NObamamania for Me

OK, I will admit it up front, I was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama in the election campaign of 2008. I found this well-educated and articulate young man to be what our country needed most after the God, Greed, and Goober years of George W. Bush. Further, it seemed to me that we were in desperate need of a post- Baby Boomer voice in the White House. Someone who could speak to us beyond the harsh rhetoric and polarizing politics of those of us marked by Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, the Great Society and Watergate. Granted, Barack Obama is well versed in those agendas, but he is not of those agendas, and I held out the hope that he could move ahead on the issues most important to me, without alienating those who held other perspectives.

You see, as much as I revile the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, fundamentalist groups like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the talking pin heads of Fox News, and all the others I like to label as flat-earthers, I must admit I, am partially to blame for their very existence. As a "card carrying" member of the liberal left, I and my fellow-travellers (as we were labeled by the McCarthyites of the 1950s) scared the beejesus out of our moderately conservative neighbors, until they found refuge in the Reagan Revolution and the Moral Majority. And it wasn't long before the right wing demagogues began to really cash in on the fears of their growing congregations, by constantly feeding the fires of intolerance.

For almost forty years, we on the left have watched most of our most cherished reform ideas and programs suffer tremendously at the hands of those who claimed to be the true bastions of the American way. We saw greed and unbridled capitalism turned loose as government regulation was labeled "socialist." We watched a president take us to war, claiming he was doing God's work in a new "crusade" against evil. We even had to gag down the bitter pill of the word "liberal"being transformed into an expletive by Opiate besotted clowns on right wing talk radio. It got so bad that some of our most revered liberal leaders began referring to themselves as "progressive," in order to avoid the tag of the hated "L" word.

But then came that previously mentioned "crusade" against evil and the invasion of Iraq. Four years later, there were no weapons of mass destruction, no link to Al Qaeda, and thousands of dead young American soldiers. Then, as if on a Biblical cue, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, and we all got a front row TV seat to just how badly the faith-based White House could mismanage a real national disaster. Thus, the door was opened for the Democrats to take control of every elective body in our national government. Enter Barrack Obama and exit the Bush crowd.

So what did we get? For the first three months, the Obama administration spent almost all of its time trying to resuscitate the nation's economy. After years of Republican, and Democratic, I am sorry to say, deregulation and poor oversight, the Wall Street Bankers and hedge fund managers almost destroyed the world's financial systems. Since the 1980s, greed was the order of the day, and avarice lobbied Washington to look the other way. In the last days of the Bush administration, even die-hard Republican capitalists knew that only through a massive federal bail-out, could our economy keep from completely melting down. Thus, between Henry Paulson, Ben Vernanke at the Fed, and the incoming Obama intelligentsia, the TARP program plus a Trillion dollar stimulus package were rushed through Congress and economic armageddon was narrowly avoided, or so the story goes.

But along the way a very disturbing trend began to develop in the Obama White House. Promoting himself in the last days of the 2008 campaign as the post-partisan candidate, President Obama decided to try and make this promise a reality (unlike many other promises he has quietly shelved since January 20). Instead of hammering out real financial reforms, which would of course get no Republican support, the president softened if not outright eliminated many of his core promises. Take for example his demand for strict regulations on executive compensation. . . gone. Or how about the demand that banks are going to be required to restructure all those sub prime loans that caused the economic crisis in the first place? Gone.

OK, I hear the argument bubbling up from all the political realists out there and it goes something like this. . . there is a big difference between governing and campaigning. Oh really, then why were Republicans able to jam all their right wing agendas through Congress during the Bush years? The answer is simple. George W was committed more to his agenda than he was to building consensus. His born-again political commandos did not give a damn about soothing the feathers of any Democrats, since his party controlled both the House and the Senate. And as much as it pains me to say this, the "Dubya" crowd was much more politically savvy about how Washington works than the Obamanistas are. Plus, they reveled, rather than shrank when the opposition cried foul.

Barrack Obama, seems to be more concerned with being seen as a great healer and conciliator, rather than a hardcore political operative. It seems that everything is on the table with his luke-warm legislative agenda. Just look at his health care reform program? Why in the hell should any truly progressive politician give a damn about insurance companies losing money? Where did the single-payer option go that he called for when running for a seat in the Senate in 2004? And why do lobbyists, you remember Obama's sworn enemies, get a seat at the table?

I believe there are two answers here. First, Barrack Obama spent so little time in the Senate that he is woefully under prepared to play the kind of legislative hardball necessary to ram a bill through to final passage. Would that he would have read some of Doris Kearns Goodwin's other books, beyond the Abe Lincoln love fest of Team of Rivals. Mr. President, may I recommend, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, 1976? In it Kearns Goodwin writes about how LBJ spent thirty plus years as a United States Senator and knew all there was to know about the legislative process before he became president. After the election of 1960, President Kennedy's entire domestic package was stalled in Congress until his death in 1963. Once in office, the wheeler dealer Johnson successfully pushed through all of Kennedy's bills but added a number of his own, collectively labeled the Great Society. Kennedy had no hope of breaking the solid segregationist Democratic South with any kind of civil rights legislation. Lyndon Johnson broke the back of that impregnable body and the country got the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, The Voting Rights Bill of 1965, and the War on Poverty. Anyone care to give up their Medicare rights?

Johnson, unlike President Obama and the semi-fictitious Lincoln in Kearns Goodwin's latest work, did not give a damn about consensus or camaraderie. But more importantly, Lyndon Johnson paid his dues in Congress and had earned many IOUs from the movers and shakers on Capitol Hill. Obama never paid any dues, and seems almost helpless in getting the Democrats in the House or Senate to play ball. Both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden warned the American people about this back during the Democratic primaries, but when they fell by the way, no one paid much attention to the realities of governing. We were all too caught up in Obamamania.

Secondly, and to this writer, much more importantly, President Obama is basking in his own cult phenomenon. Like John Kennedy before him, Obama is enjoying an incredible level of personal appeal. His popularity numbers are hovering around seventy percent, which if true, would make him the most popular president ever. . . at least for now. But personal popularity among the masses does not translate automatically into political capital in Washington. Unless he is able, and more importantly, willing to use the bully pulpit on Capitol Hill, he will never see his legislative agenda get passed. If, on the other hand, he is more worried about being liked than effectively governing, then he is doing just fine.

One possibility that might work for President Obama, one that JFK absolutely refused to employ, would be to let his Vice President run with his legislative agenda. Joe Biden, like Lyndon Johnson, made his political bones in the US Senate and he knows how to get things done. It seems that President Obama has a much better relationship with Biden than Kennedy ever did with Johnson, and Biden has nothing to lose by bending a few well-placed arms, or as Johnson called it, "pressing the flesh." It does not seem that Barrack Obama is at all interested in moving out of his pop culture role, so few other choices remain. Even though he claims that Lincoln is his presidential role model, President Obama runs the risk of being another James Monroe; well liked, elected twice, but very little in the way of a presidential legacy. And don't give me any of the that nonsense about the Monroe Doctrine. That little gem was the policy brainchild of Monroe's curmudgeonly Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams.