Dear President Obama…
I read, yesterday, some excerpts from your interview with Rolling Stone. (I didn’t go purchase the entire magazine because I am underemployed/just-plain-cheap/a shut-in, take your pick.) And among other things, you told RS:
When I talk to Democrats around the country, I tell them, “Guys, wake up here…I keep in my pocket a checklist of the promises I made during the campaign, and here I am, halfway through my first term, and we’ve probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we said we were going to do—and by the way, I’ve got two years left…”
Uh, yeah, Mr. President? Sir? Are you the nation’s supreme executive and a progressive leadership figure? Or a goddamn shipping clerk?
A checklist? Dude, get a fucking grip. First of all, as Jon Caroll thoughtfully points out today, you’ve either forgotten a few items on your checklist or else you’re arriving at a “70 percent” completion figure through some very creative accounting. Close Guantanamo? Um. Gay rights? Errr.
More to the point though, sir, I don’t really fucking care about how much of your campaign promise list has been “checked off,” and I sincerely doubt that anyone else does either. You “wake up, here,” Mr. President; the presidency is not a government contract, where you go in with defined, limited project specs, complete them and then you’ve succeeded.
Take a look around you, guy. We are at or approaching “plane crashed into the goddamn mountain” in terms of the unemployment rate. Okay, that’s not really your fault, but what are you doing about it? You may believe it politically impractical to do more right now, but that’s not really an answer. You may believe that more cannot be done at all, and that we (meaning the rest of us, since you’re pretty well set for life) must simply be patient, but I read economics and financial commentary every day and there are many more people than just Paul Krugman who disagree, so you can’t simply dismiss the issue.
Meanwhile, the health care reform which you presumably have “checked off” has done nothing to slow down obscene premium increases from the private insurers to whose tender mercies we’re still subject. The housing market is stuck in seemingly the worst of all possible worlds, neither cleared nor re-inflated. Most of the people and institutions responsible for creating the disastrous bubble and subsequent collapse, meanwhile, have gone unpunished and unreformed, and are already up to their old tricks once more, raking in windfall profits and handing one another seven-figure bonuses. We’re still milling around in Afghanistan without any clear purpose, let alone a convincing route to achieving one.
And, of course, before you accuse this humble petitioner of impatience, let’s take a long-term perspective by all means and look at what you’ve done about the biggest long-term challenge we face: reforming our energy industry. And it seems you’ve done… nothing. You decided that we had to “do” health care first, which has worked out so well from every perspective, then afterward, even when said energy industry went out of its way to damage its own credibility and scream for regulatory intervention and, y’know, leadership, you just kind of stood around trying to convince people that you were just as frustrated as us.
Once more: you’re the fucking president, sir. The rest of us get frustrated because we’re powerless to do something. What we need from you is not someone to share in that frustration, but someone who is not powerless and will act like it.
So start acting like it. This “checklist” concept is absurd. Whatever happened to “the buck stops here?” Yet there you are acting like some bored bureaucrat deflecting complaints with “not my department,” because you aren’t concerned with anything that falls outside a strict, literal interpretation of your (self-written, in this case) “job description.”
Wake up, here, Barry.
Your friend,
Matt
P.S. “…and by the way, I’ve got two years left?” Uh, you planning on going somewhere in 2013, chief? Because as disappointing as you’ve been so far I’m hardly eager to see you replaced with President Huckabee or, y’know, that one person. If you’re not planning on a second term I hope that you let some people know so they can prepare accordingly.
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I really don’t know where to start with this (I’m not going to get into the “Barry” thing because I don’t want to say something I might later regret). On the substance, I’m as disappointed as you are that more hasn’t been done, but I can’t, for the life of me, understand how Obama personally was supposed to do it all. Yes, he’s the President, and he’s not powerless. But he’s not all-powerful. Those who enjoy comparing Obama to Bush often point out that Bush didn’t let Congress stand is his way, that he ignored political practicality and just got (horrible) shit done. This is sort of true: Bush put through lots and lots of changes, but almost none of them were permanent: his major legislative successes all date to the period shortly following 9/11 (when a dustmop could have passed anything it wanted to, assuming it had managed to occupy the Oval Office), and pretty much everything serious he tried to do legislatively after the Iraq invasion either passed with an expiration date or didn’t pass at all (lest we forget Social Security privatization, immigration reform, the nomination of Harriet Miers, etc.). Bush’s legislative record is pretty shitty, and most of the changes he made were either administrative or symbolic. Obama’s approach is very different: he’s not blowing his load pursuing quick ‘n’ dirty – and therefore temporary – satisfying changes; he’s trying to institute permanent changes. And those sort of changes are rarely satisfying, since our system of government pretty much guarantees that lasting changes are incremental. Like it or not, we’ve always been a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back country. Obama’s approach makes for shitty politics at the immediate level, but at least it’s a long-term strategy.
