Can You Hear Us Now?

So, let me see if I have
this straight.

One year ago, the Democrats
won commanding victories resulting in control of the presidency and
lopsided majorities in the House and Senate.

One year ago, the Republican
brand was so weak that the party was on death watch, literally capable
of sliding into the history books alongside the Whigs and the Federalists.

One year ago the country
was enthralled with the notion of a new president who seemed committed
to solving a host of problems and, above all, offering change from a
hated predecessor and his disastrously failed politics.

But now, today, that
promised change seems a lot more like chump change instead.

Now, today, the Big Hope
president has virtually nothing of import to show for nearly a year
in office.

Now, today, that president
continues to follow the policies of his horrid predecessor on everything
from civil liberties to civil rights to economics and foreign policy.

And now, today, he and
his comrades in Congress have squandered whatever goodwill they once
had and face an angry public turning back to the right, desperately
seeking solutions to their problems.

Better still, this is
likely only the beginning. Does anyone think the job situation
is going to get better in the next year? How about Afghanistan?
Does anyone believe that the public will be enthusiastic about Obama's
healthcare plans, assuming anyone can locate them, and assuming that
a bill can actually get through Congress? Who out there thinks
that his position on global warming will please anyone in America, even
as it does next to nothing serious about addressing the problem, and
even as it remains - like his healthcare ideas - playing hide-and-seek
with the American public?

I am not surprised that
Barack Obama - like the last two Democratic presidents - has turned
out to be a conservative, corporate creature whose interest in the public
interest is scarce and superficial. What does surprise me, though,
is just how bad he is at playing politics, especially where his own
self-interest is overwhelmingly at stake. Can this really be the
same person who ran such a remarkable campaign last year, stealing the
presidency from two of the great figureheads of American politics?

Obama is one of the most
articulate politicians in American history. And yet, his communications
strategy is the absolute worst I've seen since Carter. In fact,
what's most stunning about it is that his team seems to have dismissed
all the lessons learned over the last three decades - especially from
masterful Republican administrations - about how to market presidents
and policies from the White House. This is no longer rocket science,
if it ever was. How can a guy this sharp be so clueless and, thus,
adrift?

Obama is also one of
the smartest people ever to sit in the Oval Office, but he has demonstrated
astonishing levels of cluelessness about what the public wants, about
the nature of his opposition, and about what makes a presidency successful.
He doesn't understand that the public will follow you if you lead
them, especially if you do so with passion. He doesn't get that
the conservative movement is a lethal cancer seeking to commodify, monetize
and profitize every aspect of America, and therefore is committed to
the destruction of all else, including this administration, despite
even that it is essentially staffed by Goldman Sachs. He doesn't
understand that the most successful American presidents were the ones
who brought a vision to the table, and fought for it.

Fundamentally, Obama
is an anachronism. He is essentially a nineteenth century president
operating in a crisis era, as the early twenty-first grapples with cleaning
up after the late twentieth.

Historians sometimes
debate over whether history makes the man or the man makes history.
Leaving aside the sexist construction of the question, I think, manifestly,
it has to be both. Almost all the great presidents served during
time of great crisis, usually war. But that doesn't guarantee
their place in the historical pantheon. You have to also meet
those challenges of your time. Lincoln is widely considered America's
greatest president. His predecessor, James Buchanan, is generally
thought to be the country's worst. Both faced the same crisis
of Southern secession, but they responded to it very differently, earning
their respective places in history. On the other hand, had the
civil war come twenty years earlier or later, we'd hardly even know
their names, except as the answer to trivia questions. "Who
was the first president from Illinois?!" "Who was our tallest
president?" And so on.

Obama could be Lincoln
- or better still, FDR - if he wanted to be. He has chosen
instead to be Buchanan. Faced with crisis scenario after crisis
scenario, the candidate of 'change' repeatedly and instinctively
homes in on the weakest, most centrist, most useless response possible.
His stimulus bill probably stopped the economy from continuing its free
fall, but it leaves the country stuck in months or even years of unyielding
recession at worst, and jobless recovery at best. His healthcare
bill helps in some important ways, but does nothing to hold down costs
in a society that utterly wastes one dollar out of every three it spends
in this area, and it does nothing to make healthcare more affordable
for most Americans. He seems to have some interest in a global
warming bill and a banking regulation bill and maybe even doing something
about civil rights for gays. But in none of these areas is there
any sense that he will do what is morally necessary. Likewise,
with Afghanistan, all the indicators seem to suggest that he will opt
for some numbingly anodyne middle ground.

