WASHINGTON -- In June 2008, before the financial implosions that would come a few months later, I asked two smart financiers who happened to be Republicans about the future of the seemingly shaky American economy.
Defying the moment's conventional predictions that we would somehow muddle through, one of them offered a dire and uncannily accurate forecast. He explained why banks would blow up, investments would crash and the federal government would have to spend "at least $300 billion" to bail out financial institutions.
The other financial expert listened closely, took a sip from his drink, and smiled. "This," he said, "would seem like an excellent time for the Democrats to take power."
It wasn't that he liked the Democrats' policies. He just wanted the other side in charge when things came tumbling down. I doubt that my friend is as surprised as others are over the trouble Democrats face in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate race that forced President Obama to Boston on Sunday for a last-minute campaign rescue mission.
I have thought often of that exchange while watching Obama and the Democrats struggle with the country's understandably cantankerous mood.
Underlying so much of the self-assured political analysis pouring forth in our multimedia world over the Massachusetts showdown is a debate over the reasons for the decline of Obama's popularity from the heights of last spring.
Conservatives blame it on "liberalism"--big government, big deficits, an overly ambitious health care plan, a stimulus that spent too much and other supposedly left-leaning sins of the Obama regime.
In explaining Scott Brown's strong run for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, conservatives highlight the Republican's strength among independent voters who are said to be alarmed over the ambition and reach of Obamaism.
Obama sympathizers counter that the president's approval ratings are quite healthy in light of an unemployment rate that's gone over 10 percent and a nearly unprecedented destruction of personal wealth.
The conservatives' focus on ideology, they say, is an opportunistic way of distracting attention from the mistakes of the Bush years and the role conservative policies played in bringing us to this point. To cite ideology rather than the economy in explaining the poll numbers is like analyzing the causes of Civil War without any reference to slavery or the rise of the New Deal without mention of the Great Depression.
It's not surprising that I lean toward the second set of explanations, and I wish that my conservative friends would be as honest as the Republican investor was in acknowledging that presiding over bad times always hurts the party stuck with the job.
But the success of the conservative narrative ought to trouble liberals and the Obama administration. The president has had to "own" the economic catastrophe much earlier than he should have. The vast majority of Americans understand that the mess we are in started before Obama got to the White House. Yet many, especially political independents, are upset that the government has had to spend so much money and that things have not turned around as fast as they hoped.
It's also striking that most conservatives, through a method that might be called the audacity of audacity, have acted as if absolutely nothing went wrong with their economic theories. They speak and act as if they had nothing to do with the large deficits they now bemoan and say we will all be saved if only we return to the very policies that should already be discredited.
The few exceptions to this rule--Bruce Bartlett and Richard Posner, the authors of two bravely dissident books, come to mind--find themselves excommunicated from the conservative movement.
Yet the truth that liberals and Obama must grapple with is that they have failed so far to dent the right's narrative, especially among those moderates and independents with no strong commitments to either side in this fight.
The president's supporters comfort themselves that Obama's numbers will improve as the economy gets better. This is a form of intellectual complacency. Ronald Reagan's numbers went down during a slump, too. But even when he was in the doldrums, Reagan was laying the groundwork for a critique of liberalism that held sway in American politics long after he left office.
Progressives will never reach their own Morning in America unless they use the Gipper's method to offer their own critique of the very conservatism he helped make dominant. It is still more powerful in our politics, as we are learning in Massachusetts, than it ought to be.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.
(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
Print
COMMENTS (3)
The Democrats are losing support also because they have been more beholden to corporate interest than to common interests. They have had bipartisan agreement with Republicans to keep insurance reliant on for profit companies - no public option, no Medicare buy-in, certainly no single payer; we'll still be paying twice what we should be paying (compared to the other industrialized countries) after reform passes. Wall Street has been bailed out, but Main Street not.
We haven't moved to investing in the public good. The Democrats need to speak to the country's need to raise taxes and invest in education, infrastructure, public transportation, alternative energy, etc. Instead they've become beho ... view full comment
The Democrats are losing support also because they have been more beholden to corporate interest than to common interests. They have had bipartisan agreement with Republicans to keep insurance reliant on for profit companies - no public option, no Medicare buy-in, certainly no single payer; we'll still be paying twice what we should be paying (compared to the other industrialized countries) after reform passes. Wall Street has been bailed out, but Main Street not.
We haven't moved to investing in the public good. The Democrats need to speak to the country's need to raise taxes and invest in education, infrastructure, public transportation, alternative energy, etc. Instead they've become beholden to the short term profits of large corporations. Reagan gave a bad name to taxation - "government's the problem". Obama has the wisdom, eloquence, and smarts to turn this around. If he doesn't, the Democrats get the bum rap.
"This," [the Republican financier] said, "would seem like an excellent time for the Democrats to take power."
