I like that Chris Bowers spelled out the reasons why he distrusts the Obama administration. Even better is his self-recognition that a lot of his criticism is dispositional and not “really…a question of analytic and scholastic ability.” He created a meaningful and honest post about how progressives are reacting to the Obama administration. However, I don’t really like his binary framing. Either you trust Obama or you do not. He makes the case for distrusting him and asks us to make the case for trusting him. That doesn’t seem to me to be the best way of looking at the issue. We need a little more nuance.
I could respond by detailing all the reasons I like Barack and Michelle Obama, and the many ways in which I have faith in them (which is not the same thing as trust). I could detail the many good decisions and policies he’s already made or announced. But a laundry list won’t settle the debate. Here’s where I think I really differ from Chris. Barack Obama is the first president in my lifetime and probably ever to represent me. Obama represents the liberal, academic, urban, secularized wing of the Democratic Party. He’s both an achieving Ivy Leaguer (as opposed to a legacy) and a former community organizer for the urban poor. This is a cultural thing. Obama is one of us, and his movement is our movement. To be sure, Obama represents something similar to other groups. Biracial people and the parents of biracial people, blacks, minorities of any type, single mothers, poor people, urban people, all can take pride and comfort in the mere fact that Obama was elected president. But those groups don’t have much of a defined ideology. The liberal, securalized, urban wing of the Democratic Party does have a defined ideology, and Obama largely represents it. These values are multiculturalism, internationalism, science-based policy, tolerance, social justice, and civil rights. Bill Clinton reflected these values fairly well most of the time, but he was very defensive about it. Obama is bold and largely unapologetic about his liberalism. Both Clinton and Obama had to operate in a larger political environment that was tilted to their right, and both will prove to be mere navigators in a larger political stream. For some reason I don’t quite understand, Chris has never seen Obama as rising star out of our movement. But his success or failure will be our success or failure. The country needs him to succeed because he’s the president and leader of the country. But we need him to succeed so that the values of urban, secularized liberalism can succeed.
Yet, the true backdrop of Chris’s post is the economic bailout. He mentions wiretapping, Afghanistan, and other matters, but the source of most of Open Left’s angst has been focused on economics. Chris devotes a whole section on his distrust to Larry Summers. And right up front Chris admits that there are extremely well-credentialed progressive economists on both sides of the issue. Some think the Geithner Plan is a solid step in the right direction and some think is a cynical giveaway to the very people that created the mess. Given that, Chris recognizes that his distrustful disposition is the decisive component of his opposition to the Geithner Plan. It’s actually quite refreshing candor, if you ask me.
I suppose most people would assume that I am a booster of the Geithner Plan considering how much grief I’ve dished out to its critics. But that’s not really the case. I don’t know if the Geithner Plan will work or cost us more money in the long run. I do know that nationalization is guaranteed to cost us hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. I doubt that that can be avoided no matter what we do. What I also know is that the Geithner Plan is the plan. There are no other plans. This is what we’re going with. So, I damn sure hope it works and works better than the alternatives. And, in order for it to work, we need Geithner to be a strong secretary. He needs credibility on the Hill and with the American people. It makes little sense to suggest he’s stealing our money to give it to Banksters unless you really truly believe that’s his motivation. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to persist in yelling at him to nationalize the banks and wipe out the shareholders as a cost-saving measure if there’s little evidence we’ll really save money doing that.
We might want Obama to take this opportunity to roll-back 1990s-era deregulation, break-up the banks, and fulfill a long pre-financial crisis wish-list of progressive reforms. I know that I’d like to see that. Do I trust Obama to do all those things. No. Not really. As Chris points out in his first bullet point, “it isn’t just the Obama administration we are dealing with.” We have to deal with a global banking network and we have to deal with conservative Democrats like Max Baucus and Kent Conrad. Even Chris Dodd’s liberalism becomes suspect when he is dealing with his state’s powerful financial services sector. I have no problem with pushing Obama to enact regulations that are opposed by Congress and Wall Street. I have a problem with expecting him to prevail or to choose every battle or to get it all done in 90 days.
