Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

So now there's going
to be a bipartisan health care summit, eh? Woo-hoo.

Is that sorta like the
jobs summit we just had, one full year into the reign of Obama, despite
that all twelve of those months has been riddled with severe economic
cancer? And hasn't that summit just really produced a raft of
good solutions to the unemployment crisis?

Is the health care summit
gonna be kinda like the stimulus bill, a full third of which was a sop
to Republican tax-cutting religious dogma, which effort bought all of
a single GOP vote in Congress?

Does it bear any resemblance
to the health care negotiations which have been going on for nearly
a year now, that also involved protracted efforts to accommodate Republican
interests, and that succeeding in reducing the level of GOP support
from the prior vote on the stimulus bill down by a full one hundred
percent?

Or are we talking here
about any of a whole slew of "Democratic" policies, from the Middle
East to Afghanistan to civil liberties to military spending, in which
the Obama administration never had to negotiate at all with Republicans,
because they were already running the same policies as George W. Bush?
And nevertheless still got slammed for it?

I really have to confess
that I don't know why Barack Obama ever wanted the presidency.
He had a boatload of fame and fortune in his hands already, though admittedly
it's a whole other league to be in as a part of the exclusive club
of US presidents.

On the other hand, you
run some serious risks as president that really call into question whether
it's worth it, from a cost-benefit perspective. Especially since
you can only spend so much money in a lifetime, and Obama had already
made tens of millions from his books, and had huge potential to keep
on making more from lectures, lobbying and more books, without ever
sitting in the White House.

Lincoln and Kennedy remind
us of the most prominent of these risks. But combine the always
present possibility of presidential assassination with the fact that
we have the first black president of a country still loaded with angry,
armed racists, and you have a serious concern there. Additionally,
America is just absolutely in a bad mood these days. We're like
a toddler having a temper tantrum, oscillating between wanting this
or that, usually wanting both at the same time, and regularly throwing
a shit-fit if we don't get just exactly what we want when we want
it. If it were possible for an entire country to need its diapers
changed, that's just about where we are nowadays. Put it all
together and you get a recipe for disaster for a black president whose
middle name is Hussein. Especially one who allows himself to be
labeled a socialist. Maybe Michael Steele or Clarence Thomas could
pull this off without agitating the survivalist crowd into taking a
pop at him, but Obama's got a whole army of nuts out there waiting
to take him out. Many of them are in these tea party fringe fanatic
groups. Hell, many of them are in the GOP.

Moreover, that's not
the only risk he took in running for the presidency. You can also
get elected and then fail miserably. Is it really worth it to
enter the pantheon of American politics, but in a titular sense only?
Wouldn't it be better to lay low and get rich than to be a laughingstock
failure who also happened to have once had an oval-shaped office?
Wouldn't most people rather be Jeb Bush than George W.?

This is why I wonder
why this guy ever sought the presidency. Doing so clearly came
with some serious risks, and not necessarily massive benefits relative
to where he was already sitting.

Of course, if you were
going to do something with the office, that would be something else
entirely. That would be worth taking big risks for. I think
most people want to be successful in life, and most people who are either
self-confident (or radically insecure) enough to seek the American presidency
would absolutely also like the legacy of being one of the great ones.
Obama just doesn't seem to have that jones, though. He's the
perfunctory president. He seems to want to have a health care
bill, any health care bill, so he can say he's done that. He
seems to want to have a climate agreement, however eviscerated, just
so he can tick off that box. And he seems to want to be president
just to be president.

Of course, the Democratic
Party has become nearly as captive of corporate and Wall Street interests
as the Republicans have, which may be a better explanation for the inaction
of Congress and the president. But the capacity to sustain that
facade is now rapidly melting. Perhaps Democrats even realize
this.