Yes, this sums up the bipartisan financial establishment's views quite well. They blew up the system in 2008 and somehow managed to get the Democrats in Congress (rather than the sitting Republican President or the Congressional Republicans) to become the political front-men for the bank bailout. Then, with the only conceivable political force that could leverage popular opinion to sustain the bailout for the banks in place--ie, the nation's first black President and the attendant feel-good moment--they managed--through operatives like Summers, Geithner, Bernanke and other assorted ... view full comment
"This," [the Republican financier] said, "would seem like an excellent time for the Democrats to take power."
Yes, this sums up the bipartisan financial establishment's views quite well. They blew up the system in 2008 and somehow managed to get the Democrats in Congress (rather than the sitting Republican President or the Congressional Republicans) to become the political front-men for the bank bailout. Then, with the only conceivable political force that could leverage popular opinion to sustain the bailout for the banks in place--ie, the nation's first black President and the attendant feel-good moment--they managed--through operatives like Summers, Geithner, Bernanke and other assorted loyal servants of finance--to manipulate said President into safeguarding their interests at the ultimate cost of his own political viability. And I think Obama is still, at least in part, in the dark about all this.
It reminds me of the anecdote about Robert Rubin telling President Clinton on taking office--not before, of course--that his social policy plans would have to be scrapped or the bond vigilantes would destroy his presidency. Clinton was absolutely shocked. It's amazing to me that Democratic Party politicians with degrees from Yale and Harvard can be so withdrawn from economic and political reality.
Obama had a window to tell hard truths to the American people and put the "financiers" on the defensive during the transition and in the very early part of his term, but he chose to imagine that his election represented a cultural watershed with some ill-defined post-partisan ethos supposedly emerging in the ascendant. Now, with the stimulus effect wearing off, increasing numbers of ARMs due to reset in 2010-11, and the December 2009 unemployment stats looking terrible if you count all the "discouraged" workers who fell out of the counting by BLS, Obama is in huge trouble.
Another article recently at TNR likened Obama to Hoover, and I think there's a lot in that. In a way it's counterintuitive since this crash happened in the fall of the election year (2008) instead of the fall of the year following the election (1929). But, because Obama never attempted to communicate the extent of this crisis which has been developing gradually over decades--probably because he didn't understand it, himself--he has now effectively come to own it. Obama, for all his pleasing characteristics and impressive image, understands neither money nor war, and he's smack in the middle of crises of both kinds with no easy solutions. This is a powerful argument not to elect someone whose political experience amounts to several terms in the Illinois State Senate and two years in the US Senate, but of course, that's water under the bridge now.
In any case, it's difficult for the Democrats to "offer their own critique of the very conservatism [Reagan] helped make dominant" when the Democratic Party is so complicit in what's taken place. I mean, seriously, how likely is it that the party that excommunicated Ralph Nader is going to come up with a powerful critique of the financial establishment, its assorted vampire squids, and the political system that serves them so well?
But Democrats also act as if Republican policies didn't fail. All the hand ringing over bi-partisanship and the need to bring Republicans onboard, catering to conservative Democrats' demands while dismissing the demands of progressives, etc., communicates that the administration considers conservative interests more valid and conservative policies potentially more successful than progressive interests and policies.
Republicans make smoochy noises toward "moderates" in national elections, but, once in power they govern from the Right, making sure to address the economic priorities of their conservative base. And, in the process, helping to define the "middle" in more and more conservative te ... view full comment
But Democrats also act as if Republican policies didn't fail. All the hand ringing over bi-partisanship and the need to bring Republicans onboard, catering to conservative Democrats' demands while dismissing the demands of progressives, etc., communicates that the administration considers conservative interests more valid and conservative policies potentially more successful than progressive interests and policies.
Republicans make smoochy noises toward "moderates" in national elections, but, once in power they govern from the Right, making sure to address the economic priorities of their conservative base. And, in the process, helping to define the "middle" in more and more conservative terms.
Obama, on the other hand, ran from the Left but is trying to govern from the "middle" -- as now defined by the Right Wing and the corporate media -- while giving the interests and priorities of those who actually put him into power the bum rush.
Too many Democrats are in thrall to "the middle." But, in terms of policy, the middle is absolutely incoherent. Too often "Independents" and "moderates" ask for the impossible -- to reap progressive results from conservative policies. They want to maintain a broad and expanding middle class AND a low wage workforce. To keep inflation in check AND enjoy ever greater returns on their assets. To maintain the world, and history's, most expansive, powerful military establishment, indulge in massive corporate subsidy and for-profit privatization of basic infrastructure and services, and a constant state of war, all while paying as few taxes as possible AND without running a deficit. Plus, they want to deregulate the economy, most especially the financial system, while still reaping the consumer protections once provided by all the regulation they disdain. They are perpetually angry and perpetually disappointed in both parties. But most especially in Democrats who put catering to their impossible whims above devising effective policy.