What I know is that we haven’t had a president this progressive since Franklin Roosevelt, that we’ve never had one from our background who instinctively reflects our values, and that we desperately need him to succeed or we won’t only lose the White House to Palinesque thugs, but we’ll lose the internal battle within the Democratic Party. Are we going to be the party of tomorrow, filled with all races, religions, sexual-orientations, based in social justice and international cooperation? Or are we going to be the socially conservative, business-first, hawkish, Third-Way party that was wiped out between 1994 and 2006?
And, on that 90-day thing?
link
First, good post. After the last few weeks of throwing poo at each other over the Geithner Plan, I think it’s important that we all take a step back and take a moment to understand why and how we’re fighting each other.
WRT whether I “trust” Obama or not, I think it’s a good way to frame the question, but still a little closed and binary (as you said). But I don’t want to give up on the word “trust,” because I do think it accurately highlights our differences…but only if you confine the “trust” to specific cases.
If you held a gun to my head, I’d trust President Obama, but that’s hardly useful. On specific issues, however, I don’t trust him on:
Having bitched for a couple paragraphs, I will say that I absolutely trust Obama on pretty much all other policy areas:
That’s off the top of my head. I trust Obama on foreign affairs, health care reform, environmentalism, and domestic economic recovery, but I don’t trust him on civil liberties or banking reform. What other issues are on the table right now?
Well, this is pretty much everything I was going to say, but you beat me to it.
I would add that I trust Obama on sexual/gender/race rights issues, and I see Obama’s taking a smart position bringing up comprehensive immigration reform as an economic matter.
On the balance of the whole I do trust Obama on many issues, but the two big ones, the economy and civil liberties, I have my doubts.
Also, BooMan is right about that binary, black and white view. We’ve had eight years of that shit. We need better thinking than that in order to solve the problem.
I still feel that “trust” is the right word to use, because IMO it really does get to the core of why we’re disagreeing with each other over this stuff.
A few days ago arguing with Booman here somewhere I was using the word “faith,” i.e. “how much faith do you have that Geithner is operating with the best intentions and the best advice?” But “trust” I think works better.
I still want to cling to the question, but just tweak it so the implications of the question aren’t so broad.
Faith and trust are not the same.
I can have faith that someone will want to do the right thing and not have trust that they can actually do it or won’t get talked out of it or won’t make so many compromises along the way that the objective is thwarted.
I have faith that Obama is not blindly abdicating economic responsibility to Geithner and I have faith that he understands the problem and the strategy and I have faith that he would never be duped into or intentionally embark on a plan to enrich bankers at our expense. That doesn’t mean I trust him to fix the economy using this plan.
See the difference?
which is why I think “trust” works better to understand the differences here. A few days ago I was groping with the word “faith,” but as you point out it doesn’t quite do it.
“Trust” is the right word to use, IMO.
I don’t think a search for the right word is going to bear much fruit. But when Chris says he doesn’t trust Obama he means he doesn’t trust him and that he doesn’t have much faith in him. He may see him as someone who can be talked into doing the right thing but he doesn’t see him as someone who instinctively wants to do the right thing. His position is basically attitudinal. He can’t rely on experts to tell him whether the Geithner Plan is a giant rip-off or not (because they disagree on that point), but he chooses to believe that it is a rip-off because he doesn’t trust or have faith in Obama.
well would YOU trust a guy who promises “When I am president America will once again be the country that stands up to these deplorable tactics. When I am president we won’t work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution, we will be straight with the American people and true to our values,” and then adopts the Bush approach, or worse, to state secrets?
Do you trust a guy who promises to filibuster the FISA amendments act, and then caves to political pressure from the right?
That’s a rhetorical question. You may trust him. I don’t.
I do not trust him to do the right thing on civil liberties and I’ve been right up front about that. I don’t take that distrust and extend it to everything else, though.
what’s that latin term? “lie about one thing, lie about everything”? lawyers use it all the time.
I’d like to see some links from 2007-2008 in which you stated openly and up front that you didn’t/don’t trust him on civil liberties, because I honestly don’t remember those.
That’s just silly. Have you ever lied about anything? If so, by this standard you can never be trusted to tell the truth about anything else ever again. So, should I not believe a word that you write? Or have you never lied? Or is that not a reasonable standard?
Word, phrase, reason, whatever, I place a very high premium on diagnosing why and how people disagree on issues.
