Tuesday, October 21, 2014

A Progressive Paradox: How to Read the Cards

There seems little doubt that if President Obama's support were stronger these days there would be less chance that the desperate party of fear and doom (Benghazi!  Ebola!!), seemingly critically wounded in 2008 due to their horrific bloodthirsty and fiscally insane recklessness, might actually make incremental gains in congress this Fall.

Recent posts by two writers I greatly admire and follow plumb a good deal of my despair at the idea that our government could actually become even more hostage to these thugs come November.  These anti-patriots were entirely responsible for the full-on temper tantrum government shut-down last October and associated sequestration that wasted at least hundreds of millions of our tax dollars.  Why do they hate America so?

When you couple that with their tactic of thwarting any Presidential initiative and squeezing every governmental budget they can, aside from munitions, war-making in general, and their domestic pork-barrels, it turns out as recent event show, that there might be actual human lives, rather than merely misery for millions, in jeopardy thanks to that scurrilous lot.  Republicans they call themselves.

Like many progressives, happy to wear the despised label of "liberal" but concerned that term is too timid, my current opinion of Obama's performance involves both great admiration and major disappointment.  Group therapy with Paul Krugman and Thomas Frank is an intriguing prospect.

Professor K got this started with his surprisingly upbeat recent assessment of the President's job to date in Rolling Stone.  If you are reading this you do not need any recitation by me of Krugman's cv or demonstration of his importance for several years now as a (or perhaps the) primary skeptic of the mainstream DC/wallstreet/bankster economic framing, with austerity and budget-balancing the linch-pins.  That has included of course considerable possibly at-times too-polite criticisms explicit and im- of the president's policy choices and truly astonishing cabinet and other staff choices.

Frank's chastening followup to Krugman's article starts out like this:
Paul Krugman is easily the best newspaper columnist at work today; for years, he has been the only American columnist who matters. His relentless, one-man war on austerity, I believe, should have earned him a second Nobel Prize.
As Salon readers know, Krugman has for years been willing to criticize the Obama administration. However, in a much-discussed essay the economist published in Rolling Stone last week, he reverses himself and declares that Obama has won him over; that the president is “one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history.”

That's pretty heady stuff!  "The only columnist who matters"!  I love it.  He is close to my favorite, yes, but perhaps that bit of hyperbole by Frank was a necessary set-up for his inevitable criticism.

The Krugman RS article starts like this:
When it comes to Barack Obama, I've always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of political virtue.
And I wasn't wrong. Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP's unwillingness to make even token concessions.
But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn't deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.
You might risk some deterioration in your political credentials if you do not read that whole article.

Meanwhile, Mr. Frank, who I also greatly admire, seems not at all comfortable with Krugman's presentation.  Big-time, actually, since at least to my way of thinking he goes a bit overboard with the wet-kiss business.  Or maybe I'm just a prude.  I suspect he has at least plausible deniability for that poor headline.

I'm not intent here on setting out all of the details, just wanting to entice you to consider exploring these opinions.

Frank:
What makes Krugman’s article peculiar is that he now derides as irresponsible “Obama-bashing” some of the very criticisms of the administration that he himself has made over the years. In 2010, for example, he strongly hinted that bankers had been engaged in “white-collar looting”; in Rolling Stone he laughs at people who complain that “Wall Street hasn’t been punished.” The Krugman of today also, amazingly, distances himself from certain misguided souls who are upset because “income inequality remains so high”; amazing because this is a subject on which Krugman has written for decades—indeed, just a few months ago he penned a scorcher against people who deny the mushrooming problem of inequality.
Krugman tells us that his regard for the president was late to bloom. I myself moved in the opposite direction. I liked Obama a lot in 2008; in fact, I even voted for him during his ill-fated run for Congress in 2000. I anticipated great things from his presidency, in part because he wasn’t connected in any obvious way with the Clinton administration. And I have been increasingly disappointed by his performance as the years passed.
Liberals like me favored, in general terms, each of the president’s main achievements—health care reform, the stimulus of 2009, and the Dodd-Frank financial reform act (which, among other things, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). However, many of us also recognized that each of these was something of a half-measure—in part because we paid such close attention to Paul Krugman. On the stimulus, Krugman himself made the case for its inadequacy, many times over. Dodd-Frank was a step in the right direction but it clearly didn’t go far enough. Apart from the welcome launching of the CFPB, the law is extremely complex and its rules still aren’t completely written. As for Obamacare, people like me have high hopes that it might someday evolve into something closer to the program the public wanted and the program the public needs, but as of today it’s still just the individual mandate, and it’s got lots of setbacks (the problem of high deductibles, for example).
Krugman’s approach in Rolling Stone is to take a look at these things and announce that the glass is half full, rather than half empty as his previous observations led him to believe. Based on this new and more accurate reading, he pronounces Obama to have earned Mount Rushmore status.
There is also more at that link, and equally highly recommended.  This debate has been going for a good long while now, and I was especially pleased to find two such admirable enlightened progressives framing it their own way recently.

Frankly (no pun), I would not pretend to believe either writer is free of political motives.  As things are these days (and perhaps always have been), if  you care about our country, the economy, and our system of government, it seems more or less impossible to pretend to be apolitical.  It seems quite plausible to me that PK was at least partly looking to bolster Obama's image in the face of the unprecedented outrageous racist bigotry and obstreperousness he has endured.  I am so motivated also.  The idea that the other party's primary representatives can routinely lie, wheedle, dog-whistle, and basically appeal to the basest of human instincts and count on the corporate media to uncritically parrot their tripe is beyond maddening.  It is absurd that Obama's favorable numbers are as low as they are right now.  One antidote is to try to set the record straight as to Obama's major accomplishments.  The RS article might be seen at least partly as an attempt at short-term dike-mending.

And yet there are wholly justified criticisms from the left that would typically be offered in far more nuanced terms and with far greater humaneness than the racist chirping that is really almost the entirety of the right-wing's complaints.  It is especially critical that these criticisms be voiced loudly and continuously lest we find ourselves in 2016 with a locked-in unregenerately complacent militaristic-minded, corporate-favoring democratic insider with just as little inclination to actually promote liberal or preferably progressive initiatives as Obama has shown.  Reining in war-mongering, outsourcing of government including militarism, Wall Street financial brinksmanship, and our outrageous income inequity, as well as facing up to climate change, as just some of the low-hanging fruit seem to call for some serious and loud truth-telling about what the Obama regime has more or less failed at.  Perhaps Frank is more centered on this somewhat longer game.

I don't have a winner and loser here.  Just some very important stuff that we cannot afford to be blasé about.