Saving Progressivism From Obama

What's the worst case, and the best case, that we can imagine for the next two years? Let's look at the economics first.

Republicans and the White House both seem determined to make the
recession worse by reducing the budget deficit long before the economy
is in recovery. The deficit commission's two co-chairs have proposed
that the cuts begin in October 2011, when unemployment is still expected
to be at least nine percent. The economy needs a massive fiscal jolt,
and instead is likely to get austerity.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve's experiment
with buying Treasury bonds in order to keep interest rates low is not
working very well. Mainly, the policy seems to be annoying America's
allies. Cheap money by itself won't fix the prolonged slump.

Obama's ill-fated Asia trip was intended to bring home a foreign
policy victory to divert attention from the domestic economic and
political carnage. But Obama failed to get the Koreans to agree to a
(badly conceived) trade deal, and failed to get the G-20 leaders to
agree to new strategy to pressure nations with big export surpluses to
do more of their part to help the global recovery. An economically
weakened America with a politically weakened president has less weight
to swing around.

So as President Obama gears up for a re-election battle in 2012, the
economy is unlikely to be much different than the one that sank the
Democrats in 2010. The question is whether Obama and the Democrats can
change the national understanding of what caused the economic collapse
and who is blocking the recovery.

In this enterprise, I don't have high expectations for Obama. I
cannot recall a president who generated so much excitement as a
candidate but who turned out to be such a political dud as chief
executive. Nor do his actions since the election inspire confidence that
he will be reborn as a fighter.

The president's defenders offer an assortment of alibis for the epic
defeat. The in-party always loses seats in the first mid-term (but not
this many). The recession was far more protracted than anticipated
(Obama's own chief economic adviser, Christy Romer knew how bad things
were pressed for a much larger stimulus than Obama was willing to
embrace.) The Republicans blocked him at every turn (yes, and he kept
trying to conciliate rather than fight.)

Consider that the Democrats got particularly shellacked, as Obama put
it, among the elderly. When you remember that the Republicans hope to
gut Social Security, this is quite remarkable. When you add the fact
that Democrats have been far more committed to defending Medicare than
Republicans who want to turn it into a voucher, the sheer political
malpractice of this election loss among seniors is just stupefying.

Because of the poor design of the Obama health plan, and the
ineptitude of explaining or marketing it, older voters came away
convinced that the scheme would come at the expense of their Medicare.
Even today, as a fiscal commission appointed by Obama tries to take more
money out of Medicare and Social Security, our president and his budget
wonk advisers cannot bring themselves to draw a simple line in the sand
and declare that the Democrats will never cut Social Security benefits.
Had Obama done so before the election and dared the Republicans to
match the pledge, dozens of Democratic House seats might have been
saved.

And had Obama made clear that the real obstacle to comprehensive
health reform and cost savings is the private insurance industry, not
our one island of socialized medicine--Medicare--he might have clarified
who is really on the side of America's seniors.

The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, who has tended to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, attributed the electorate's punishment of the Democrats to "a kind of political cognitive dissonance."

Frightened by joblessness, the American people rewarded the
party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension
of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they
rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into
budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of
billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent.
Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that
not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the
watering down of whatever it couldn't block.

Hertzberg goes on to tick off a litany of misperceptions on the part
of the electorate, adding with his characteristic gentle understatement,
"But why don't the American people know these things. Could it be that
the President and his party did not try, or try hard enough to tell
them?

Danny Goldberg made a similar point in The Nation:

Almost half of the public is either misinformed or subject
to unanswered right wing narratives. If I believed that there was a
chance of Sharia law being imposed in the United States I too would be
gravely concerned. If I believed that most Europeans and Canadians had
inferior health care to that of average Americans, I too would be
against health care reform. If I believed that man-made global warning
did not exist or that there were nothing we could do about it and that
environmental efforts were responsible for unemployment I'd be against
cap and trade. If I believed that prisoner abuse would make my family
significantly less likely to be killed by terrorists, my thinking about
torture would be different. And if I believed that the problems with the
economy had been caused by too much government instead of too little,
that my personal freedom was threatened by the government instead of
large corporations, I'd probably be in a tea party supporter and a
Republican.

Goldberg calls for less reliance on polling and focus groups and more reliance on "inspired intuition" to restore progressivism.

The real question is how we do this without the active collaboration
of a Democratic president who is fast becoming more albatross than ally.

I am not one of those who believes that Republican missteps will save
us -- that the Republicans will be disabled by divisions between the
far right that now controls the party and the very far right represented
by newly elected Tea Party militants. Let's get real: The Republican
Party and the Tea Party are essentially the same party. There will be
skirmishes, but the Republican leadership will keep its eye on the
ball--of destroying Obama.

Nor am I especially hopeful that Obama will metamorphose into Harry Truman any time soon.

If politics continues on its present course, about the best one might
expect for 2012 is that the Republicans will nominate such a nut-case
that Obama will stagger to re-election. But unless he is re-elected with
a mandate to carry out drastically different policies, we can
anticipate continued economic pain and continuing drift of the
electorate to the right.

So what is the alternative?

My audacious hope is that progressives can move from disillusion to
action and offer the kind of political movement and counter-narrative
that the President should have been leading.

I doubt that it makes sense to run a left candidate against Obama in
2012. The history of these efforts is one of failure that only weakened
the Democratic nominee, whether we recall Ted Kennedy's doomed primary
challenge to incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980, or Ralph Nader's run in
2000.

The closest that the progressive movement came to realizing this
strategy was of course in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson decided to abdicate
in the face of mass protest. But in that tumultuous year, we had a
surfeit of anti-war candidates and a real movement. Even so, we ended up
with Richard Nixon. This year, it is hard to think of a plausible
candidate (Howard Dean? Russ Feingold?) who could unseat Obama without
further weakening the Democrats in the general election.

So our task is to step into the leadership vacuum that Obama has
left, and fashion a compelling narrative about who and what are
destroying America. Our movement needs the passion and single mindedness
of the Tea Party movement, and it helps that we have reality on our
side. If we do our jobs, we can move public opinion, discredit the
right, and elect progressives to office. Even Barack Obama might embrace
us, if only as a last resort.