You and I are never going to agree on the utility of Geithner as SecTreas, nor are we going to agree on the utility of his plan. But it’s not enough to end it there, IMO- we’re presumable on the same “side,” so why do we disagree here? Where’s the disconnect?
And again, I think Bowers nailed it- the disconnect is in how far we “trust” Obama on certain issues. For example, if you don’t trust him on, say, foreign affairs, then every little thing that Clinton, Panetta, Gates, etc. says and does will make you flip out and predict DOOM! It boils down to trust, IMO.
Secularized wing of the Democratic Party? Someone who believes giving money to charities run by religious organizations is OK?
yeah. That’s the Urban Progressive in him. Academic Progressives loath the very idea of faith-based charity. Urban progressives know that they’re often the only people filling the needs of the people.
Sierra Club Liberals versus Alinsky.
I’m a civil libertarian. We’ve gone down too many slippery slopes already.
I find both answers to my comment to be demeaning and overly simplified.
I think part of it is political outlook.To me, you have a naive idea of the “norm” from which we have descended on the slippery slope.
Well, I have studied the Constitution and US, European and non-Western history (all of which I’ve taught), so I take umbrage at that remark as well. I suggest you go back to Locke, Jefferson and Madison (among others) plus the landmark SCOTUS cases, especially the dissents. Maybe that will reveal to you the top of the slippery slope.
How about you go back to the Palmer raids, Jim Crow, the CIA rampage through Guatemala and Iran, project Phoenix, MyLai, the Dred Scot decision, the internment of the Japanese-Americans, the Red Squads, Cointelpro, and so on and tell me how that slipperly slope works again.
It’s slippery, and it goes downward.
it’s not a slope. it is a more complex topography. and it does no good to pretend that we are innocents.
You’re so profound. Not. And arrogant to boot.
I’m not arrogant. I’m just weary of a slippery slope argument that only makes sense if you pretend that the last 200 odd years of US history did not happen. There’s no such thing as a slippery slope. We got a voting rights act 20 years after the Japanese Internment. We got torture in Guatanamo 40 years after the Church commission. What is arrogant is to insist that a false construct defines reality and that anyone who doesn’t sign up and express shock that the United States Government does not act like a comic book version of Jefferson’s utopia is utterly compromised.
And to amplify, your original point was that government funding of faith based organizations was a slippery slope that offended the civil libertarian in you, and that argument offends the historian in me. Faith based organizations like SCLC and the thousands of church based organizations enrolled in Alinsky type organizations, not to mention the religious abolitionists, the quakers, and many others have been absolutely vital to American liberty. And if you had the decency to read Obama’s definition of “faith”, you’d see it extends to organizations of atheists – he defines “faith” to be a commitment to some project of charity or social welfare.
later
Ding ding fracking ding. This is one of the things that I don’t get about you, Booman, and others who reflexively defend Obama when he does something, uh, debatable- President Obama is a man who can be pressured to change his position. If we do nothing and let the Republicans be the exclusive group shooting at him, he won’t defend the “liberal, secular, urban” policy stance- he’ll move off of it in order to get something done and earn popularity points with Independents. He’s the President now, which means every American is his constituent, not just the “liberal, secular, urban” voters.
That’s neither wrong nor right, but it is a reality that Progressives need to accept. He’s not just our President, he’s everyone’s President. Republicans already understand this, and they will gleefully pressure him to move to the right on an issue. Why is it intolerable for Progressives to accept this and proudly move him to the left on an issue? He’s going to get beat up anyway, so why not get something out of it (other than watered-down legislation/policies)?
I just blasted Obama two days ago over the DOJ’s position on wiretapping. I don’t reflexively do anything if I can help it.
I disagree strongly with your characterization that this is “reflexive.” A governing philosophy is rational, not reflexive. That’s all this is, IMO- President Obama is vulnerable to pressure, therefore Progressives must ensure that he receives Progressive pressure.
Perhaps you reject my characterization of President Obama as “vulnerable to pressure,” but on certain issues there are plenty of examples supporting that characterization (wiretapping being just one example). It would be “reflexive” to trust Obama on those issues in spite of that past behavior.
Wait.
You wrote this:
I denied defending him reflexively.
Then you yelled at me for using the term ‘reflexively’.
