It seems pretty clear now that the Obama presidency has failed.
Don’t get me wrong. I still support Obamacare, and I support the president in his current round of struggles with the Republican rump in the congress, as long as he holds firm. I even think President Obama’s decision to hand off the Syrian affair to the United Nations was correct. It’s what should have happened with the situation in Iraq that was hyped by the Bush administration as cause for war. The only losers are hawks on the left and right for whom the only live issue was whether the United States looked like a superpower.
When I say that I now think the Obama presidency has failed, I mean that the president has failed to govern, even to attempt to govern, as the transformational leader his successful campaigns seemed to promise. This is not entirely the fault of the president or of his advisors. Mr. Obama was able to campaign to be the president of the entire country, to appeal to the broad perception that democracy is being undermined in the land, and to promote a near progressive agenda. That his campaign had broad appeal is borne out by the results of two elections in which he won substantial victories.
But the national electorate is not represented by the United States Congress or the Supreme Court. These institutions, and the bureaucracies that surround them (as well as the bureaucracies that surround the presidency itself), have been skewed so as to give more power to right-wing thinking than it presently deserves, if public opinion is taken into account on countless issues from gay rights to voting rights to firearms regulation. Our country, even in these benighted times, may still be a creation of the liberal establishment brought together by the Roosevelt revolution, but our nation’s capital is now a creature of the Reagan revolution with its neoliberal economics and its bias against social programs and the social role of the state.
Add to this fundamental difficulty the continued power in our nation’s capital of corporate wealth with its interests in social control, high unemployment, income inequality, and the suppression of labor. Add the continued power of rightist religion that shares the interest of corporate wealth in social control, particularly in attempts to halt the progress of second-wave feminism. Add to both of these the complexes of phenomena contingent upon President Obama’s status as our first president of African American descent, and you have a mixture of forces that have made against the success of his presidency as we hopefully imagined it five years ago.
Even so—and I’m aware that this may not be entirely fair, President Obama has attempted to govern from a position somewhat to the right of center, backing away from full blown support of economic stimulus to deal with the consequences of the great recession, refusing to hold banks and bankers accountable for their role in the debacle (as the first President Bush did not fail to do during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s), abandoning support for a public option in Obamacare legislation, generally continuing to promote neoliberal economic “reforms” of our nation’s educational institutions, caving to the congress with respect to the sequester in 2011, ratifying and enlarging the surveillance state and concomitant suppression of the press. I could make a much longer list.
While these things have been going on, the President has of course provided progressives a few token victories in the areas of gay rights and environmental concerns. But even these have left the major difficulties faced by LGBT advocacy and environmentalist groups intact. The net result is that the forces of societal sadism and institutionalized greed have seen their fortunes advance during the Obama presidency. The prison industrial complex grows richer every day. The militarization of police continues unabated. State officials now refuse requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. The resegregation of public schools now seems an accepted fact. The country is now rife with anti-immigrant sentiment, ratified and reinforced by the Obama administration’s program of deportations. Voter suppression legislation is now pending in many states. The American middle class is now all but dead.
Have I overstated the case? Perhaps. But Republican rightists constantly tell us that government is our problem, and that is because the governments of today’s nation states represent the only force capable of standing against the greed and decadence of the corporate oligarchy that now more or less runs the world and owns the Republican party. The same oligarchy also owns much of the Democratic party, and it apparently wields a powerful influence over our young president. It’s too bad. He seemed to have such promise.
Julian. This piece really needs a wider read than in these small confines. You nailed it!
You haven’t over stated anything. You broke the code. “…the same oligarchy also owns much of the Democratic party…” What I include here is only one example of “…it apparently wields a powerful influence over our young president.” http://tinyurl.com/k3v3af6 . I include it because I live thirty miles from the remains of the bankrupt Range Fuels.
I watched this one up close and personal. I heard the promises. I listened while all concerned spun stories of fantastic hope for one of the poorest counties in GA.