The core (sometimes theoretical)
principle at the root of representative democracy is the quid pro quo
that is supposed to govern the relationship between the representative
and the represented. The member of parliament gets to serve in
high office, provided that MP reflects the political sentiments of his
or her constituents. The problem with American politics today,
of course, is that the real constituents of members of Congress are
not the voters in their districts and states, but rather the special
interests who fund their campaigns to fool the voters in their districts
and states. You don't need to see Bulworth again to figure that
one out.

And the problem for Democrats
is that the country is now reaching the limits of viability for that
game. Voters can be fooled or lulled into political narcolepsy
for a long time, provided conditions are relatively benign. One
reason, frankly, that voter turnout has been so low over the last half-century
is that people have been basically satisfied with conditions in their
lives, notwithstanding the usual grumbling about welfare queens or foreign
aid or uppity blacks. This also explains why we rarely see people
marching in the streets in any serious way, and why we don't see the
rise of alternative political parties of any serious scale. By
and large, people have been pretty complacent about politics because
their life conditions have been pretty decent, whether they know it
or not.

All that is changing
now. Actually, it's been changing for thirty years, but now
it's really crashing down hard. During the middle part of the
twentieth century a literal new deal was struck in American society,
in which for the first time the masses would get a moderate share of
the pie and the fantastically wealthy would be reduced in economic stature
to being merely hugely wealthy. But, after a while, the greediest
amongst us decided they'd had enough of that tough bargain and, circa
1980 or so, the empire struck back. The American plutocracy hired
Ronald Reagan and his party to undo the provisions of trade, labor,
tax and welfare state laws that propped up the newly created middle
class, and the ground underneath most Americans' feet has been eroding
ever since. It was actually much worse than what people thought
all along, because much of the pain for the middle class was eased by
sending wives to work earning a second income, and stealing from their
children via budget deficits.

Now comes the triple
whammy of the apocalypse, as the products from these policies come home
to roost in a serious way. First, deregulating everything in sight
so that the rapist class could have its unfettered way with all of us
has produced the inevitable reckoning with reality now screening in
your neighborhood as "The Great Recession". Second, the unsustainable
pattern of profligate borrowing has become - go figure - unsustainable,
and we are now seeing the beginning of serious movements toward reeling
back spending on popular government programs, just when they are needed
most. And third, the structural changes that have been promulgated
over the last three decades leave most Americans poorly positioned to
even hope for a path to economic recovery. Roughly speaking then,
the middle class have been tossed out of the plane, their primary parachute
was defectively fabricated by a deregulated corporation trying to save
money on production, and their emergency chute was stolen out of the
pack and sold on the black market called Wall Street.

The problem for people
like Obama or Pelosi or Reid or just about any Democrat in Congress
today is that people increasingly know this. They are feeling
it acutely. The decades of complacency have been replaced by the
new era of fear and anxiety. Thus we're now seeing signs of
a reanimated political sphere. Turnout is up, anti-incumbency
is way up, and street rallies and alternative political movements are
increasingly challenging the pathetically limited options of the status
quo.

We've entered an epoch
of political oscillation - mood swings would perhaps be the better
description - in which the two dominant political parties do fantastically
well in opposition, but horribly in government. That's because,
in reality, neither of them is offering any actual solutions to the
problems the shrinking American middle class is grappling with every
day. Republicans distract with an endless procession of bogeymen
at home and abroad, and with tax cuts that only exacerbate the problem
further. Democrats, on the other hand, uh... Democrats,
er... Well, I don't know what Democrats actually do. They
just kinda sit there taking potshots. Both parties do great in
opposition because it's so easy to show how useless the government
is, especially if hypocrisy is not necessarily a problem for how you
practice politics (and for the GOP it is not only not a problem, it
has become a high art form). But it turns out that actually governing
after you win in opposition is problematic if you don't have any real
solutions to offer. Republicans have been hammered twice in the
last two election cycles, once to kick them out of Congress and then
again to kick them out of the White House. Democrats will have
precisely the same experience in 2010 and 2012, and for precisely the
same reasons.