That’s an odd way of engaging in debate.
You’re right, I did use that word. That was wrong. Sorry. My bad.
Well, some of us are skeptical that “He’s a fucking crook and an idiot in bed with the Banksters and betraying us secretly” is a good message for “applying pressure”.
First, my advice is to ignore people like that.
Second, I think there are plenty of people offering good-faithed criticism of Obama (especially on his banking reform plan), and you shouldn’t use words used by others against us.
Finally, I think far fewer people use that language than you perceive. “Geithner is too close to Wall Street” is NOT the same as “Obama’s a fucking crook who’s betraying us.” There is a difference, and I would encourage you not to put words in people’s mouths.
Seriously, if you can’t differentiate between harsh criticism and insane criticism, then you’re never going to be happy on the internet.
I don’t see how any criticism on intuited motives does any good. Where is the left counter proposal ? Because “have the FDIC takeover” is neither a leftist proposal nor a practical suggestion.
The point is NOT “OMG Obama is wrong on banking reform!” (though I agree with that).
The point is that Progressives should be given latitude to criticize Obama, in order to pressure/move him to the left. We know Republicans are going to do that, and we’ve seen that they’ve succeeded him in pressuring/moving him to the right (e.g. Stimulus Bill).
Let’s not get bogged down in a specific issue- the point is that there should be some latitude for criticism generally, because Obama has shown himself to be movable.
I’m perfectly ok with latitude, but I’d like to see some “leftist critiques” that were substantive and leftist. Critiques that are just of the “I don’t trust them” type don’t seem to serve a purpose. For example, on banking I’d like to see, and it is frustrating not to see, a real critique of the banking reforms aimed at democratizing the system instead of this “Have FDIC take over” stuff which seems to me to be neither leftist nor particularly practical.
I blew posting this because I think it’s an insult to FDR, not to mention JFK and even LBJ. The formerly reviled but recently rehabilitated Harry Truman proposed real national health care when I was a toddler. Now that I’m about to start collecting Social Security, the SSA sends me an earning estimate that warns me that because the “Trust Fund” is running out of money, I might not actually collect the estimated amount. Meanwhile Obama’s Treasury department is searching for intermediaries to avoid the Congressional ban on bank bonuses. The “most progressive President” is panning out as the biggest union buster ever. Meanwhile, Universal Health Care is turning into mandatory purchase of extremely expensive private insurance. Even Hilary’s mandatory HMO’s would be better.
I’ve been in the fire folks. I’ve had four generations of my family living in my house at once because I was the only one who had a house. I’ve stood in line at the Elgin Unemployment office listening to a little girl crying to her distraught mother that she was hungry. I remember giving literally my last dollar to that little girl to buy something from the snack machine. I can’t forget the look in her mother’s eyes as she told me adoringly,”Gracias, Senor! Gracias!”. I think that is when the Voice In The Wilderness was born, when my life’s savings and my struggle to rise above my blue-collar origins were stripped away and I stood with nothing in my pockets like my grandfather stood on the dock at Ellis Island. So call me a soft-hearted soft-headed liberal.
I wanted so hard to believe in Obama. I wish I could concur with Booman. But I truly believe that he cares more whether some upper crust “Master of the Universe” gets his $900,000.00 bonus than whether that little girl has enough to eat.
Well, I think your final sentence is absurd. I don’t say that to be insulting. I just feel that way.
I’m not insulted. We’ve got to feel as we feel, Booman. Most of all, I hate feeling like a chump. If the Reanimated Corpse and the Mooseketeer had been elected, I’d be deep into legal proceedings to regain Italian citizenship for my family. If HRC were President, I’d be disappointed, but would not feel betrayed. I feel this burning anger because my hopes were raised then dashed.
Perhaps, I’ll be pleasantly surprised because I no longer expect anything good at all from President Obama.
I second her comments re JFK and LBJ. JFK sought to take private bankers out of the system of international debt and institute government-to-government loans, instead of private bank-to-government loans so the process of crossborder lending could better serve the people in both countries, and not just the bankers at one end, who used those debts to leverage private resources from those countries.
JFK was also a strong supporter of civil rights. Remember, he was the president who sent in the National Guard to ensure African American students could enter the University of Alabama after Governor Wallace threatened to keep them out.