The guy is a leaky bucket
at a time when the boat has been swamped. He's an pressureless
fire hose when the house is in flames. A tattered parachute when
the ground is coming up fast. A rusty musket as the Huns come
over the ridge. At a time when America needs a bold, powerful
and wise leader in the White House - principally to undo the damage
of the bold, powerful and sociopathic guy who was just in there -
we have instead Mr. Rogers' pet gerbil. Complete with cardigan
sweater and barbiturate-laced water supply. Obama seems to want
nothing more than to be liked. In the neighborhood called Earth.

The great irony, of course,
is that he is accomplishing just the opposite. Gallup recorded
his job approval ratings right after his inauguration at 69 percent.
Today they are down to 50. That's not 35 percent, like his predecessor,
to be sure. But since when did being better than George W. Bush
become the standard? A backed-up toilet was more popular than
Bush a year ago today. Hell, even gonorrhea was more beloved.
But the point is that dropping fifteen to twenty percent in job approval
in what is likely to be the best year of his presidency, at a time when
the public is likely to be most generous, is a spectacular failure of
the first order. Even according to Obama's own pathetic standards.
If all he wants is to be liked, he's still blowing it. This
is the equivalent of having every fourth friend or family member drop
you on Facebook. Not a good sign, especially if you live for popularity.

It didn't have to be
this way. He could have been both a great president, a popular
president, and a heroic president. All he had to do was be willing
to treat the people who already hate his guts as political enemies.
All he had to do was be willing to treat the people who live to fleece
the country as treasonous thieves. All he had to do was to speak
clearly, act boldly, and lead a broken country down the bright shining
path toward repair that is obvious to anyone who is willing to look.
But since that group excludes most Americans right now, this notion
of bold leadership is especially essential.

In fairness to Obama,
the public doesn't really know what it wants these days, and best
of luck to the two new Republican governors trying to cut taxes without
deficit spending. If they can do it, they will only do it by slashing
government services. Idiotic voters love tax cuts in the abstract.
They will most likely feel a bit less enamored of closed schools, pothole
proliferation, massive prisoner releases and state parks that cost as
much to get in to as professional sports stadiums now do. For
the last several decades, these selfish citizens have been all to willing
to be trained by one of the sickest regressive mantras of them all -
that government is just some bloated pig wasting tax dollars, and therefore
that they could have their tax cuts without any cost to service, or
without deficit spending. Apart from occasional lip service to
Jesus, there is nothing closer to the core of the regressive/Republican
canon than this tax-cutting chant.

It's a complete lie,
of course, and it took about five minutes into the Reagan administration
to show that. Reagan slashed taxes so much that he tripled the
national debt in eight years time. That problem wasn't helped
by the fact that Republicans actually blow through cash faster when
they control the government than do supposed "tax-and-spend Democrats".

But now the day of reckoning
has arrived, especially for the states, which generally do not have
the federal government's capacity to tell gigantic lies through borrowing.
People in New Jersey and Virginia have been stupid, and all they had
to do to see how stupid they were being is to look at what that "economic
girly-man" Arnold Schwarzenegger has been doing to Caleefornya.
The state government is essentially conducting a going-out-of-business
fire sale, and its creditworthiness is now about as good as Bernie Madoff's.
Government services are being tossed overboard as if they were lead
cannonballs in a leaky rowboat.

This is the denouement
of regressive fiscal policy these last decades. Lotteries won't
save our state and local and federal governments anymore. Selling
off land and highways and other assets no longer works, 'cause they
done all been sold. Privatization of every service from prisons
to the military not only doesn't save money, it only gives you less
quality at greater cost. And whodathunk that? Who could
imagine that converting a not-for-profit government program into a profit-making
private one would cost more? Profits don't cost anything, do
they? And you know how much more efficient(!) business is than
the government, right? Like health insurance, for example, where
overhead is a mere thirty-five percent, compared to the outrageous two
percent of Medicare.

So, yeah, in fairness
to Obama, the public doesn't know what it wants, except that it wants
it all. Since that can no longer be provided, it will happily
pull the lever for any politician offering the sweet song of "change"
from the status quo, the more vague the promise and the more aggrandizing
to the voter, the better.