And yet the public will
be no more satisfied with the outcome than they are now, and likely
less so. It's ludicrous to imagine that the party of Bush and
Cheney - which has only gotten worse in their absence - will actually
solve any national problems. Meanwhile, time is running out for
Washington to actually produce solutions. Or at least to be seen
as serious about producing solutions. People understand that this
is not necessarily easily done. Franklin Roosevelt got elected
president four times without ever genuinely slaying the Great Depression.
But people believed that he was trying, and they knew that the party
of Hoover would do nothing. Obama, on the other hand, has done
just the opposite of FDR. He has entirely blown the good will
which attended his inauguration one year ago, such that even if he were
to be serious about dealing with jobs now, it's not clear that he
would be trusted enough to be taken seriously, and it's not clear
that he could even reap the political benefit from any success he might
actually produce.

This was the stupidest
imaginable of strategic decisions by this White House. If they
thought they could simply continue to win by being not Republicans,
they were wrong even in the short term. (Very short term, as it
turns out. They got clobbered right away in Virginia and New Jersey,
and now also in Massachusetts.) If they thought they couldn't
do anything legit to solve problems because they have to placate their
real masters on Wall Street, they were wrong in the longer term.
Americans are unlikely to continue to countenance such treason from
their government anymore, as they lose their jobs, houses, medical care
and dignity.

Look, let's be honest,
American government was designed by its creators to fail, if by success
one means the ability to govern in any real sense and the ability to
be responsive to the preferences of voters. It's a pretty ingenious
system really, at least for those who have a congenital fear of government,
that particularly American paranoia. The system basically requires
so much consensus (which is another way of saying that so many actors
can block it from moving forward), that only on occasions like the day
after Pearl Harbor can it move expeditiously at articulating and legislating
national policy. Otherwise, it requires a powerful figure who
can light enough of a fire under the recalcitrant co-decisionmakers
in the system for anything substantial to happen. And that more
or less can only be the president.

In the long nineteenth
century of American government, that mostly just didn't happen, in
large part because the prevailing view of the role of government was
so limited. Today, however, it is more or less expected.
It more or less defines whether a presidency is successful or not.
Roosevelt and Johnson and Reagan and Wee Bush got what they wanted,
and thus had largely successful presidencies, as measured by that yardstick.
Of course, in some of those cases what they wanted were really disastrous
things, and so those presidencies turned out to be not so successful
in the larger sense, by virtue, ironically, of their successes in the
narrow sense. In any case, for folks like Bill Clinton or Big
Daddy Bush or Barack Obama it's all moot anyhow. They don't
aspire to much of anything serious, and they therefore, of course, don't
get anywhere near achieving it.

This model for governmental
failure created by the Founders has now become even more unruly, at
least when Republicans are in the opposition. They have decided
to use the filibuster and nomination holds in the Senate to block literally
everything the Democrats want to do, including even staffing up the
president's administration. Democrats, of course, are just the
opposite. Even when they are in the minority by only the barest
amount, they still allow the Republicans to do whatever they want, using
whatever legislative bullying technique they choose. Essentially
what we have today is a situation in which Republicans make life for
the vast majority of Americans worse when they are in government, and
Democrats do nothing whatsoever when they are given control. Nothing,
that is, unless you count destroying the reputation of progressive politics
while ironically not actually being progressive at all.

America is increasingly
in need of some serious Constitutional shake-ups, and a parliamentary
system of responsible government to replace the existing do-nothing
model is perhaps at the top of the list. That alternative surely
at least has clarity going for it, hence the term 'responsible'.
You know who governs at any given time, and you get to throw the bums
out of office if they don't do it the way you want them to.
It's a higher gamble affair, though. It essentially puts all
the eggs in one basket, at least for the short term. If we had
had such a system in 2005, for example, Social Security would have been
effectively destroyed. On the other hand, when people saw in 2008
what Wall Street did to the Social Security accounts they had been building
over a lifetime, Republicans would have banished from the halls of government
for eighty years.

