President Barack Obama: There is Method to his Madness

President Obama addressing Congress on "The American Jobs Act" - Sept. 8, 2011 © Chuck Kennedy | WhiteHouse.gov

As Will Milberg anticipated, President Obama gave a speech last night that did not just involve political positioning. It was a serious Address to a Joint Session of Congress about our economic problems, proposing significant solutions. The address was also politically astute, and will be consequential. Obama was on his game again, revealing the method to his madness.

His game is not properly appreciated, as I have argued already here. He has a long term strategy, and doesn’t allow short term tactics to get in the way. He additionally understands that politics is not only about ends, but also means.

Many of his supporters and critics from the left, including me, have been seriously concerned about how he handled himself in the debt ceiling crisis. He apparently compromised too readily, negotiated weakly, another instance of a recurring pattern. In the first stimulus, healthcare reform, and the lame duck budget agreement, it seemed that he settled for less, could have got more, was too soft. But, of course, this is not for sure. I find that my friends who supported Hillary Clinton look at me, as an early and committed Obama supporter, differently now and express more open skepticism about Obama these days. But I think, as was revealed last night, that Obama’s failures have been greatly exaggerated. (Today only about political economic issues)

A worldwide depression was averted. The principle of universal health care for all Americans is now part of our law, the most significant extension of what T. H. Marshall called social citizenship since the New Deal. And, a completely unnecessary American induced global crisis did not occur. None of this was pretty. The President had to gain the support of conservative Democrats (so called moderates) and Republicans for these achievements. But it was consequential. In my judgment, despite complete, and not really loyal, Republican opposition to every move he has made, he has governed effectively, steering the ship of state in the right direction, despite extremely difficult challenges.

And during his . . .

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DC Week in Review: The American Political Landscape

Jeff

On Friday, I intended to use some posts from the past to illuminate the political events of the week, but found myself writing about more private problems, about the human condition and my own incapacity in understanding it. Today, I return to more familiar terrain, thinking about the changing American political landscape.

Viewing the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on Thursday, I was reminded why the 2012 election is so important. What the Republicans propose on the economy, on American identity and principles is strikingly different from President Obama’s promise and performance. Day to day, it has seemed that Obama is losing his focus. But I am convinced that he is accomplishing a lot and that the alternative is stark. In April, I presented my guide for judging his Presidency. I think it still applies.

Trying to figure out the stakes in an election requires understanding the issues, and judgment of Obama’s leadership and the Republican alternatives, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it requires an understanding of imagination. Governor Paul LePage of Maine gave clear expression of the right-wing imagination when he ordered the removal of murals celebrating labor at the Maine department of labor – not fair and balanced. These murals are not even particularly provocative. Images of the banned murals were presented in a post by Vince Carducci.

Cultural works that don’t depict a specific worldview offend the Tea Party imagination. And work that can’t be supported through the market, following Tea Party wisdom, is without real value. The cultural and market fundamentalism present a major civilizational challenge.

While this challenge must be met rationally, politics isn’t and shouldn’t be only about reason. Feelings, along with imagination, also are of telling import, as James Jasper explored in a post last Spring.

I feel strongly about the Tea Party, as the Tea Partiers feel strongly about their commitments. I know this is important. How the . . .

Read more: DC Week in Review: The American Political Landscape

Thinking like a Terrorist

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church demonstrate at Virginia Holocaust Museum © 2010 JC Wilmore | Wikimedia Commons

The strength of the United States, Barack Obama said during his Presidential campaign, lies neither in its arsenal nor in its banks, but in the ideas that have defined its history. Max Weber and Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized this as no mere rhetorical gesture. To simplify, the institutional apparatus of the country rests on the concepts of equality and freedom. In the United States, equality and freedom are not simply ideas in a book, de Toqueville argues, but instead, are the root of everything. The judicial, economic, educational, and religious systems are largely governed by these ideas, which throughout history have been progressively institutionalized, internalized, always emphasized, and of course sometimes distorted. The country largely revolves around principles such as economic, religious, and cultural freedom and the principle of equality before the law. This leads me to wonder, might the U.S.’s greatest strengths also be its most significant vulnerabilities?

