? Don't make us laugh.
I was surprised not to read a lie in a Frank Rich column right in the first sentence, this time it came in paragraph 3: "You can't win an election without a coherent message. Obama, despite his administration's genuine achievements, didn't have one."
WHAT genuine achievements, Mr. Rich? You're an embarrassment to journalism. Stop the lies.
Obama; "The Trojan Horse" or the "Manchurian Candidate". Both apply!
"This is a snapshot of a whiplashed country that (understandably) doesn't know whose butt to kick first. It means that Obama can make a comeback, but only if he figures out what he has to come back from and where he has to go."
Frank Rich is another one of those "smart guys" like Bill Clinton whose frontal lobes and any informed sense of compassion have been suffocated by remaining too long inside the New York/D.C. political and corporate media bubble. It's pathetic to see him still clinging to the failed neo-liberal DLC Dimocrap Party.
Hey Frank, why don't you cease wasting your and our time flogging a dead jackass and start calling for a new national populist progressive movement and Third Party. Start making your public arguments for:
(1) True campaign finance reform (fully publicly financed campaigns) with commensurate telecommunications legislation that eliminates the paid political ads on THE PUBLIC's broadcast spectrum and digital spectrum that BOTH should only be licensed to media companies on a temporary basis and revoked if they don't live up to their fiduciary and new legal obligations to produce programming that is both profitable and demonstrably commensurate with the broadest public interest.
(2) Scrapping the Federal Election Commission and returning the media platforming of presidential debates to the League of Women Voters.
(3) Reforming applicable Federal and State laws to allow for easier ballot access for Third Parties.