This one’s addressed to progressives in the United States. OK, we’ve gotten our bright young President, his lovely family and his team of the “best and the brightest” into the White House. We’ve emotionally invested in him. We’ve celebrated with him. And we’ve trusted him during the opening months of his Administration. Now, what do we have to show for it?
I think we have a lot of mixed results: the S-CHIP bill, an inadequate stimulus package about 33-40% of the size it should have been which has so far produced little stimulus, rampant lemon socialism in bank bailouts absent any substantial regulation of salaries and bonuses in companies on the public dole or any real removal of toxic assets, failure to control consumer interest rates on credit cards, failure to provide effective relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, failure to analyze the causes of the recent economic collapse and to propose a regulation program based on such knowledge, failure to moderate in any substantial way executive claims about its rights to prevent disclosure of information that would be important to the political process, failure to moderate executive claims about its authority to hold prisoners indefinitely without trial or charge, failure to pursue investigations of lawbreaking and possible war crimes in the previous administration, and current legislative efforts on the Hill in health care and energy that give every promise of producing legislation that is inadequate to solve the problems motivating the legislation. In other words, from a progressive point of view, we already know that this administration is heading towards failure, a failure that will be apparent if it doesn’t go to the mat and succeed in producing a Health Care Reform bill with an effective public option, and if, more generally, it doesn’t take on the task of mobilizing the broader public against the lobbying-financial-health care-energy-military-industrial complex that for nearly 40 years now has successfully been redistributing wealth and income to an increasingly small percentage of the population.
Which brings us to the central question of this blog. Does it pay for progressives to give their trust to the Obama Administration to lead the charge for progressive reforms? I think the evidence is on the side of a very loud no. Each time the Administration has had a chance to propose a progressive solution to a current problem, it has declined to do so. Instead, it proposes a compromise position that, if passed, might be thought of by progressives as barely satisfactory. But then the other shoe drops, and the barely satisfactory Administration proposal needs to be compromised still further to get any legislation at all, as if getting legislation is more important than getting legislation that actually solves a national problem. Well, obviously, for this Administration, getting any legislation at all is viewed as the important thing, probably because they believe more in their powers to persuade much of the public that the legislation they pass, however imperfect, is better than nothing at all, than they do in their powers to persuade those same people to pass good legislation in the first place.
So what can progressives, who want to see the right legislation pass, do to make this happen? The most important thing is to leave the Administration out of it and develop a position in each legislative area on what progressives will vote against, get progressives in Congress to sign and commit to it, and then do what’s necessary to enforce commitments by primarying those who break them. Efforts like this would create a situation where the Administration would be constrained against bargaining away too much in legislative give-and-take. It would create situations where the Administration would have no choice but to try to market and sell a progressive position over the objections of Republicans and Centrist Democrats, on pain of no legislation at all. This is the kind of choice we want the President to face for a number of reasons.
The first is that the President evidently won’t formulate and support progressive positions on his own. He’d rather be above the fray and then arbitrate conflicts among conflicting interests, keeping the goal of getting a bill the paramount one. This orientation disadvantages progressives and advantages the right wing. Their intransigence is rewarded leading to further intransigence on their part. The second is that the President can be more effective than the progressive movement in articulating progressive justifications for legislation. Our education capability is no match for the bully pulpit, especially when this President is doing the bullying. It’s critical to get him on our side. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to respond very well to support and to trust; but, as a practical matter, prefers instead to accommodate those who, he perceives, may have the power to defeat him and are prepared to use that power. The lesson is that we have to organize to develop that power, and we may have to use it once or twice before the progressive agenda can come front and center.
Third, and this is related to wanting to get the bully pulpit behind us, we need to do that not only for the sake of getting progressive legislation, but also as part of our broader change agenda. This Administration needs to join the progressive movement. It needs to move the political culture of the United States towards more political, economic, and social democracy. That will never happen if it is allowed to continue to practice the politics of bipartisanship, looking forward and not backward, getting the most votes you can possibly get behind any bill that passes, and making everybody happy. Again, progressives can stop that, but, I’m afraid, not without risk and cost to themselves. Let’s hope that they can show more courage than the Administration itself, resist those inevitable charges of being rigid impractical ideologues, and channel the Administration toward fulfilling, once again, the historical mission of the Democratic Party, moribund these past 32 years.