Give a listen to his speech made the day Medgar Evers was (later) killed. It’s one of his best. This is just an excerpt:
Here’s a bit more, but go read the whole thing:
There’s more. This guy defined the word liberal, in the best sense.
do you really believe he deliberately chose for the execs and against a poor child?
i don’t believe Obama is that evil. i think he is not well served by his economic team. re: the economy i think he has surrounded himself with the wrong people. in other areas he has made some stellar choices.
also, i think Chris Bowers has framed this wrongly.
i don’t think this is about trust. Obama has done and will do some very good things. he will also make mistakes.
a pure binary split — either/or — is not a helpful way to look at this man or many others.
One thing the Navy taught me was the man in command is responsible for the actions of his officers and men. Obama owns the actions of Geithner and Summers.
But I truly believe that he cares more whether some upper crust “Master of the Universe” gets his $900,000.00 bonus than whether that little girl has enough to eat.
I don’t think it is that. I think he has some kind of deep-seated desire to be liked by the “Masters of the Universe”(Just my $.02). Why do you think he’s a “go along and get along” type a lot of the time?
i think he trusts his blend of common sense and rational diplomacy will win over 95% of people with enough time to prove its efficacity, the other 5% will never come around, being too busy teabagging and such.
so which goes deeper, faith or trust?
i have faith obama would like to do the right things, like booman, and i trust he’ll try.
however, when up against all that is most entrenched and evil in the system, i don’t trust him to always confirm my faith in his actually being a principled man, in a situation where compromises of a kind that would curdle your or my blood are actually pragmatic realpolitik.
maybe faith is more from the heart, and trust more of a cerebral decision.
in my own case, they are not exclusive of one another.
in a bigger picture, in a way O is like a spy in the enemy camp, it’s a great coup just to get him past the guards, to expect him to do an indiana jones without getting offed is just too cartooney.
his moves on the economy, civil liberty and the wars are retrogressive, but his moves towards science, energy and diplomacy the opposite, he’s ‘the man in the middle’ and he sways both ways.
is he naive? or a savvy pol aiming for more power?
at this point my faith still outweighs my distrust, he’s walking a tightrope, and has a lot of political capital. his whole presidency is surreal and many are still in a kind of shock that he was elected at all.
the more he does stuff that enables the right, the more his progressive voters will howl, (and should).
the more power he prises out of the greedy claws of the bankers, and the more soft power diplomacy actually resolves any global issues, (CO2 being the deal-breaker), then we can see our faith rewarded that O was always one of us, he just had to temporarily fake out the right by seeming more centrist tham he is, in order to have enough trust from the hoi polloi so that he COULD get enough power to really bring the kind of deep, compassionate changes America really needs, in his second term, probably.
till then he’s paying the piper, dancing with the wall st. elite that bought him his ticket to the ball, sloughing off swathes of naive voters that really thought he could wave a magic wand and get everyone a pony.
the burning questions are how far right will he have to tack to then tack back later, and how big a backlash from the hurting public, (some with little to lose, and no patience to wait out a ‘long game’) who don’t know nuance from a hole in the ground, and so far see him droning the pakis, paying off fat cats, and wiretapping our emails.
and here’s the kicker… doing that shit is pleasing a bunch of people who though he was going to turn the whole USA into San Francisco the minute he was inaugurated…
folks who thought he was a wimpy commie are seeing him bombing like a real man should!
faith, trust… perhaps the duality is better expressed for me as one between fading hope and outright horror-
which is why i don’t do dualities unless i have to… 😉
This has been my biggest gripe about the ‘nationalize them’ side. If it’s gonna cost us money, say how much, and then say how much we’ll save or lose. Tell us all of the upsides and downsides. Instead, we get this presented as some magic pony plan. It’s just as bad the vague bullshit from Geithner et al they are decrying.
From a lay perspective, I think it’s impossible to judge. What else do we have but opinions from battling experts? Of course, some people want to agree with people who were ‘right’ about the mess that was coming, but was it really an amazing prescience to know housing prices were overvalued and couldn’t rise forever?
The fact that people like Summers were wrong WRT deregulation does give me less faith than I might have otherwise, but I feel like people on the other side have to give better answers then magic pony plans that are without form or detail or simply calling names or proclaiming how ‘right’ they always are.