Oops followed delays followed by another oops. Finally, oops became default. Grief followed in the wake. The VC didn’t grieve. He operates on the principle that you” fail your way to success.”
President Obama has bleed money since day one for one fiasco after another. This article documents just one individual in only one area (ethanol production) that runs his life.
P.S. The bones of Range Fuels was bought by LanzaTech. Wanna guess who the lead VC is for LanzaTech? This is just one example of what happens to any President of these United States.
P.P.S. This particular VC is an equal opportunity player. R or D doesn’t matter. Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is an independent Director and sits on the Board of another of his ethanol investments, KiOR. ( Just Google it. KiOR is currently being sued by stock holders.)
Next
Me agrees
with this piece’s thrusts.
Me it grieves
that neo-lib gusts
blow into Reagan-ish sails,
and that equity’s fairness pales.
A “Progressive” impotently wails
that it has been run off the rails, –
– the train of thought
re the goals which he’s sought.
Democracy’s values are light on the scales.
Democracy’s attacked by wicked white whales.
Obama’s no Ahab the whales to resist.
The whales will continue their Repuglican tryst
of religionists and nitwits of the Koch Brothers gist.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Repeat a coupla my takes,
these takes taken over decades –
I’ve been angry beginning in the ’80s toward:
{i} The “Democratic Leadership Council” {a Clinton-ish moderation which continues clout under Obama}. … Wikipedia about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council
{ii} The “Evangelical Right” {Me an Evangelical who objects to the Right’s discrediting our Bible-specified cause, – which is to present Christ’s gospel and to present it in His love’s spirit}.
===================================
Being from Illinois, I have to say that the idea of an “Obama movement” ignores the Chicago political reality from which he came. And that’s not necessarily an entirely bad thing despite the political brokering any candidate has to endure/abide if he or she is to advance. Obama broke the color barrier and that is a very good thing indeed.
Bob, I was also troubled by my use of the term “movement.” If you’ll look at the post again you’ll see that I edited it and substituted the term “presidency” in the two places where I had said “movement” before. “Presidency” was what I really meant and perhaps shied away from claiming at first; though I think I said “Obama movement” remembering a young couple we met at an Obama rally here in 2008. I wrote about them then because it seemed rather wonderful that they had driven from Oklahoma with their small children to hear Obama speak. Rorty’s little book, “Achieving Our Country,” which I’ve been rereading, has a good appendix on the difference between campaigns and movements. Movements don’t fail. Campaign’s very often do.
As you know if you’ve followed my blog, I was an enthusiastic Obama supporter in the beginning. I remain an Obama supporter, though my ardor has waned; and I agree that his breaking of the color barrier is important and valuable. But the race issue has been an albatross for him, at least from the time that the hyping of Jeremiah Wright’s preaching caused him to abandon the prophetic black church. Cornell West has had a good deal to say about this recently, and the president’s own remarks in his Morehouse graduation speech this year and in his recent speech at the Lincoln Memorial have done little to comfort those of us who would like to think of him as an inheritor of the legacy of Dr. King.
Steve, I’d like to claim that our present troubles all began with the Reagan presidency, but in fairness I think they go back farther, at least to the Carter years when we began the project of deregulation that has led us to our present regulatory slough. I remember a tendency of the late seventies, which I saw particularly among those of us who worked in community arts, to think that corporations had grown up and were prepared to be good citizens. We can now see that as an effect of the prosperity of that period and not as a sea change in the lives of the multi-nationals.
Curtis, I think the record of some of the Obama administration’s support of bad corporate ventures is to be attributed to incompetence rather than venality. But I agree that there has been plenty of failure there. About biofuels, I’m sympathetic to the argument that the ethanol carbon footprint pretty much neutralizes any gains we get from adding it to gasoline, as long as I’m understood not to be a supporter of fracking and mountaintop removal. I also think Midwest agribusiness has been the chief beneficiary of ethanol production.