As for particular policy points you make:
1. I really don’t see how it’s Obama’s fault that Gitmo remains open. Congress gave Obama the finger on that one, and there’s really nothing else he can do.
2. The LGBT rights situation is nowhere near as simple as it’s typically portrayed. DADT is the thing everybody’s talking about, and I’ll get to that, but the administration’s other accomplishments, which have a positive impact on exponentially more people than DADT, always seem to go ignored. Here’s a list:
None of that is inconsequential.
3. On DADT, it’s a really complicated issue that I don’t pretend to fully understand (would that more would admit the same…), but it seems like Obama’s doing his level best to end the policy in a stable way. Yes, he could end it with an executive order (which could be rescinded by the next President, resulting in the destruction of the lives and careers of anybody who came out in the interim) right now, but again, it’s the permanent thing he’s after. It’s taking such a long time because the Pentagon is dragging its heels, and there’s only so much a President can do there (yes, he’s CIC, but remember that DOD is a huge bureaucracy including tons of civilians who aren’t under oath to obey the POTUS, and that there’s plenty of military brass who have no problem disobeying orders from a POTUS, if it can be done quietly. The “Commander in Chief” thing has never meant that a President can unilaterally dictate military policy, at least without suffering the possibility of assassination or a coup). The only way for a DADT repeal to be truly permanent and not lead to chaos is for there to be a well-planned set of policies in place before the ban comes down (otherwise there will be all sorts of fucked-up shit happening, like LGBT people being passed over for promotion, base commanders sequestering LGBT service members away from everybody else, etc.), hence the time it’s taking. I’ve never bought the argument that Obama’s legislative approach to the problem was some scheme to kill efforts at repeal when the three people with veto power have all publicly declared that they’re determined to end DADT. It could happen, sure, but it doesn’t seem all that likely (unless you’re determined to ascribe to Obama the evilest of intentions). And the recent Senate vote on repeal ought to make it clear to us exactly the sort of assholes we’re forced to deal with on this. As for the DOJ’s various movements on the legal challenges, that’s even more complicated. I’m happy to talk about it if you want, but I’ll move on for now.
4. HCR: are you really going to discount all of the good the bill accomplished because health insurance companies are petty douchebags? None of the new regulations, the high-risk pools, the exchanges, or any of the rest of it matters because some people’s premiums are going up in the short term? Seriously? Yeah, it’s kind of a shitty bill in some ways, and compared to what we all would have liked to have seen passed, it’s completely unacceptable. But let’s face it: we were never gonna get our dream bill, and I really have no idea what else Barack Obama could have done to pass a better bill. I’ve never heard anybody explain how, exactly, any of it would have gotten through the Senate (aside from vague suggestions that Obama should “use the bully pulpit” or “twist arms” or something else equally abstract). For a first step, it’s on par with the first versions of Social Security and Medicare (don’t forget that both of those were half-assed, barely-there laws when they were first passed). I’m more pissed that there hasn’t been any discussion of a follow-up bill, even from the hardcore HCR hawks and activists. It seems to be much more satisfying to complain about what was passed than to try to improve it with further legislation.
5. On the economy, yeah, it sucks, and it’s not getting better. And Obama and his people really ought to be paying closer attention to Krugman, et al (though it must be said that there’s no magic bullet, and even if Uncle Paul were personally dictating policy, we’d still be totally fucked right now, though we’d probably pull out of the tailspin sooner). Still, as you point out, the plane had already crashed into the mountain by the time Obama came along, so to lay the blame for the non-recovery at Obama’s feet isn’t the result of deep consideration. It’s scapegoating. I know it’s not really convincing to say “but it would have been a whole hell of a lot worse without the administration’s actions,” but it’s true. That we’re in a long and supremely shitty recession and not a full-blown depression (or even total social and economic collapse) is something to be grateful for, even if the half-measures that prevented that from happening could have, with a different Congress, gotten us out of the hole entirely.
6. The housing bubble: I don’t think anybody wants to re-inflate the bubble (aside from hardcore economic conservatives, maybe), since it’ll just catastrophically collapse again in a few years or decades. So what the hell do we do? What, exactly, is the solution? I don’t know, and I suspect nobody does, because I think this isn’t a housing lull: it’s our new reality. Bubbles are, by definition, ephemeral. Carping on Obama’s inability to return us to the unsustainable position we were in before the bubble popped is missing the point.
