Barack Obama's Trials and Battles with the DC Political Establishment

The following is an excerpt from Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama by Eric Alterman. Available from Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011.

Don’t Know What I Want But I Know How to Get It

“The self-critical element of the progressive mind is probably a healthy thing, but it can also be debilitating,” Barack Obama told Rolling Stone magazine in the fall of 2010. Progressives need to keep this in mind, particularly in light of the amazing series of interlocking challenges that faced Obama’s presidency in merely restoring some sensible form of equilibrium to the governance of the United States. What’s more, he was attempting to work with a minority party with no strategic stake whatever in sensible governance.

When, for instance, the unemployment figure reached 9.5 percent—or, more accurately, 16.5 percent if we include the people who had given up looking—in the summer of 2010, some of the lost jobs could be attributed to the failure of Congress to appropriate funds to replace lost state and local revenue in time for localities to retain their needed staffing levels of police, firefighters, schoolteachers, and the like; a legislative package was purposely delayed in the Senate by a combination of single-senator holds and party-line obstructionist votes. But bad employment numbers were actually good news for Republicans, as they were roundly interpreted as evidence of the failure of the Obama administration’s economic policies and therefore increased the likelihood of strong Republican showings in the coming November midterm elections.

As a matter of fact, the worse things got for the country, the better they looked for Republican candidates. And given that Republicans can plausibly claim to be ideologically in sync with just about any nonmilitary budget cut no matter what the ultimate effect, what possible incentive do the Republicans have to cooperate with the Democratic majority to pass legislation that will actually improve economic conditions? The two parties are demonstrably different in this respect. Democrats, even in the minority, participate in solutions designed to improve governance. They cannot help themselves. A commitment to the principle of good governance is the primary reason most Democrats tend toward politics in the first place.

One might argue that this faith in government’s ability to improve people’s lives is misplaced, or that it becomes easily corrupted over time by the temptations of power and privilege, but few serious political observers would deny its initial presence. This is rarely true of Republicans, who are suspicious of government on principle and opposed to successful programs in practice and therefore happy to see government programs fail and, ideally, disappear entirely.

Ironically, given the deeply contested manner in which George W. Bush ascended to the presidency in 2000 despite his second-place finish in the popular vote and a transparent power grab on his behalf by the U.S. Supreme Court, it is Obama’s, not Bush’s, legitimacy that has come under attack by mainstream Republicans. As environmental reporter Dave Roberts describes it, “At the federal Congressional level, the Republican Party has become tight in its discipline, extreme in its ideology, and utterly unprincipled in its tactics.”

To be fair to the Democrats, they are a far more ideologically diverse party than the Republicans and contain many moderates, many of who, in past Congresses, would easily have been conservatives. To further complicate matters, the more conservative or “centrist” representatives are almost always the most vulnerable because they do not represent reliably liberal districts (many were recently recruited for the purposes of winning in “purple” districts). As NPR’s Ron Elving observed following the publication of yet another poll predicting a Republican landslide, House Democrats were divided between their safe “sitting pretty faction” and “the more fragile ‘scaredy cat’ faction that could be carried off by even the gentlest of anti-incumbent breezes.” As a result, the Democratic leadership in both houses is forever forced to compromise with its own side rather than its opposition.