But that doesn't mean
Obama isn't both a fool and a disaster to his country for his relentless
pursuit of mediocrity in governance and tepidness in policy. He's
a fool because he doesn't realize that he and his party have become
the anti-change incumbent targets of the very same tool they rode to
power. In 2010 and then again in 2012, they will be smashed by
angry voters demanding that something be done, just as they were in
elections held this week.

And he's both a fool
and an American disaster because he could have written a much different
story for the history books. Americans want their leaders to lead,
oddly enough. Voters are incredibly lazy about understanding politics,
in between their bouts of rage at the lousy politicians selected by
those darned... lazy voters. That laziness means that they will
follow you if you lead. They'll even follow you, for a while
anyhow, if you're ideas are insane. George W. Bush is the paradigmatic
case. Americans didn't want the war in Iraq. They didn't
really even want the massive tax cuts. But he hammered those policies
home, using every technique of the bully pulpit to masterful effect,
and he got what he wanted, even when he lacked a majority in Congress.
He might have gotten his Social Security theft bill through Congress
as well, had he not already established himself to the electorate as
a liar and a disaster-inducing idiot. (Bush should get on his
knees and thank Darwin that he failed on that front. Seniors would
likely be lynching him now if his bill had passed.)

Obama could have been
a bold, decisive and game-changing leader, but he has chosen instead
to be Bill Clinton in the time of Franklin Roosevelt. He wants
to do something about the Great Depression. But not too much!
He want to respond to Pearl Harbor and the Nazi threat to plunge the
world into a thousand years of darkness. But only if no one would
get hurt! He want to make sure Americans aren't ill-fed, ill-clad
and ill-housed. But only if the Republicans literally seeking
to destroy his presidency will go along for the ride!

Brilliant. He doesn't
get that people want leadership from the president, that they absolutely
demand that in a time of crisis, and that they will drop you like so
much depleted uranium if you don't bring it during a time of big,
multiple crises. Like now. This guy is fast wearing out
his welcome.

The mood of the public
today is anti-incumbent, and the president and his party are the incumbents
du jour to be anti against. They have exacerbated their problem
by failing to take the steps sufficient to really solve problems, and
by focusing on problems other than the one absolutely at the top of
the public's list right now - jobs and more jobs.

Most of all, though,
this president has almost completely lost control of the communications
high ground. For a president in the American system of distributed
power - especially one who, unlike George W. Bush, is unwilling the
toss the Constitution and its separation of powers into the garbage
can - communications mastery is everything. You can only win
by skilled use of the bully pulpit. Obama, on the other hand,
has allowed himself to be defined by others, not least of which including
a now revived and revanchist Republican Party, blood dripping from its
fangs, a very hungry look gleaming in its eye.

So, for example, most
Americans now think Obama is a liberal, despite the fact that he is
actually quite conservative (except if you count as liberal spending
a ton of money to clean up the regressive right's multifarious messes).

And most Americans do
not consider themselves liberal.

Neither of these outcomes
was necessary. A skilled and gutsy and bold President Obama would
have staked out an agenda clearly in the public interest, identified
just as clearly the opponents to that agenda and their motives, hammered
home his relentless sales pitch to the public, twisted arms right out
of their sockets in Congress, and forged a new progressive majority
in America over sensible policies, leaving the minority of old white
male crackers out there foaming at the mouth, forming the core of the
Republican Party. Tony Blair was the model here. He aggressively
painted - quite accurately - the British Conservative Party of Thatcher
and Major as the source of the country's woes, and he never stopped
reminding people of their disastrous reign. Meanwhile, Blair did
nothing much in office, signed up for the Iraq war - totally in opposition
of public sentiment, lying all the way - and helped to bring on a
vicious recession. And he still bought the Labour Party more than
a dozen years in office, just by reminding the public of how bad the
Tories had been.

Obama is, instead, taking
himself down and - in as cruel a twist as history can muster - the
progressive values he long ago walked away from, along with him.

Where we go from here
could be very, very ugly. The GOP right now is in the process
of alienating and crushing every last scrap of moderately sensible politics
from within its ranks. That means that American voters will very
likely have the following choice in 2010 and 2012: On the one
hand, a discredited do-nothing Democratic Party that promised change
and didn't deliver; and on the other, a rabid, ultra-regressive
GOP that is itself promising change from the failed former would-be
change-providers.

Before you guess who
would win that contest, bear in mind that this is likely to be happening
under still dire economic conditions and a shrinking national standard
of living.

You may be forgiven for
thinking that that scenario is all too reminiscent of a certain European
country in the 1930s.