But I will say that in the last couple weeks I’m losing a lot of faith and goodwill I had for Obama.
I’m very upset that Obama appears to be living in mortal fear of the Intelligence Community. I certainly understand that there is a rational basis for such fear but I want him to put it all on the line to protect our Fourth Amendment rights, come what may.
That’s pissing me off and I’m not going to let it go.
But I really am not troubled by his economic plan. I certainly do not see it as a deliberate plan to siphon money away from hardworking taxpayers and give it to bankers. As you note, other than the shareholders, that’s what a nationalization plan would effectively do as well. And at a guaranteed loss of staggering sums of money.
There is no magic pony, but there are lots of ways to screw this up really badly. Right now they are being appropriately cautious.
What is going on with Obama and the intelligence community is also my biggest concern. But I don’t know if I’m willing to assume its about fear yet.
I studied Obama alot during the primaries – as I’m sure we all did. But I wasn’t so interested in specific policies as I was in his process. One of the possibilities that I see is that he doesn’t seem to take on battles unless he has a strategy that gives him a good chance of winning. So sometimes I think he might be assessing the situation to learn about the power centers and where the bodies are buried so that he can come up with a plan.
Remember in the primaries and general election how everyone would get so frustrated that he wouldn’t come out guns blazing and throw punches? Instead he would bide his time and seize a moment – only to emerge “on top” of it all.
I’m trying to imagine that same strategy in the “mother of all battles” with the intelligence community.
I think that’s well said, and I’d sure rather believe you than the alternative re this.
During a primary townhall my wife and I sat not 15 feet from him and were very, very excited to hear him say that he studied the constitution, understood the constitution, and would follow the constitution. So to us, this is a major betrayal.
Interestingly, it was his biggest applause line of the event, which frankly shocked me because I didn’t think most people gave a shit about the Bush/Cheney abuses.
I want to hear more from the administration on this, but since this was a Friday night news dump I expect little, if any, explanation for it.
I don’t think he’s in “mortal” fear yet, but I think he’s being cautious, and for good reason. I hope his caution means he he has learned the lessons of history.
Frankly, I’d rather see him press first for those reforms the intelligence community will not object to , so he can get some important things taken care of, like a national health care plan.
Then, I hope he finds the cajones to confront them on Afghanistan, on wiretapping, on torture, and on bringing transparency and accountability, to the greatest extent possible, to the dark corners of that community more suitable for growing fungi than democracy.
And hey, don’t diss the magic pony. I may have money on him in two weeks in the Derby..! 😉
“I certainly do not see it as a deliberate plan to siphon money away from hardworking taxpayers and give it to bankers. As you note, other than the shareholders, that’s what a nationalization plan would effectively do as well.” – Booman
Now I don’t know what the nationalization plan that Booman references is. Booman seems to imply that under any nationalization that shareholders would be wiped out but bond holders, derivative counter-parties, etc would be made whole and consequently the taxpayer would have unlimited liability since the all the liabilities on the banks balance sheet would be made good by the taxpayer. Well, Booman, if that is your implication all I can say is de facto that’s exactly what we have now with the Obama bailouts. The shareholders have been effectively wiped out by the financial markets. Of course management gets to reprice the options so can make a killing if the stock prices can be goosed upwards. All the bond holders & counter-parties are being made whole by the taxpayers as we have seen with the use of proceeds of the bailouts to date.
This is the essential scam of the Obama plan. Taxpayers are on the hook for all the losses and liabilities while bank managements and counter-parties make all the gains. Take a look at the Geithner/Summers PPIP for example. Citigroup can create a SPV which can invest $1 of equity in a PPIP. Treasury contributes another $1 of equity in this PPIP. The FDIC then lends this PPIP $12 (6x leverage) which then allows this PPIP to buy $14 of toxic assets (assets that are worth 20 cents on the dollar in terms of what the market will pay today). If the market is right then Citi has transferred dud assets to the taxpayer and cleans up its own balance sheet at inflated prices. Now we can argue back and forth but in 2 years when the stories leak – remember this post.