7. On criminals going unpublished: I find that as infuriating as you do. But it’s really two separate issues: the Bush administration’s crimes, and the banksters’ crimes. The former really ought to be addressed, and I’m unhappy with the Obama administration’s lack of movement on it, but I understand why they’re not going for it. Their choices are: A) criminal investigations/trials/other justice system actions (which, given Bush’s politicization of the DOJ and the packing of benches with conservative judges that’s been happening non-stop for 30-some years, seems pretty iffy), or B) Congressional investigations (HA!). Sadly, not enough people in this country give a shit about the Bush administration’s crimes to sustain the sort of investigation that justice and democracy demand. People seem to prefer pretending that the last eight years never happened. As for the banksters, there’s plenty of popular support for punishing them, but very few of them actually broke any toothy laws, so there’s not a lot that can be done there, really. I’d love for the banking bill to have been harsher, but once again, there’s that pesky Senate…
8. Afghanistan: you’ll get no argument from me on this one. Huge blunder on Obama’s part. We can also file the administration’s treatment of civil liberties and state secrets in the fucked-up-and-totally-indefensible drawer.
9. Energy policy: the “clean coal” thing is just stupid, and I’m in total agreement with you there. But Obama’s DOE has spent billions developing non-fossil-fuel energy technology. Not enough, of course; we need a major bill and we need it now. But let’s not pretend that the lack of legislation equals “nothing.”
As unhappy as I am that Obama hasn’t been able to accomplish more so far, I’m trying to keep perspective. The problem isn’t that Obama’s obsessed with what’s politically practical; it’s that certain operators in Congress (particularly the Senate) are drastically limiting what’s politically possible. Yes, Obama is the “supreme executive” of the executive branch, but he’s not the boss of Congress. I think eight years of King Bush have gotten our heads all turned around about Presidents. When was the last time expectations were so impossibly high for a President? Why is the bar so much higher for Obama than it was for Clinton, Carter, Johnson, or Kennedy (or Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Mondale, etc.)? (And the FDR comparison doesn’t hold water. He was constantly under fire for hippie-punching too. It’s only decades later that liberals/progressives regard him as a hero.)
Really, I don’t enjoy defending Obama. I have severe reservations about much of what he’s done (and not done), and my feelings about him are decidedly mixed. But there’s so very much hyperbole and reaction-level criticism on our side of the fence, and very little of it actually leaves room for consideration. Obama is a total failure at doing things that satisfy us progressives, but since when has that been a measure of Presidential success? Especially when he’s come closer to doing the things that would satisfy us than anybody for 60+ years?
p.s. (in reply to your p.s.) So if I’m reading you correctly, you’re unhappy that Obama is not publicly assuming that he’ll be reelected in 2012? If he had said six years, would you have been any happier?
Gray, I can’t really argue with anything you say here. Some worthwhile things have been accomplished; various other things should have been attempted but have not been, perhaps because they would be near-impossible; either way the situation is deeply disappointing. Is that fair? I’d say that’s how I feel.
This wasn’t really a “slam Obama for doing a terrible job” post, so if it sounded that way then that was carelessness on my part. It was really more a “what in hell do you want us to be upbeat and optimistic about?” post.
Obviously one can respond “there’s an election coming up, and better that than all of us becoming resigned to a self-fulfilling expectation of defeat.” And that’s fine as far as it goes, but I think the question remains. Could Obama really, off the record, or indeed could anyone, tell me that he actually thinks that “we have only just begun” and that gradual victories are going to continue?
As you point out, many of the things we would like and which have not happened in the past year and a half were arguably impractical. Well, that was with near-record majorities in both houses of congress. And whatever happens next month I think this is pretty much guaranteed to be Democrats’ high-water mark for a very long time.
I can’t really blame Obama for that, or for the dysfunctional politics which has made even this high-water congress such a deathtrap for legislative progress. Neither, however, can I actually see the (aside from political bluffing) grounds for saying “chin up, kids; there’s still more to look forward to.” Politics does take me by complete surprise at times (2006, e.g.) so perhaps my expectations are completely off. If anyone can give me a specific reason why, I will be ever so grateful.
Some detail responses just in case:
“Barry.” Is “Barry” reactionary code or something, now? I honestly don’t read that much of the “liberal blogosphere” these days so I really don’t know. If this is in some way insulting, I withdraw the remark and offer appropriate apologies.
