The President: Why Can’t We
Be Friends?
Ed Note: First posted January 29, 2009. Updated in comments as the prez continues to surprise by exhibiting (re politics) a tin ear and bad hands. Clank the Robot …
1. Good good good: Obama moves to un-do Bush-Cheney labor policies.
He’s also done two handfuls of other good things, eg, undoing the Presidential Papers Act regulations that baby Bush (apparently to prevent his father’s Gulf War papers from becoming public property) put into effect during his own first week in office.
So, hats off to the new prez for this slew of moves at the periphery of the news.
2. Have you ever seen the rain?
But elsewhere — front and center — the chaos and lack of action are now worrisome. FDR signed his first major economic move — closing banks for sixty days — the evening of his first day in office. Obama is still talking about hoping to have his own sometime in February.
It seems Obama is trying to move ahead in stately fashion with dreams long in planning, while at the same time flailing to keep nostrils above the waves of the financial crisis.
Eg, the dream of Changing the way Washington behaves, replacing partisanship with Cooperation, a la mode the great Russian anarchist Kropotkin.  If the country were healthy — as it seemed to be when he declared his intention to run in 2006 – there might be at least a shred of hope here. Today there seems none, and what might have passed as high-mindedness is looking like naivete.
3. There’s a bad moon on the rise
Politics are as they are for well rooted reasons. The Change I want and the world needs is to see the nostalgic reaction of Neo-Liberalism (Thatcherism/Reaganism) buried. If this means burying most of the Congressional Republicans, so be it.
But Obama seems intent on making them his friends. And his reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s antics suggests the new prez was surprised by the blowhard’s heartfelt wish that he fail.
Much has already been written about an aspect of Obama’s psyche: his charming Friendliness, rooted in having a white mom and a black dad and growing up with friends and loved ones on both sides of that social divide.
Mediating, saying no to separatism, encouraging togetherness, and pulling it off routinely as he made his way up the ladder …
That does seem to be his Way. But there is no reason to thing he can change the essence of politics in the capital of what remains the world’s most powerful state.
4. I ain’t no fortunate son
It was no accident that the US normalized relations with China in 1978, that Thatcher became Prime Minister a year later, and Reagan was elected a year after that.
Whatever Neo-Liberalism may have been across the pond, over here it was the ad campaign behind which the owner-operators of the US cut ties to the rest of the nation and moved their capital to Asia, where labor was and remains plentiful at pennies on the dollar.
Obama certainly has given a lot of lip service to the plight of the working class, and the words express genuine concern. But it’s not clear he’s psychologically able and willing to join the battle. He, quite naturally, wants everybody to be friends.
If he fails to achieve Change We Need, the failure will be much more than personal.  Power exists and cannot be wished away. If one doesn’t use it, it writhes like an unmanned fire hose, uselessly and destructively … Until someone else grabs hold.
(Re “someone else grabbing hold:” Something like this happened in 2000, when, by means not yet clear, the longtime peripheral maniacs of the Likud Lobby (whom during the 80s were personally sidelined by Reagan in favor of George Schultz and Bush pere) grabbed the reins of a feckless faux Compassionate Conservative’s foreign policy.)
ed says:
Paul Krugman, agreeing more or less:
QUOTE
So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.
It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.
END QUOTE
February 6th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
ed says:
Worse and worse …
The much ballyhooed bank plan, rumored to be announced this coming Monday at noon, is now (friday evening) being leaked to the press and looks a disorganized mess, the product more than anything of an inability to agree on big moves.
February 6th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
ed says:
Can’t help but notice that the last clip above — Who’ll Stop the Rain? — comes from 1981, the year Reagan took office. And segues to a call to meet in the street.
February 6th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
ed says:
Maureen Dowd, at the Times. Also unhappy with the new man’s charm campaign.
February 8th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
ed says:
And Paul Krugman. Rather furious with the president’s retreat on the stimulus plan.
February 9th, 2009 at 1:26 am
ed says:
And now — holy cow. Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, Obama’s second pick for Commerce secretary — and central to to Obama’s bipartisanship program — changes his mind and says no thanks, he’ll stay in the Senate, citing, as if filing for divorce — annulment — “irresolvable differences” with Team Obama.
The Jimmy Stewart side of all this is shining. Mr Obama Comes to Washington. And gets hosed.
All the better. Sooner than later the president may accept the bleak fact that the presidency is a political office.
February 12th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
ed says:
Woops. There’s goes Gail Collins, off the Obamarama wagon. (Pretty funny)
February 14th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
ed says:
A week after Geithner’s miserable debut, it’s not clear that he is really part of Team Obama. That he came out without a plan was shocking and awful — and this Times story reports that he and the inner circle have had a running argument on the basics since his nomination.
SO WHY DID OBAMA HIRE THE GUY? Same puzzle re GOPHer Gregg for Commerce, who thankfully had the presence of mind and nerve to step back and say no.
LINCOLNESQUE?
I’m afraid Obama got this idea of hiring a cabinet of contrarians and even enemies from reading about Lincoln.
It’s a very bad idea. Lincoln just barely survived it, and just long enough … And, even so, wasted a lot of time — and thus, soldiers’ lives — in his early years.
Lincoln waited, for political reasons:– until the night of the ’62 elections to dump McClellan, the do-nothing general who sympathized with the South and was the Democrat candidate in ’64; and
– until shortly before the ’64 elections to dump the prime presidential contender within the GOP, Treasurer Salmon Chase, an abolitionist (Lincoln was not). Keeping Chase there all along is something like Obama hiring Hillary into the cabinet.
– Secy of State Wm Seward seems to have been a decent ally for Lincoln but was also at odds re the South (as was the entire NY machine, run by Seward in DC and Boss Tweed in NY, which thought the war was bad for business) and foreign policy. Seward was always scheming to start a war with France in Mexico or Spain in Cuba or England on the high seas, or all three, as a way to heal domestic wounds — without settling the basic questions. This infuriated his boss.
So Lincoln was rather alone in his cabinet room, and spent a lot of time unearthing and defusing moves by his own cabinet to undermine him.   The press had a nickname for the cabinet … Memory doesn’t serve. Something like the Contrary Cabinet. I.e., it was an odd political story then as well.
But Lincoln had the mature, pickled thick-skinned disposition to endure it. Just barely. Doesn’t sound like the sociable Obama, who seems to want everyone to like him, along with everybody else..
Was Geithner chosen to be contrary?  If not, then why? Because nobody in the Inner Circle has their own ideas, when the crisis has been shrieking its head off for 18 months? Deferring to experience nevertheless? But is there anything he did between Feb 2007 (when HSBC sent the first shock) and Obama’s election that worked?
Oh, yes: Some Lincoln “theorists” think his second Secy of War, Stanton, was part of the Wilkes plot (which certainly was a “conspiracy” in that many were involved, and Wilkes had repeated contacts with the South’s intelligence people). No opinion re Stanton. I guess that means I doubt it. He and L seem to have become friends during the lonely war years.
February 18th, 2009 at 5:41 am