On his Sunday show, Fareed Zakaria, one of the few Sunday talking heads that I greatly admire, chastised the liberal activists for their criticism of Obama, asking them to "grow up" instead.
With the ongoing flame wars on Dailykos, with some dyed-in-the-wool Obama supporters souring on the President, I thought I would deconstruct his criticism, offer alternate perspectives and also my opinion.
Below the fold is the full transcript of his criticism.
Over the last week, liberal politicians and commentators in America took to the air waves and OpEd pages to criticize the debt deal that Congress reached. But their ire was directed not at the Tea Party or even the Republicans, but rather at Barack Obama, who, they concluded, had failed as a president because of his persistent tendency to compromise. This has been a running theme ever since Obama took office.
I think that liberals need to grow up. As "The New Republic's" Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, there is a recurring liberal fantasy that if only the president of the United States would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry and enact his agenda.
In this view, write Chait, every known impediment to the legislative process - special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macro economic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public policy - are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. This does happen if you're watching the movie "The American President," but not if you're actually watching what goes on in Washington.
The disappointment over the debt deal is just the latest episode of liberal bewilderment about Obama. "I have no idea what Barack Obama believes on virtually any issue," Drew Westen writes in "The New York Times." Confused over Obama's tendency to take balanced positions, Westen hints that his professional experience, which is as a psychologist, suggests deep traumatic causes for Obama's pathology.
Let me offer a simpler explanation. Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist who understands that in a country divided over core issues, you cannot make the best, the enemy of the good. Obama passed a large stimulus package within weeks of taking office. Liberals feel it should have been bigger. But, remember, despite a Democratic House and Senate, it just passed by one vote.
He signed into law an unprecedented expansion of regulations in the financial services industry, though it isn't one that broke up the large banks. He enacted universal health care through a complex program that was modeled after the Republican Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusetts. And he's advocated a balanced approach to deficit reduction that combines tax increases with spending cuts.
Now, maybe he just believes in all these things. Maybe he understands that with a budget deficit that is 10 percent of GDP, the second highest in the industrialized world, and a debt that will rise to almost 100 percent of GDP in a few years, we cannot cavalierly spend another few trillion hoping that it will jump start the economy.
Maybe he believes that while American banks need better regulations, America also needs a vibrant banking system and that, in a globalized economy, constraining American banks alone will only ensure that the world's largest global financial institutions will be British, German, Swiss and Chinese. He might understand that Larry Summers and Tim Geithner are smart people, who, in long careers in public service, got some things wrong, but also many things right.
Perhaps he understands that getting entitlement costs under control is, in fact, a crucial part of stabilizing our long-term fiscal situation and that you do need both tax increases and spending cuts - cuts, by the way, that are smaller than they appear because they all start from the 2010 budget, which was boosted by the stimulus.
Is all this dangerous weakness, incoherence, appeasement? Or is it just common sense?
Again I gave this a lot of thought, and I will deconstruct his criticism from my perspective.
First though I have to take issue with this argument:
I think that liberals need to grow up. As "The New Republic's" Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, there is a recurring liberal fantasy that if only the president of the United States would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry and enact his agenda.
I, for one, am not one of them. If anything I disliked Obama's penchant for speeches, because that sets up everyone for a great disappointment later. Not just that, the President is then held captive to those words. The recurring theme of his campaign speeches were hope over cynicism, unity over disunity, working across party lines and be able to disagree without being disagreeable. To many of us these were lofty ideals, but speeches like this hold you up to standards that cannot be maintained in a town full of hyenas and scavengers. Something has to give, either the promise of lofty bipartisanship or the promise of progressive reforms. A speech can at times be a Rorschach test, everyone reads whatever they want to, so eventually someone is bound to get upset. So, no, I don't want another speech. Words are cheap. I, like many liberal activists, want action.
Fareed's explanation is more to my liking:
Let me offer a simpler explanation. Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist who understands that in a country divided over core issues, you cannot make the best, the enemy of the good.
It never occurred to many Liberals, enamored by the speeches, that maybe Obama was not a progressive at all. By any standard metric he is a right of center Democrat who is governing from that position. Recently, in a well-publicized and oft-criticized web video, the President tells a bunch of college Democrats how the Republicans call him socialist, while at the same time the Huffington Post calls him a right-winger, so both cannot be true. That maybe the case in the ideal world, but here we are talking about a very strange political landscape where the goalposts have moved so far to the right that today Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would be socialists. Yet, we know that by liberal standards they were way to the right of what we liked.