As a foreigner, I am sometimes mystified, and sometimes awed, by the radical consequences of the foundational freedoms in the U.S.. For instance, the freedom to say anything, including, to cite a recent Supreme Court decision, the freedom to hurl anti-gay slurs at mourners attending a funeral. Even such speech acts are protected under a firm system of liberties, the firmest that I know of. On the other hand, I am also bemused when friends at a restaurant divide the bill to exactly reflect what each one of the eaters has consumed, dollar by dollar, with due attention to the price of each and every item. A “depraved taste” for equality, de Tocqueville would say.

De Tocqueville argues that liberty and equality are always in tension in America; economic liberty, for example, may go against the principle of equality, as it often does. Or, vice versa, the push for equality may curtail some liberties. But the system, he adds, has built-in mechanisms designed to keep the needed equilibrium in place. Again, I am being schematic: of course the system is more complex and there is more to America’s history than . . .

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Truth and Politics and The Crisis in Washington

The more things change, the more they stay the same? (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?)

I am convinced that the mess in Washington, which may still lead to another world economic crisis, and the resolution of the latest conflict over the debt ceiling, which probably won’t have any positive impact on the American economy and could make matters worse, is primarily a matter of political culture, not economics. I think specifically that the relationship between truth and politics is the root of the problem. Truth is both necessary and fatal for politics. It must be handled with care and in proper balance, and we are becoming unbalanced, driving the present crisis.

Factual truth is the necessary grounds for a sound politics, and philosophical truth cannot substitute for political debate. Hannah Arendt investigated this in her elegant collection Between Past and Future. I have already reflected on these two sides of the problem in earlier posts. I showed how factual truth, as it provides the ground upon which a sound political life develops, is under attack in the age of environmental know-nothingism and birther controversies, a politics based on what we, at Deliberately Considered, have been calling fictoids. And I expressed deep concern about a new wave of political correctness about the way the magic of the market and highly idiosyncratic interpretations of the constitution have been dogmatically asserted as the (philosophic) truth of real Americanism.

The posts by Gary Alan Fine and Richard Alba confirm my concerns.

Fine is sympathetic to the Tea Party politicians, specifically the fresh crop of Republican representatives in the House, and he reminds us that they are smarter and more honestly motivated than many of their critics maintain. I tentatively accept this. As a group they have a clear point of view and know the world from their viewpoint. They are likely no dumber, or smarter, than our other public figures. But still I see a fundamental problem, which Fine perhaps inadvertently points out when he . . .

Read more: Truth and Politics and The Crisis in Washington

Loading the Debt Problem onto the Backs of the Middle Class

Middle Class grave © DonkeyHotey | Flickr

From the fracas in Washington, it would be impossible to know that Americans still live in the world’s richest country. In 2010, the U.S. GDP was about two-and-a-half times that of its nearest competitor, China—you know, the country that’s building new cities everywhere and a bullet train system to ferry citizens among them. But to listen to the political discourse that currently dominates the airwaves, the U.S. is facing financial collapse, if not now then in another decade, and it cannot afford another dollar for many collective goods, whether an improved mass transportation system or health care for senior citizens.

As a number of commentators have observed, the political crisis over the debt ceiling is a distraction from graver and more urgent problems: especially the stagnation of the economy, which is not generating enough jobs to make much of a dent in the unemployment rate or to give young workers solid footing for the beginning of their career climbs. The Great Recession, supposedly over, is threatening to turn into a Japanese-style stagnation that could endure for a decade or more.

The state of the U.S. economy is bound up with the plight of the American middle class, as Robert Reich has acutely observed. That plight has been developing for decades, a lot longer than the debt problem, which dates back just a decade, to George W. Bush’s entry into the White House. The economic gains since the 1970s have been concentrated at the top of the income distribution, in the top few percent, and little has trickled down into the middle class. One widely cited statistic has it that the top 1 percent now take home about a quarter of the national income, up from just 9 percent in 1976; the distribution of wealth is even more unequal. (By the standard statistical measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, the U.S. is now considerably more unequal than any other economically developed country and more resembles a developing nation like Nicaragua.)