As of right now the Fed and Treasury have either spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion which is nearly equal to our GDP. During the 30s all the fiscal & monetary stimulus and guarantees did not exceed 8% of GDP and we had a 50% contraction in GDP. Right now GDP is contracting at a 8-10% annualized rate and we are committing nearly 90% of GDP. By transferring private sector losses to the taxpayer what Obama is ensuring is the next bubble – a bubble in Government Finance and when it crashes that dislocation that we have seen in 2008-2009 will be a picnic.
Obama will go down as either economically clueless or a tool of the financial oligarchy.
Um, yes? From an on the ground, common sense perspective it didn’t take a genius to see this was unsustainable…but when you look at the economics team in the Obama Administration, please point to the people that possessed this prescience. You can’t, because they don’t exist. Anyone who was right about this has little to no influence on the Obama Admin’s economic policies.
So, I guess “YES!” is the answer to your question, when it comes to evaluating the Obama econ team.
“I have no problem with pushing Obama to enact regulations that are opposed by Congress and Wall Street. I have a problem with expecting him to prevail or to choose every battle or to get it all done in 90 days.”
What battles HAS he chosen? The bailout bill’s regulations were decidedly light to non-existent. Has he chosen any in legislation currently pushed? Anything aside from the executive pay stuff that is all show anyway? In terms of upcoming legislation, I am not going to give him credit until it actually comes to the floor. If he’s willing to compromise stuff away then he hasn’t chosen the battle.
“For some reason I don’t quite understand, Chris has never seen Obama as rising star out of our movement.”
This is because Obama has made every effort to distance himself from, co-opt, marginalize or obsolete the online aspect of “our” movement for over 4 years. Between January of 2005 and April 2009, when has he ever engaged with the netroots? Instead it’s the standard email blasts and creating his own tools that makes it possible his supporters can support him without ever coming into contact with the netroots as they existence c. 2006. I’d pointed this out since the beginning of the primaries and chose to vote for him anyway as better than the alternative. Consequently, except on FISA I don’t see Obama as having betrayed anything. I just see him as wrong.
One final thing about nationalization. Who cares. Who fucking cares if it saves us money compared to the zombie plan? The real point of nationalization is to break the power of the banks so they can’t do this to us again and lose the influence they have on our politics. That is how we get paid back.
Which bailout bill are you referring to? The one that passed last October?
My first comment in this thread was a link to an article that says the Senate is going to ditch some of Obama’s priorities because they don’t have the votes right now. Some of those include needed reforms like bankruptcy cramdown. However, the overall message is that the Senate is going to devote the bulk of their efforts this year to two things: health care and financial regulation.
On your last point, given how incredibly hostile the dominant segment of the Netroots has been to Obama I have never blamed him for completely blowing us off. The one time he tried to talk reason about a colleague that had voted for Alito, the Daily Kos crew was so unrelentingly hostile that he quit the Netroots for good. I don’t blame him. He had a big job to get elected and he didn’t need ‘allies’ that won’t pick up their oars and row.
Given how poor a choice Alito has been, well perhaps he shouldn’t have picked that particular battle. But yes, it’s quite possible that after that he saw the netroots as an aspect of the “partisan problem” that he campaigned against. I suppose it’s a fine line, his lack of engagement is understandable (though again the left has never convinced him of anything has it?) but who wants to be someone who is rowing a boat with no input where it’s going? Especially if you see the captain steering that boat toward some rocks on the starboard side….
My point basically is perhaps the netroots were too strident, but did Obama attempt to meet them at least part way, or did he leave because they would not come to his full position, stop?
I do want to clarify one thing, yes it’s a good thing to make the money back if you can and I’d like to do that, but I think the priority needs to be removing the power of the financial institutions or at least blunting that power and the best way to do that is nationalization and making sure they stay smaller.
I have zero sympathy for Netroots denizens that bitch that they they never had much input. I had a direct line to the Obama administration through the whole primary. If I had a question, it got answered. If I needed a pass to a rally, I got a pass if at all possible. And it wasn’t because they were showing me preferential treatment. All well known bloggers had the same access.
What Obama didn’t do is kiss our asses, and some asses are still chapped about it.
And do you know what else?
I have been invited on conference calls with the Treasury Secretary, the Education Secretary, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the vice-president’s chief economic adviser all in the last 90 days. Some calls I shared with all the bigfoot reporters from the Wall Street Journal, etc., and some were just for bloggers. If I want a question answered I have a White House contact I can email at work to answer it. All well known bloggers have the same access.