Speaking of symbolism, why are our airports still on perpetual orange alert? For some reason (maybe I just made it up) I had at one point this notion that the entire color alert system might have been quietly retired. And then body-scanning… setting aside progress for a second, could Obama at least reign in the TSA a bit from worsening this Orwellian farce?
Gitmo: In the big picture, this one is realistically pretty symbolic as well. But Obama was the one who brought up his campaign promises (I know, I know; “he started it”), and as I recall this was one of them. Presumably one he should not have made, I guess?
On gay rights you pretty much settled the issue, I think.
On health care… I think the biggest criticisms one can make are tactical. I think the charge that Obama stood back and let congress take (or fail to take, as it were) the lead in crafting details for so long was an error, at least in hindsight. And I really do believe that it’s legitimate to say that a clear statement from Obama could have helped, at least at a very early stage (before, as has admittedly become the case since, an official endorsement from Obama became a signal to the GOP to oppose anything, regardless of actual details). I recall the White House’s kind of shifty pronouncements on a “public option” and wince, now. Admittedly, mistakes happen, especially in a new Presidency, and perhaps this bill will indeed prove “the thin end of the wedge” over time. I hope so.
Housing bubble: no, I don’t want to re-inflate it. But we’re in this murky, in-between situation where a lot of people can’t afford to, or simply refuse to, take the loss on their house and it seems (from what I can glean of discussion of the issue) to be an anchor on economic recovery in various ways. I don’t want to bail people out, and that’s politically impractical anyway… I usually tend to assume that in something like economic policy, just because I can’t personally see a solution doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. I must allow that I may be wrong there, though; thinking about it, professional economists themselves do seem to be conscious of significant limitations on their abilities these days.
That pesky Senate: Everyone seems to just take the (relatively recent, in fact) calcification of a supermajority requirement in the Senate for granted, like it’s the Rocky Mountains or something, i.e. just there. Shouldn’t that situation actually be a little… worrying? And if so, then doesn’t someone really need to stand up eventually and make an issue out of it? And again, if so, who or when will be in a better (or, shall we say, a less-bad) situation to do so than Obama, now?
The P.S. That was mostly just a flippant comment; you raise a valid point that predicting six more years is as problematic as predicting two more years, in which case I guess I would have advised simply not making any remark on that issue at all. (It didn’t seem to be in response to a specific question.)
Thanks for your response, Matt. You make a lot of excellent points, and I can’t fault anybody for frustration. Things suck, and they’re going to continue sucking for the foreseeable future. My own frustration probably made my comments above more combative than I intended them to be; I’m sorry if they seemed at all confrontational. To be fair to you, much of what I said above wasn’t a direct response to your post, but the unloading of lots of pent-up thoughts and reactions I hadn’t been able to articulate for months. I’m sorry to have hijacked your post with tangentially related blustering.
I think we have to retain some optimism, or at least the hope of optimism, if we’re to remain sane in the coming years. I don’t think we’ve passed the high water mark of Democratic governance, or of progressive influence. Our current Congressional majorities are a lot smaller than they actually appear to be, since at least a third of Congressional Democrats lie somewhere on the Blue Dog/conservadem spectrum. They get counted as Democrats even though they really have more in common with pre-Tea Party Congressional Republicans than they do with Obama-era Democrats. We never had 60 votes in the Senate. About the only thing that elected Republicans are good at is party discipline (which is why even “moderates” like Snowe and Collins almost never deliver votes according to their principles, but according to what the GOP demands of them), so when they’re in control, they don’t have these problems, and they don’t need a filibuster-proof majority because there’s always plenty of Democrats willing to vote with them. My understanding is that the filibuster rules can be altered, but only at the beginning of a new Congress. That Reid and co. didn’t do so in January 2009 is to their eternal shame, but there’s nothing anybody can do about it until January 2011. I think it’s fair to fault Obama for not making filibuster reform a big deal during the lead-up to his inauguration, but considering the national attitude at that moment, I doubt anybody had the attention span for a fight of that sort. That Obama and the rest of the Dems haven’t made a stink about it since then is what I find really troubling.
My feeling that we haven’t missed our shot is based both on the notion that we didn’t really have a shot to begin with (since we never really had the votes we needed, despite party ID appearances) and on the notion that the political future only looks brighter for progressives. Old white people are the problem, both in the GOP and in the Democratic Congressional caucus, and old white people are a declining concern. Rising demographic trends all point to a more progressive future. I’m not predicting that progressives will become the political majority, but our worst enemies are dying out, and the people left are at least marginally more sympathetic to our policy goals. Fewer Republicans AND conservadems in Congress is nothing but good news for us, and that’s what population trends seem to indicate is on the way.
