Frank Rich raises important questions about the Obama economic team in Sunday's New York Times:
three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting.
Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton
administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at
Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.
And be sure to check out Timothy Egan's fabulous "Typing Without a Clue" tirade about "Joe the Plumber" and Sarah Palin getting book contracts:
Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to
poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they
labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance
and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about
something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.
Writing
is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most
frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And
Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible,
exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”
Rich’s column is part of a growing qualm about Obama’s “center-right” approach to government. Since the right has a lot to answer for in terms of getting us into this economic crisis (Rubin, in particular), there’s some justification for concern. But Obama has a keen sense of where the fulcrum of power lies. He has a bully pulpit but cannot by himself determine the location of that fulcrum. What liberals need to do is to keep casting a bright light on those places where right-wing ideology result in conspicuous failure. Obama can only lead a country that’s disabused of some powerful and cherished delusions.
Joe the Plumber is like a character from a Preston Sturges movie who’s thrust improbably into the limelight. That he wasn’t laughed off the stage immediately shows how ignorant both citizens and their media overlords are about the meaning of words like “socialism”. He’s just another mutant creature from the Karl Rove Theater of the Grotesque. Still, pop culture being what it is, there’s a guilty pleasure to be had here. If you’ve ever dipped into an Ann Coulter “book”, you know how it feels.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, mixes Kathy Lee Gifford and Joe McCarthy. She amplifies the danger of a pop culture that presumes wisdom flows from folksy bromides. Ronald Reagan, at least, was amenable to direction but Palin may be too vacuous to understand her own limitations. She’s a beast slouching towards Bethlehem oozing sincerity and zipperoo. I suspect she’ll implode before getting there but she does warrant concern.
The country could do a lot worse than eight years of a Clinton-esque administration (without the absurd scandals, of course).
That said, Obama has cleared the election hurdles and enjoys the support of a solid Democratic congressional majority. The fulcrum analogy is faulty because it presumes a static rather than a dynamic process. Obama needs to put a finger on the scales to tilt them in a progressive direction.
Nobody wrote apologies for George Bush, arguing that he had to respect some vague and imaginary fulcrum. Eight years of the Clinton administration had shifted any such fulcrum to the left relative to twelve years of Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, but “Dubya” didn’t care: he came into office with an agenda, and used the full powers of the Executive to implement it.
He packed his cabinet, the regulatory agencies, the Justice Department (and others), and the federal courts with supporters of his agenda. He issued Executive Orders. He brokered legislation and federal agency rules, and undercut his enemies on the budgetary side as well, snponsoring congressional financing legislation and using the Office of Management and Budget as a political bludgeon. He used the propaganda powers of his office and more broadly of the Executive branch. And he used all of this to, in turn, exert pressure and influence on state governments.
The only way to educate the citizenry is to explain things. The only way to recondition the sensibilities of the masses is to provide an environment which does so, to the extent possible. Yes, it takes a long time, and requires consistency, but the sooner you get started, the sooner you get there.
You have to lead by example, use the machinery, and argue from a position of strength.
You want to begin negotiations pushing for as much as you want, not as much as you think you can get, because by the time your opponents bargain you down, the compromise you accept will be much closer to your original goals than it would be if you had started from a “moderate” position and been bargained down from there.
Conservatives should be made to heave a sigh of relief that they managed to avoid something far more extreme: only then will they have a sense of getting a relative bargain, and be willing to accept terms which are actually much closer to progressive goals than they would otherwise have even considered.
Conservatives are always decades behind the curve. Those who didn’t like Martin Luther King at the time, still found him a better alternative than militants like Huey Newton or even Malcolm X. Those who found the salacious gyrations of Elvis “The Pelvis” Presley objectionable, now regard him with fond nostalgia relative to his pop music successors. The same with those long-haired Liverpudlians who dared to usurp the place of Rosemary Clooney.
Is Obama’s long, continuing drift to the right part of some savvy strategy? Time will tell.
Incidentally, I just wanted to add that I appreciate Soleri’s participation here. Quite aside from the fact that I agree with his comments most of the time, he’s an exceptional writer. Indeed, if Mr. Talton himself could adopt an alter ego to express afterthoughts and seed the comments section, he could do no better than Soleri.
His last two paragraphs are a marvelous bit of prose, but the line describing Sarah Palin as “a beast slouching towards Bethlehem oozing sincerity and zipperoo” is alone worth the admission price. Soleri’s progressive bona fides not withstanding, it might have flowed from the late Bill Buckley’s pen after a particularly agreeable three martini lunch. Cheers, mate.