Loading the Debt Problem onto the Backs of the Middle Class

Pushing Back Against the Right’s Narrative on the Budget

Wall Street Journal chart

The right, as has been frequently observed of late, has developed an “alternative-reality” view of how we have arrived at our current budget-deficit impasse, placing the blame squarely on the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats. A runaway federal budget since 2009 is the key element in their story. In a July 15th editorial (“The Obama Downgrade”), The Wall Street Journal states this view succinctly:

“The early George W. Bush years saw spending bounce up to a plateau of roughly 20% of GDP, but no more than 20.7% as recently as 2008. Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi’s Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945.”

The editorial is accompanied by a chart to illustrate the basic claim–witness the remarkable uptick of the curve between 2008 and 2009:

At first sight, the chart appears to sustain the WSJ charge and to indicate that federal spending under Obama is of a different order of magnitude from the past. For a moment, it shook my own antipathy to the Republican position; maybe, in all fairness, the blame deserves to be more evenly divided between the two sides of the political aisle. My curiosity aroused, I probed more deeply into the numbers (which come from the OMB website). I’d like to share what I discovered. I make no claims about any special knowledge of the intricacies of the federal budget, just an affinity with numbers.

If you have followed me this far, you may have guessed what is coming—the discovery of a deceptive use of data. It begins with a disturbing piece of disingenuousness, if not dishonesty, in the WSJ editorial, which places the responsibility for remarkably high level of fiscal year (FY) 2009 expenditures entirely at Obama’s door. But a federal fiscal year begins on October 1 of the prior year, and the Bush White House was therefore the source of the FY 2009 budget passed by Congress and responsible for spending some of the money. The budget as proposed authorized $3.1 . . .

Read more: Pushing Back Against the Right’s Narrative on the Budget

Is a Simulacrum or Pragmatism Driving Corporate Jet Tax Policy?

One of Dassult's smallest corporate jets, the Dassault Mystere Falcon 10 © Justin Smith | Wikimedia Commons

When I heard President Obama’s Press Conference on June 29, 2011, I wondered if corporate jet tax policies were being driven by a simulacrum or pragmatism. The references to corporate jets seemed to be more aligned with a simulacrum; and the tax policy aspects seemed to be driven by pragmatic concerns with a smattering of campaign type rhetoric. Consequently, the President’s comments generated some strong reactions from associations/lobbyists, the private sector, and unions.

On June 29, 2011, the President and CEO of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, and the International President of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers issued a news release with an attachment of a letter addressed to President Obama which was critical of his remarks about corporate aircraft and proposed changes to the tax code. After complementing President Obama on his emphasis on manufacturing, new technology and innovation, they expressed concern that his rhetoric and proposed tax changes would negatively impact the United States general aviation industry which has about 1.2 million jobs linked to it, contributes about $150 billion annually to the U. S. economy, and is a major source of exports.

During the severe economic downturn in 2008, ill-informed criticism of corporate jets and business aviation exacerbated the challenges facing our industry, which led to depressed new aircraft sales and jeopardized very good, high-paying jobs throughout the United States. More than 20,000 highly skilled IAM members were laid off in this industry.

As our industry looks to begin a recovery and the workforce returns to their high-skilled jobs, we are very concerned that the rhetoric coming from some in your Administration will lead to similar economic difficulties. While such talk may appear to some as good politics, the reality is that it hurts one of the leading manufacturing and exporting industries in the United States. And it adds to the pain so many working families have endured.

Ed Bolen, The President and CEO of the National Business Aviation Association, a lobbyist, which represents more than 8,000 companies which serve the business aviation . . .

Read more: Is a Simulacrum or Pragmatism Driving Corporate Jet Tax Policy?

Red Jobs, Blue Jobs

Virginia farmers © D. Clow | Flickr

It has now passed into the realm of political cliché that there are red states and blue states. Like so many commonplaces there is a certain truth to the analysis. We expect Mississippi to vote differently than Minnesota, Indiana differently than Illinois, and Vermont differently than New Hampshire (the last a point made elegantly by Jason Kaufman in describing the divergence of political cultures). States have different political cultures, which are based on their histories, their values, and their economies.

However, even in the most garishly red of states, Democrats often get 2/5 of the vote, and the same is true in the most azure domains for Republicans. But what are we to make of these divides and these common tendencies? A potentially more powerful way of understanding politics is to recognize that even more than geography, occupations have political cultures. It is very often true that you vote as you work. While this has been recognized by political consultants as they target their mailings and by sociologists who examine what produces individual-level voting decisions by studying broad occupational categories, the red job/blue job divide has not captured the public which thinks in terms of land.

