The Unnecessary Fall
A counter-history of the Obama presidency.
John B. Judis
Senior Editor
* August 12, 2010 | 12:00 am
His advisers have clearly reinforced these inclinations. In the campaign, they fashioned him as the outsider candidate of “hope” and “change” and have extended this strategy into the presidency itself. They see him as standing above party. In a meeting with congressional leaders last April, senior adviser David Axelrod rejected the complaint that Obama accorded equal blame to Democrats and Republicans with his descriptions of the “cynical politics in Washington.” Within the White House, top aides still speak of promoting the Obama “brand.” Organizing for America, the administration’s campaign organization, which is supposed to be focusing on the 2010 elections, recently devoted its resources to organizing parties across the country to celebrate Obama’s forty-ninth birthday.
These efforts to elevate Obama above the hurly-burly of Washington politics have been disastrous. Obama’s image as an iconic outsider has become the screen on which Fox News, the Tea Party, radicalright bloggers, and assorted politicians have projected the image of him as a foreigner, an Islamic radical, and a socialist. He has remained “the other” that he aspired to be during the campaign, but he and his advisers no longer control how that otherness is defined.
The White House and cabinet officials he appointed have reinforced his aversion to populism. As Jonathan Alter recounts in The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Geithner and Summers repeatedly blocked attempts to get tough on Wall Street on the grounds that doing so would threaten the recovery itself by upsetting the bankers. For most of his first year, Alter writes, “Obama bought the Geithner-Summers argument that the banks were fragile and couldn’t be confronted while they remained in peril.” Its reluctance to come down on the bankers crippled the administration politically, making it far more difficult for it to get its way with Congress on a second stimulus program that would have boosted the recovery and Democrats’ political prospects. Bad politics can trump good policy.
Populism has profound shortcomings as a worldview. It tends toward demagoguery. In its relentless focus on the middle class, it can ignore or stigmatize those below it. It can prove hostile to a long-range scientific outlook. A more populist Obama, for instance, might have postponed the battle for climate change legislation or national health insurance and probably would have taken a weaker stand on immigration. But populism has been an indelible part of the American political psyche, and those who are uncomfortable making populist appeals, like Hoover or Carter–or, more recently, presidential candidate John Kerry–suffer the consequences at the polls.
If Obama’s politics leads to a Republican takeover of one or both houses of Congress, and even to a Republican president in 2012, then much of what Obama has accomplished could be undone. It’s unlikely that a new Republican president and Congress would actually repeal the health care or the financial reform bill. But the former could be starved of public funds and deprived of regulatory oversight; and the latter could be neutered by a hostile treasury secretary and by weak or hostile presidential appointees to the Securities and Exchange Commission or the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Reform legislation needs administrations and congresses committed to reform. That is where politics has to come in; and that’s where the Obama administration, with its aversion to populism, has fallen short.
John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Much More of this Read at:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/76972/obama-failure-polls-populism-recession-health-care?page=0,3&passthru=MzM1ZDQ4YmRkZTM1NDBhZDJlNDNiYjg4OTM3OTRhNTk
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