Nothing novel. Nothing trivial.
President Obama did something disingenuous when he was candidate Obama. He allowed himself to be marketed as a messianic figure, capable of delivering robust change to the United States, political environment and all. Of course that was clearly not his intent, but that was the result and as a leader he needs to take responsibility. Leadership is about managing expectations. In the pursuit of power, Obama let expectations inflate beyond a manageable level. It would be harder to blame someone not of his stature. But a man with his intellectual sophistication and well-honed verbal skills has both the capacity to recognize such a problem without a significant lag and the ability to articulate clearly and unequivocally to his constituencies that the solutions to many of our country's problems are technically difficult to solve or have solutions that are technically difficult to implement or solutions that simply may be unattainable. Furthermore, that genuine, consistent bipartisan cooperation is a necessary condition of policy success in our current political system and that concessions which are barely palatable may have to be made. Therefore, once the policy-making process has been complete the outcome may not fully or even adequately reflect progressive desires.
To his credit, he has made clear and consistent efforts to introduce a greater degree of nuance and complexity to political discourse in this country. When engaging with the opposition party in debates not heavily constrained by concision the president has demonstrated the absurdities of some of the Republicans' rhetoric. But in spite of his talents in open argument president Obama cannot seem to move the chains of public policy and has failed to deliver the robust change that his campaign intimated was in his capacity to deliver. There are several problems that confound Obama, all of which could have been expected without employment of oracular foresight.
One problem is the media. The media is not a monolithic entity. Let's be clear about what is meant by "the media," I am referring to General Electric/NBC Universal, Viacom, TimeWarner, News Corp, Microsoft, Google, and Walt Disney. The vast majority of the words the American people hear or read and the images that they see about events and people beyond their local community are inclusively either sourced in or screened by these seven companies. These companies have interesting properties, too. Overwhelmingly they are publicly traded companies whose agents have a legally mandated responsibility to act in their shareholders' best interest, which is to generate an optimal amount of profit and deliver it to shareholders at appropriate times. Their primary sources of revenue are not from subscriptions or other direct consumption, rather they are through advertising money. Their operations are primarily designed to deliver advertisements. The more advertisements they can deliver in an hour, the more revenue they can make, just like the more cars a car factory can produce in an hour, they more revenue they can earn (provided a high quantity doesn't start depressing the price). If they don't deliver as many effective advertisements as their competitors, advertisers who can will retreat to their competitors, followed by investors, and their agents will be regarded as unsuccessful and will suffer professional and personal consequences. In order to keep their shareholders happy, they have to keep their advertisers happy. If that involves delivering innocuous content, screening out messages that advertisers (who are the wealthy class of individuals and the business interests they manage) find unacceptable, and reducing the amount of non-commercial content, then that is what they can be expected to do. This is not a conspiracy. This is a system level consequence of the structure of individual incentives at work.
This provides a political environment in which the Republican strategy of railing against government when they are not in power while doing everything they can to sabotage the capacity of government to deliver services to the American people as well as the quality of those services can be effective. Then the Republicans can ride back into power on a wave of anti-government sentiment, because they are the default party and because they can be trusted to keep government manageable, or in other words non-invasive, or in other more accurate words ineffective at helping many people other than coalitions supportive of the Republicans. This is a cynical strategy, but also a very effective one. Respect is due to the Republicans. Not for their ethics but for their tactics, their discipline, and their execution. It's particularly easy to execute in a media environment where there exist demands to keep messages catchy, concise, and non-detrimental to certain powerful agendas who also fund Congressional campaigns.
Another major problem is that Obama does not have the kind of support that he needs from his winning coalition. American liberals are a self-critical lot. In fact they may be so self-critical that they sacrifice the capacity to tactically market a consistent philosophical underpinning of contemporary American progressivism and the set of policies that are corollaries. American liberals also seem far more willing to concede on points of discourse than their rivals. For all their clever, cynical, and nuanced political tactics, the Republicans and American conservatives have been willing to commit themselves to a social philosophy that admits of simple, clear, and consistent solutions to problems. They haven't encountered a problem that they believe cannot be solved with a tax cut, deregulation, or high-tech weaponry. They have portrayed a facade of delusional certitude that has been unshakable, even in the face of the contradictions and obvious failures of their policies. It is intuitive why this might appeal to voters. In the current media environment little salient information is available about the policies that candidates support. In fact some politicians take measures to obfuscate their policy positions. The focus is on politics and not policy, which have considerable overlap but are distinct. In the face of the great uncertainty that lack of useful information fosters, the predictability of pseudo-religious political ideologies may appease less sophisticated voters. We can think the American educational system, the pride of the Western world, for supplying the Republicans with a massive army of voters who either lack the interest or ability to think critically about their political system.
I think the most interesting thing about what I have written here is that it is all quite well known. It's not common knowledge, but it may be approaching common knowledge. I think that there exists empirical limits to social development. A portion of the empirical limitation may be explained by tendencies of people to be repetitively irrational, especially under conditions of friction. I am not invoking these empirical limits to excuse the status quo, merely to explain the fact that it prevails in spite of widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo simultaneously with widespread knowledge of its (at least) proximate causes. Draw whatever moral conclusions you want. I have devoted too much of my blog to moralizing and not enough to looking clearly at reality.
I think the proper management of expectations during the campaign could have allowed Obama to provide himself more time to contend with these political roadblocks. I honestly think he could have won the election without all the political romanticism. But it is not too late. I think it would be an interesting experiment for the Obama administration to begin identifying the bottlenecks and sieves in the political system and the kinds of policies they block-up or filter out. What will freedom-loving Americans think about their country when they realize that their democracy is only free to make the small set of policies that are politically feasible? Will they wonder who's interests are truly served by the current political system or will they go back to watching Real Housewives?