In the short term, of course, it’s going to be a long, bitter death-struggle for the current iteration of conservatism, and I worry that there will be a lot of bloodshed before they’re finally vanquished. But they’re on their way out, and the only way their ideology will survive is either as a fringe, or by abandoning major swaths of their identity (which they’ve so far found totally unacceptable). In the long run, they’re screwed, and we’re not. The pendulum didn’t swing nearly as far in 2006 and 2008 as we thought it did, but on the macro level it’s still swinging the way we want it to go (which isn’t to say there won’t be backtracking in the short term; see the three-steps-forward-two-steps-back comment above). We may be about to pass the short-term high water mark for Democrats (as in, everybody who calls themselves Democrats, regardless of ideology), but since the Democratic party is such an incoherent, dysfunctional mess, that doesn’t say much about the future of American politics. And the GOP’s tailspin is even worse than the Democrats’, so a loss for Dems does not necessarily equal a win for Republicans. All in all, I think the medium-term future looks pretty good, even if the next several years suck as badly as they seem primed to do.
On the TSA and related things: I’m with you 100% of the way. That Obama seems totally uninterested in things like this is a major disappointment.
On Gitmo: I think Obama pretty much had to promise to close it in order to get the Dem nomination, and I suspect he legitimately intended to close it. He tried, and he failed. While I wish he had succeeded, the final outcome was out of his hands, and I’m glad he gave it a shot. That said, I haven’t heard about anything happening on this issue for months, and that’s definitely troubling.
On HCR: I think Obama’s trust in fellow Democrats not to completely fuck up was definitely stupid, but again, I can understand how that happened, given the national attitude at the beginning of his Presidency (which doesn’t excuse the mistake, but helps to explain how it happened). I’m not convinced that there was ever a moment, from the day of his election until now, that the GOP was not 100% committed to opposing anything Obama did (remember that Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” comments came in late 2008, and the “Party of No” meme was already pretty well established before the inauguration). And I guess we remember things differently vis-a-vis Obama’s statements on the public option. As I recall, he was quite vociferous that he wanted to see a robust public option, and he held that line right up until the seeming death of the bill in the weeks leading up to Scott Brown’s election. My memory is that progressives’ objection was that Obama refused to threaten to veto the bill unless it contained a strong public option, but A) everybody knew that was a threat Obama couldn’t possibly keep, and B) I’m not at all convinced that that would have resulted in a stronger bill. In all honesty, I think the bill we got was the best bill that Congress was capable of passing. That’s incredibly depressing, but the bulk of the onus rests on the shoulders of Congressional Democrats. Obama’s not blameless in this, but his status as the whipping boy on HCR seems to me to be seriously misguided.
On the housing bubble: I’m already out of my depth here, so I’ll resist the urge to further humiliate myself by talking out of my ass. My extreme pessimism on this issue comes from a place of near-total ignorance.
On “Barry”: I don’t know for sure if it’s accepted as shorthand (though there seems to be some use of it on lefty blogs to mock right-wing Obama critics, especially those who barely contain their racism), but I only ever see people addressing Obama as “Barry” on right-wing blogs and tea party signs. The general objection is that those who routinely call Obama “Barry” are doing so because it’s a diminutive form of his first name, and is thus a hair’s breadth from addressing him as “Boy.” I know that’s not what you’re doing, and I hope I’m not coming across as lumping you in with those assholes; that’s why I didn’t go into it above.
I’m really glad we’re having this discussion. It’s a VERY welcome change from the polarized Obama-hater vs. Obamabot pie fights elsewhere in the blogosphere. Thanks!
Gray, I can only imagine the “Obama-hater vs. Obamabot pie fights” that you describe… I’m currently reading about the French revolution, and the circumstances like those which led to the revolutionaries constantly turning on one another in a search for someone to blame are very probably functioning among progressive bloggers as well. (Hopefully without actual guillotines.) Certainly we are all frustrated.
No problem on the unloading aspect of your comments, though being especially brittle, I quite appreciate your notes about venting on bigger issues. I did kind of figure that was the case, given that I know I’ve done so more than once. (It’s fortunate that with age some of us become aware of doing this kind of thing, and therefore don’t instantly feel like we’ve been “unfairly beaten up” if someone makes pointed criticisms.)
Your point about demographics is well taken. It’s tough to remember, but there are even now reasons for some measure of hope. They may seem slow, but we survived two terms of GWB more or less in one piece, and I remember how daunting that seemed the morning after the 2004 election. I will try to draw on the wisdom of this point in the next month, year, etc.