So, tell me, do I really need Obama to tell me how smart I am? What more could I legitimately ask for? Wouldn’t be the height of self-regard for me to feel slighted?
Neither of those things are input are they?
I’m thinking input = ideas passed up to the Obama organization that are considered before being rejected or accepted. This is what I mean by engagement. The most I’ve seen is the FISA response and while I no longer read Glen Greenwald, I did agree that that particular response was rather lacking.
This is really what I mean by meeting half way and such. I actually would be understanding if Obama after consideration of a netroots generated idea, decided no, not going to work. That hasn’t been done since the campaign began (bar perhaps the FISA capitulation) to my knowledge though I could be wrong.
Perhaps he HAS done that with the current Geithner plan, but if so it’s all been done so secretly that his netroots supporters don’t know about it.
That’s all I want. I don’t care about interviews or press releases, but when the netroots have an idea listen to it, evaluate it, and either follow it, adapt it or junk it, and explain why to the netroots. That said, I’ll admit there’s been a noticeable dearth of netroots ideas the last few months as opposed to complaining.
thanks for sharing that, Booman.
it’s very reassuring, and gives perspective.
This is true, it was really harsh. Senator Obama came to DailyKos with his hand out post-Alito, and it was slapped down. And because of that, Obama never came back to DailyKos. All very true.
Later on, the Stimulus Bill came up for debate and President Obama went to Congressional Republicans with his hand out, and it was slapped down. And because of that, Obama…continues to go to Republicans with his hand out. Huh.
I’m not disagreeing with your premise, Booman, I don’t blame Obama for giving the finger to us at DailyKos. But why he thinks Republicans deserve more deference than his activist base, I’ll never understand.
Was DK really that harsh towards him? As I remember, he spouted off a lot of BS that most politicians do, and people called him on it. I know you don’t put up with BS from people like Paul Kane, Judy Miller, AdNags .. and so on .. so why should we put up with BS from politicians? Sometimes it’s like politicians forget that a lot of bloggers and commenters at the blogs know how to use Teh Google
Ditto. That was a major blow to my trust in him.
Today we have news that the stress tests are bullshit, that they are set up so that no one can ‘fail’. What a crock.
I wrote about that earlier. If you’re basing that on the NYT’s article, I wouldn’t.
Marketplace on NPR had a much better story on that issue this afternoon.
thanks, and thanks for the provided link. I’m not feeling very level-headed the last few days.
Its interesting to me that you use the idea of “one of us.”
In my professional life (I am the director of a non-profit), I have done a fair amount of hiring. We talk endlessly about what it is we’re looking for and how to make that decision. In the long run, we’re not really looking for specific skills (those can be easily taught) but we are looking to find people who are “one of us.” Its incredibly intangible and sometimes we make mistakes. But you usually know it when you see it.
I’ve been struggling because I don’t like the idea of blind trust in anyone. And yet I do trust Obama. The cautiousness is mostly about not wanting to be let down…again. But I do feel in my bones that he’s one of us.
For a lot of people George W. Bush was ‘one of us’ and they needed him to succeed so that the culture of Christian fundamentalism would prevail. They followed him wherever he led because they knew the stakes. If he failed, the country would be turned over to Democrats, and their worst fear, which seemed unrealistic to even me at the time, was that it would be turned over not to some Bubba from Arkansas but a man that split his time between Honolulu, Jakarta, NYC, Boston, and Chicago. A man whose father was black, African, and atheist and whose grandfather was Muslim. In other words, a man of the world, of the city, of all cultures.
There is a warning here. We should not follow Obama wherever he may lead. But we also should know that his success is our success and his failure is our failure.
No.
LOL Thanks for the laugh.
tried to spell it out a little more
http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2009/4/10/9466/15346
I’ve never been to an Ivy League school.
I suppose he’s not “one of us” from my perspective then. But remains “one of us” from the perspective of others.
Then maybe the next Dem president will be “one of us” from the perspective of yet another group within the party.
I should hope Obama yearns at least in some way to one day be seen by a less urban state college educated worker from the midwest as “one of us,” too.
In that way Obama might be different than “us.”