The system is truly broken,
but the truth is that all systems are broken, and all systems are also
not broken. It's in the nature of people to switch systems,
and to want to switch systems, as a cheap potential solution to their
problems. But, in reality, institutions and constitutions don't
make nearly as much difference in the quality of governance as does
the character and commitments of the people at the helm, and that of
those who choose them. Good people with good intentions and a
good helping of guts will produce good results, even when faced with
daunting obstacles built into the system of governance. Rip-off
artists, on the other hand, will not be deterred by mere checks and
balances. And those who seek to do nothing while the country burns
will be able to under any constitutional order, at least for the short-term.

Major aspects of the
current crisis in American politics are deeply fundamental in nature,
in the sense that a cavalier and self-interested (often at best) public
has allowed the gravest crimes to be committed in its name, as long
as it could still sit on the sofa unmolested, slurping beer, scarfing
Tater Tots, and watching yet another episode of American Idol.
We truly do have the government we deserve.

And yet, to some extent,
it 'twas ever thus, and still we've managed to do better at times.
Moreover, it's hard not to conclude that there has been a concerted
effort to dumb down the American public on matters of politics and even
their own welfare these last few decades. And why not, eh?
There was a helluva lot of money to be made.

But while the breakdown
of the country's political system has been near complete - ranging
from government to opposition party to the media to the public - those
who ask for our votes by promising serious change, and who invoke the
rhetoric of Martin Luther King and the centuries-long tribulations of
the enslaved in order to get elected, have a special responsibility
to fulfill their commitment. It requires a particular and spectacular
brand of treasonous contempt to piss away the beliefs of an entire nation
in one's promise and one's integrity, not to mention trashing the
legions of people who carried you across the finish line for exactly
that reason. Even worse, to mangle the governance of a country
at a time of crisis - knowing full well what sort of creatures to
whom that throws open the doors of the government in the wake of your
failure - is an egregious crime of historical proportions. How
many Weimar Republics or Neville Chamberlains do we need before we figure
that one out? Obama's weakness will make Sarah Palin president.

Some folks argue that
change never comes from the top and it's a fool's errand to expect
Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or any other leaders of American
government to ever just do the right thing for the right reasons.
Maybe that's all true, and I certainly rue the fact that the only
people out on the streets these days are the know-nothings of the right.
There is a ton of work to be done right now building a progressive movement
with the capacity to pressure the country's national leaders into
doing the right thing for the country.

But those leaders are
part of the problem, too. And it's also the case that some of
the great transformative figures of this country or others - Franklin
Roosevelt, Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping - were so much more than
history forced them to be. To me, that means both that we should
continue to expect a serious contribution from those entrusted with
governing the country, beyond what the street forces them to do, and
that history vindicates such expectations as being legitimate.
In other words, we know from the historical record that it can happen
that leaders actually lead, beyond where we folks down below push them
to go. It is, therefore, not unreasonable to expect that of the
current crop, notwithstanding the crucial role also to be played by
the public, the media, social movements, etc.

Few leaders in American
history have been as blessed with the ironic opportunity of crisis as
has been Barack Obama. This last year could have been written
into the history books with an entirely different script, and one which
would have massively benefitted the country, the Democratic Party and
Barack Obama. Yet, because he is so very much not a man of his
time, just the opposite occurred. Clinton got away with being
a nothingburger during fat times. Obama is foolishly trying it
during a moment of multiple simultaneous national and international
crises, and he is failing miserably. As he should be, with such
a shamefully tepid agenda.

Barack Obama and his
congressional co-conspirators in cowardice will soon be toast, the victims
- both directly through their own inadequacies and indirectly through
their unwillingness to counter attacks upon them by the most destructive
elements of American politics - of their own failings of character.

But because of those
failings, and because at the moment the bottom was falling out they
would neither lead, follow nor get out of the way, they are not the
only folks right now staring down the business end of the shotgun that
is the future of America.

We are, too.

Indeed, far more than
they.