Fareed then goes on to mention the big policy positions that Obama compromised on. Here again I take issue with his argument. We cannot deny that a bigger stimulus was required. This is not the fantasy of some liberal radicals, but of Nobel Prize winning economists and even administration policy advisers. My personal gripe is the way they went about it. Not one person, in those days mentioned how serious the problem was. The administration was more worried about the political ramifications of a sticker-shock than the real effects of the recession. So instead of a well designed stimulus plan we had a plan with a big chunk in tax cuts that was not going to have any stimulative effect. As Bruce Bartlett writes:
For example, some 40 percent of the 2009 stimulus legislation consisted of tax cuts even though his economic advisers knew that they would have almost no stimulative effect. But Obama viewed them as an important concession to Republicans. Yet despite total rejection of his stimulus package by the GOP, Obama kept the tax cuts rather than reprogramming the money into more effective programs such as state aid or public works.
Instead, we got a weak, badly written stimulus bill, plenty of backdoor stimuli (auto bailouts being one of them) and now another backdoor stimulus plan in the so-called infra-structure bank.
Bartlett's article makes ample arguments against Fareed's point about the Health Care bill:
Obama offered Republicans another half-loaf by putting forward a health reform plan almost identical to those that they and conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation had proposed in the 1990s. Obama’s offer was summarily rejected and Republicans suddenly decided that the individual mandate, which previously had been at the core of their own health reform plans, was unconstitutional.
This is another bewildering aspect of the compromise path. Obama recently remarked about the individual mandate:
"This used to be a Republican idea,"
But therein lies the problem. Why is the President so extremely reluctant to spell out his own idea?
Josh Marshall writes about Obama's recent promise to come out with a jobs plan like this:
President Obama is getting some ribbing today for telegraphing that he's going to release his 'jobs plan' in September. What took so long? The country has been in the grip of historic, catastrophic levels of unemployment for going on three years. All good points. And count me among those who wish he would have come forward with something like this in 2010 rather than 2011. But let's get real. The President's mistake is not coming forward with a plan when he -- quite rightly -- believed that the Congress would refuse to do anything to help create jobs -- because of ideology and a desire to see President Obama defeated.
I think that's a mistake. But you can't ding President Obama for not more aggressively pushing a plan while ignoring the elephant in the room: the Republicans refusal not only to do anything on job creation but insisting on policies the inevitable outcome of which is to retard job creation.
So essentially there was no jobs plan because the President knew that the Republicans will oppose it. But that makes even less sense because it feeds into the whole idea that Obama does not want to take ownership of any legislation and that instead of bringing his own plan, he relegates it to a bitterly partisan congress. Thus, not having a plan is a lose-lose situation.
Which begs the question why did he not propose a plan before and hold the Congress accountable for not acting on it? There again comes the speeches, and my distaste for speeches, contrary to what Fareed has to say. To hold the Republicans accountable for not acting on his jobs plan the President needs to pick a fight. Question is does he really want to do that, when he promised to change the tone in Washington?
Finally I will come to the comment on banking. Fareed seems to think that not breaking up the big banks was a good thing, allowing the American banking sector to remain competitive in the Global Market. Fine. Let us, however, look at how one of the biggest American bank is doing these days. Bank of America lost 20% of its stock value and is now trading under $8. Yes, France and Britain have two of the largest banks but with the impending end of the Eurozone are they any better off? The British government owns a big stake in their largest bank The Royal Bank of Scotland, whereas some of the subsidiaries of BNP Paribas has majority ownership by sovereign European nations (Belgium and Netherlands). But I would rather let those big banks be a headache for the EU. Let us worry about BofA. If BofA is unable to emerge from this latest crisis, does anyone here have the appetite for another bank bailout?
In the end we come back to the liberal disenchantment with Obama. I disagree with Fareed's arguments, because they are bad policies and sometimes very bad politics. But I agree with his conclusion. Obama is a centrist. Many liberals projected their personal beliefs onto him. They wanted a progressive, one of them to be the President. They read what they wanted into the speeches given by this President and came to their own erroneous conclusion. Obama is a right-of-center Democrat. I have no problems with that. What I have a problem with, is his inability to take ownership of a legislation or defining his position in simple terms. If the President wants to say that he cannot pass legislation because of Republican intransigence, let him do so in clear terms. In reality he should have done that last year instead of trying to win them over with half-loaf measures that makes no one happy. His waiting till the election cycle is bad policy, bad politics and wins him no friends right, left or center.