Obama and Liberals: A Counter-Productive Relationship

The New Republic's John Judis today has an excellent analysis of the politics behind the stimulus package
-- one which applies equally to most other political controversies.
Judis argues that the stimulus package ended up being far inferior to
what it could have been and points to this reason why that happened:

But I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go.
Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are
beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1
trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to
movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people
really angry. Instead, what exists of a popular left is either
incapable of action or in Obama's pocket. . . .

A
member of one liberal group, Campaign for America's Future, pronounced
the stimulus bill "a darn good first step." MoveOn -- as far as I can
tell -- has attacked conservative Republicans for opposing the bill,
while lamely urging Democrats to back it. Of course, all these groups
may have thought the stimulus bill and the bailout were ideal, but I
doubt it. I bet they had the same criticisms of these measures that
Krugman or The American Prospect's Ezra Klein or my own colleagues had,
but they made the mistake that political groups often make: subordinating their concern about issues to their support for the party and its leading politician.

By
extremely stark contrast, Paul Krugman today explains why Republicans
are so unified in their opposition to this bill and their willingness to uphold the principles of their supporters:

One
might have expected Republicans to act at least slightly chastened in
these early days of the Obama administration, given both their drubbing
in the last two elections and the economic debacle of the past eight
years. But it's now clear that the party's commitment to deep voodoo - enforced, in part, by pressure groups that stand ready to run primary challengers against heretics - is as strong as ever.

[Though
I agree with Krugman's principal point here, I dislike his use of the
word "heretics" here. It invokes one of the worst myths in our
political discourse: the idea that there's something wrong, intolerant
or "Stalinist" about pressuring or even campaigning against incumbents
"from one's own party" who advocate positions that you think are bad
and wrong. That activity happens to be the essence of democracy, and
we need more, not less, of it. If anything is Stalinist, it's the
sky-high incumbent re-election rates and the sense of entitlement in
our political class that incumbents should not ever face primary
challenges even if they support policies which the base of the party
reviles. Why shouldn't GOP voters who love tax cuts and hate
government domestic spending, regardless of whether they're right or
wrong, demand that their elected representatives support those views (in
exactly the same way that Democratic incumbents who supported the Iraq
war and/or Bush's lawless surveillance state should have been targeted
for defeat)?]

But Krugman's larger point is correct: Republican
groups demand from politicians support for their beliefs. By contrast,
as Judis describes, Democratic groups -- including (perhaps
especially) liberal activist groups -- now (with some exceptions) lend
their allegiance to the party and its leader regardless of how faithful
the party leadership is to their beliefs. That disparity means that
there is often great popular agitation and political pressure exerted
from the Right, but almost none from the Left (I'm using the terms
"Left" and "Right" here in their conventional sense: "Right" being
the core of the GOP and "Left" being those who most consistently and
vigorously opposed Bush's foreign and domestic policies).

During
the 2008 election, Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its
infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not
to any ideas. Many online political and "news" outlets -- including
some liberal political blogs -- discovered that the most reliable way
to massively increase traffic was to capitalize on the pro-Obama fervor
by turning themselves into pro-Obama cheerleading squads. Grass-roots
activist groups watched their dues-paying membership rolls explode the
more they tapped into that same sentiment and turned themselves into
Obama-supporting appendages. Even labor unions and long-standing
Beltway advocacy groups reaped substantial benefits by identifying
themselves as loyal foot soldiers in the Obama movement.

The
major problem now is that these entities -- the ones that ought to be
applying pressure on Obama from the Left and opposing him when he moves
too far Right -- are now completely boxed in. They've lost -- or, more
accurately, voluntarily relinquished -- their independence. They know
that criticizing -- let alone opposing -- Obama will mean that all
those new readers they won last year will leave; that all those new
dues-paying members will go join some other, more Obama-supportive
organization; that they will prompt intense backlash and anger among
the very people -- their members, supporters and readers -- on whom
they have come to rely as the source of their support, strength, and
numbers.

As a result, there is very little political or media
structure to Obama's Left that can or will criticize him, even when he
moves far to what the Beltway calls the "center" or even the Right
(i.e., when he adopts large chunks of the GOP position). That
situation is extremely bad -- both for the Left and for Obama. It
makes impossible what very well might be the apocryphal though still illuminating FDR anecdote:

FDR
was, of course, a consummate political leader. In one situation, a
group came to him urging specific actions in support of a cause in
which they deeply believed. He replied: "I agree with you, I want to do
it, now make me do it."

As Judis points out,
Obama, on some issues, might move to the Right because he wants to. In
other cases, he will do so because he perceives that he has to, because
the combination of the GOP/Blue-Dog-following-caucus/Beltway-media-mob
might force him to. Regardless of Obama's motives, the lack of a
meaningful, potent movement on the Left to oppose that behavior ensures
that it will continue without any resistance. The lack of any
independent political pressure from the Left ensures that Obama will be
either content to ignore their views or will be forced to do so even
when he doesn't want to.

Prioritizing political allegiance to
their leader was exactly the mistake the Right made for the first
several years of the Bush presidency. Even Bill Kristol admitted in The New York Times: "Bush was the movement and the cause." An entire creepy cottage industry arose on the Right
devoted to venerating George W. Bush. And it wasn't until well into
his second term, when his popularity had already collapsed, that they
began opposing him in a few isolated cases when he deviated from their
beliefs -- on immigration reform, the Harriet Miers nomination, Dubai
ports, the TARP bailout and the like. But, by then, it was too
late: Bush became synonymous with "conservatism" because the latter
wasn't really about anything other than supporting the President no
matter what he did. The ideological movement and their political
leader had merged, and it was destructive for both of them.

Part
of the political shrewdness of Obama has been that he's been able to
actually convince huge numbers of liberals that it's a good thing
when he ignores and even stomps on their political ideals, that it's
something they should celebrate and even be grateful for. Hordes of
Obama-loving liberals are still marching around paying homage to the
empty mantras of "pragmatism" and "post-partisan harmony" -- the terms
used to justify and even glorify Obama's repudiation of their own
political values. Talk Left's Armando described the oddness of this mentality:

As
I wrote earlier in a comment, "up yours" to the ACLU used to be known
as "triangulation" when a certain William Jefferson Clinton did it.
Today it is known as "11 dimensional chess." Another episode today demonstrates the transformation of "triangulation" into "11 dimensional chess:"

Sen.
Tom Harkin, a liberal Democrat from Iowa, said fellow Democrats had
surrendered too much in a bid to appease three moderate Republicans who
can ensure passage in the Senate.

"I think our side gave
in too much in order to appease a few people," he said in a hallway
interview in the Capitol earlier on Wednesday. He said Democrats should
have dared Republicans to filibuster and "see what the public outcry"
would have been. "I think the people are getting shortchanged."

Imagine
if Bill Clinton had capitulated like this to a Republican Congress in
1995? Or said "up yours" to the ACLU the way Obama did? Do you think
the cries of "sellout" would be hard to find today? Me neither.

Political
ideas and values that have no meaningful pressure being exerted on
their behalf will always be those that are most ignored. That's just
the most basic rule of politics. Last year, Accountability Now was created
to provide exactly that pushback against political incumbents, and
there will be a major announcement very soon along with its formal
launch (an Executive Director has been hired and much of the
infrastructre has been created and the groundwork laid). For the
moment, on one issue after the next, one can vividly observe the harm
that comes from a political faction being beholden to a leader rather
than to any actual ideas or political principles.