Research from the General Social Survey run by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago asked respondents their political preferences and their occupations. Based on surveys from 1996 to 2008, sociologists David Grusky and Kim Weeden constructed occupational categories which can be compared in light of political affiliations. The surveys focus on the basic division between liberals and conservatives (and self-professed moderates, who typically comprise half to two-thirds of any occupational group). While even these categories are somewhat broader than are desired for the examination of the local cultures of work, they serve adequately for making this point.

The results demonstrate vividly that there are substantial differences between jobs. For example, fewer than 5% of all bartenders consider themselves to be conservatives, while 27% admit to being liberals. This is a ratio . . .

Read more: Red Jobs, Blue Jobs

Iran: The Meaning of Free Politics

Post-Election Protest in Vali Asr Square, Tehran © 2009 Milad Avazbeigi | Wikimedia Commons

I recently read a student paper which I found to be quite inspiring. The author, who wishes to remain anonymous, uses Hannah Arendt to make sense of the oscillations between hope and despair in Iran. The interpretation of Arendt and its application to an ongoing political struggle remind me of my response to the democratic movement in Poland in the 80s and 90s, also informed by a fresh reading of Arendt. The author sensitively explores the potential and limitations of free public action in an authoritarian political order, highlighting the resiliency of free politics. Here are some interesting excerpts from the study. -Jeff

The streets of Tehran had turned into free public spaces days before the 2009 Presidential Elections. The vibrant scene of groups of people with antagonistic political ideals arguing and debating with one another was truly amazing and unique. After the elections, in a spontaneous concerted act, three million people walked in silence, protesting the results of the election. Those who walked up from Enghelab (Revolution) Square to Azadi Square experienced a sacred time and space. They experienced for a few hours a power that has been engrained forever in their minds. The actors involved created a story and have “started a chain of events,” as Arendt put it in The Human Condition. While they did not walk the path of revolution to freedom, they did experience freedom when they were debating in public corners.

On the days prior to and after the elections, Iranians experienced the extraordinary, because they challenged the “commonly accepted.” They “acted in concert” and owned the streets of Tehran from which they had always felt alienated. The streets of Tehran, ever since, have gained a different meaning. They are a reminder of a moment of “greatness” that will never lose its new acquired significance. It is “greatness” because it breaks through the commonly accepted and reaches into the extraordinary. Whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists in the extraordinary is . . .

Read more: Iran: The Meaning of Free Politics

DC Week in Review: Two Cheers for Hypocrisy!

Jeff

Last week’s posts all address the difficult issue of the relationship between public appearance and private beliefs and actions.

Mormons, Muslims, Atheists, Gays and Lesbians are unlikely to become President, Michael Corey reports. Large percentages of Americans would be unlikely to vote for these minorities for the highest office in the land according to a recent Gallop poll. This contrasts with other groups that have historically been objects of intolerance. Only small percentages of the population reveal an unwillingness to vote for a Hispanic, Jew, Baptist, Catholics, woman or African American. Given the definitive role that racism has played in American history, it is striking that of these historically excluded groups, the least amount of prejudice is directed toward African Americans. This represents significant progress. That Mormons, Muslims, Atheists, gays and lesbians don’t fare so well shows that progress is a slow and uneven process. To be sure, even in the case of African Americans and women, the taboo against the expression of prejudice may depress the numbers, as Felipe and Andrew maintained in their replies. There is private prejudice, public denial.

Corey proposes two special reasons for the persistence of prejudice against Mormons, true belief, i.e. ideological certainty, and “know-nothingism,” i.e. intentional ignorance. Michael Weinman explores how these are produced and reproduced in Israel, not only as a matter of official public policy, but more significantly in the naming of a picture book character, Elmer the Patchwork Elephant. The project of official policy to Hebraize the names in East Jerusalem is transparent. Every day practices and expectations about in group and out group relations are more fundamental than the official project of exclusion, resulting in more durable effects. The public project to disappear Arab Jerusalem is strongly supported by the intimate working of primary socialization, turning a difficult political conflict into an impossible one.

The passage of the marriage equality law in New York is a milestone. Changes in everyday practices preceded the event. With gays . . .

Read more: DC Week in Review: Two Cheers for Hypocrisy!

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