Remembering the limits of Obama's political project

As they have been doing for years, The American Prospect team have been presenting insightful analysis on current politics over the last year, the first of the Trump Presidency.

Julian Zelizer reviews Jonathan Chait's account of Obama's Presidency, In Search of Obama 05/05/2017. Zelizer uses the review for some worthwhile commentary on his own. More critical commentary than the erratic Jonathan Chait would be comfortable making. As Zelizer explains:

In his book, the left comes across as a bunch of whiny, unrealistic neophytes who don’t know much about how politics work. In his chapter on revered earlier presidents, Chait means to show that the critics of Obama have little understanding of what actually happened in the past. But for Obama and all other mainstream, pragmatic liberals, the left has been an essential force for generating ideas and creating grassroots political pressure. Historians such as Doug Rossinow and Michael Kazin, whom Chait criticizes, have demonstrated that many of the best moments for liberals—such as the mid-1930s or the mid-1960s—come when the left keeps the feet of the Democratic leadership to the fire, forces issues onto the agenda, and helps create the kind of political momentum that leaders need to overcome political opposition. The left pushes Democrats as a whole to address big questions—like racial injustice or economic inequality—that seem unrealistic or out of bounds, until they are not. If Democrats had ignored the cries of the left, we might never have obtained the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the ACA, for that matter. Chait downplays the role of congressional Democrats and the left in driving the health-care legislation in 2009 and 2010 even when the administration buckled.

I've been very critical of both the left and the center-left for surrendering way too much of American democratic and historical symbolism to the Republicans and the rightwing extremists. The Republicans branded their opposition to Obama's liberal policies and his entire Administration with the symbolism of the American Revolution via the "Tea Party" activists. Astrotruf activists to a great extent, often funded by the Koch Brothers and similar Republican Party sugar-daddies.

The Democrats, meanwhile, can't even manage to defend the progressive sides of their own party founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and the progress in democracy and human rights they rightly came to represent, despite the extent to which those advances were restricted to the white males who constituted the political community of their times.

So I think it is important to recognized the elements of distant and more recent progressive moments in American history, even when those who led it had their inevitable limitations, perhaps even seriously reprehensible ones. Obama's stimulus in early 2009, passed by the Democratic House and Senate against intransigent Republican opposition - the Reps claimed to be terribly worried about it effects on the federal budget deficit, you may recall - was sufficiently large to contribute substantially to kickstart the economic recovery. The EU, by contrast, relied on the ludicrous neoliberal notion of "expansionary austerity," which caused their economic recovery to lag noticeably behind that of the US. On the other hand, a considerably larger stimulus recommended by outside economists like Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz and by some of the Administration's own advisers, would have facilitated and faster recovery and perhaps have left fewer swing voters in 2016 feeling like they needed a change of the kind that Donald Trump was putting on offer.

Zelizer includes observations like this:

Chait recounts the many ways that the Affordable Care Act succeeded in expanding insurance coverage and containing costs. The economics of health care forever changed as a result of the policy. ... Dodd-Frank constituted a bold piece of financial regulation that curbed Wall Street’s riskiest and most destructive form of behavior. Chait even depicts more modest programs such as education reform as crucial policy innovations that would have been considered breakthroughs in other presidencies if it hadn’t been for the overwhelming number of other changes that took place.

But he also notes some of the very real limitations of Obama's project from a progressive and even a narrowly partisan Democratic viewpoint:

The organizational strength of the Democrats at the state and local level has withered under bad leadership, as Theda Skocpol has argued. To the dismay of congressional Democrats, the president has not always worked hard enough to help the party amass the resources that it needed to fight an aggressive GOP. His Democratic critics complained that Organizing for America, his political campaign operation, had always focused on Obama over the interests of the party in the states and localities. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, Obama does not leave behind a coalition that, at least in the short term, has the muscle to protect what he built.

Obama had an unyielding belief in the potential for bipartisanship and civility. This was the promise of his brilliant speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, when he questioned the idea of a hardened red and blue America and claimed the divide did not have to be permanent. He continually attempted to reach out to Republicans early in his term, putting compromises on the table even when it became clear that the Republican compromise would never come. [my emphasis]

Zelizer also alludes to what George Lakoff famously describes as Obama's and the Democrats' framing problem. Noting the beneficial effects of the stimulus, Zelizer rightly notes that " nobody seemed to give the administration any credit for what it had achieved." And that is in major part due to the fact that Obama insisted on defending his program in conservative terms, i.e., expressing apparently serious concern about the size of the deficit that most Republicans haven't cared about since 1980 at the latest.