Shaping Reality or Accepting It

But, of course, the Obama campaign, like all presidential campaigns, was built on a series of fictions. . . .

All presidents have to adjust to these realities when they move to the White House. The only surprise with President Obama is how enthusiastically he has made the transition. He’s political, like any president, but he seems to vastly prefer the grays of governing to the simplicities of the campaign.

The election revolved around passionate rallies. The Obama White House revolves around a culture of debate. He leads long, analytic discussions, which bring competing arguments to the fore. He sometimes seems to preside over the arguments like a judge settling a lawsuit.

His policies are often a balance as he tries to accommodate different points of view. He doesn’t generally issue edicts. In matters foreign and domestic, he seems to spend a lot of time coaxing people along. His governing style, in short, is biased toward complexity. . . .

Barring a scientific breakthrough, we can’t merge Obama’s analysis with George Bush’s passion. But we should still be glad that he is governing the way he is.  (David Brooks)

***

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."( Ron Suskind)

Here's the problem with Cheney/Bush's so-called passion vs. Obama's dispassion: Republicans like Reagan and Cheney passionately ram through their regressive agenda, and then a Dem like Obama dispassionately accepts it as the new reality. And then the Beltway courtiers like Brooks praise him for his pragmatism. Right-wingers act, they create a new consensus reality, and so then the definition of a realist becomes accepting this newly created reality.

Rove, or whoever it was, when he said that those in power create their own reality was relatively correct in the assertion, at least when the GOP is in power, and relative to the ability of Dems to shape reality. Republicans change reality when they are in power, and Dems, when they are in power, accept the new consensus reality as it has been shaped by Republicans. GOP leaders, because they value will and action over debate and compromise, energetically advance their agenda when they have the chance, and the Dems accept it as the new reality that cannot be changed in any significant way when they have the chance, and the rest of us are to accept this docilely. 

Listen, we all understand that presidents are not dictators whose will becomes law, but there is a kind of impotency that characterizes the mentality of Democrats, which is understandably held in contempt by those on the Right. Democrats and Liberals in general do not grasp the concept of "Will" the way those on the Right do.  And the results are obvious: The Republicans get outrageous, unnecessary things hardly anybody wants done that benefit the Owners, and the Dems can't get necessary, reasonable things done that they were given majorities to do.  Why? Because the GOP knows that history is dynamic and they know how to aggressively shape consensus reality, while the Democrats look for consensus as if it's a static given, as something that already exists and all you have to do is find it.

The Right is truly more postmodern, post-rationalist in its approach, and the Democrats still stuck in a modern rationalist model--as if facts and clear thinking matter when it comes to a power struggle. Dems talk as if debate matters as a way to get to the truth when in fact the GOP uses it only as a stalling tactic. No, it only matters who has the most compelling narrative or mythos and whose will shaped by that mythos acts on it. For this reason, and for so many others, the Right cannot be aptly called conservative because the Right understands that there is nothing anymore to conserve, that you can make anything up, and if enough people believe the narrative or mythos that you create, it becomes real, it becomes the consensus reality. And the Right understands that the most important consensus reality is the one accepted by the media and the courtiers and insider elites in the Beltway. The electorate is a nuisance that can be manipulated and neutralized easily enough when it needs to be.

The rationalists on the left protest that the Right is making things up, that there are no facts to back up the fantasy it promotes.  Those on the Right just give their Bill-Kristol-patented smirk and go on to achieve most of its agenda while the mythos-challenged left founders in confusion and impotency.

I think the disappointment for me in Obama lies in that during the campaign he signaled that he was going to be different from the typical feckless, will-challenged Democrat. He seemed to get that we are in a new reality with new rules, that the Right had taken advantage of them in a way that Liberals hadn't even begun to understand, and that he was going to change that.  Remember: "Yes we can"? Remember when he compared himself to Reagan, not because he embraced his regressive agenda, but because he saw Reagan as someone to emulate as a transformative figure who made the system bend to his will? Obama gave us good reason to think he understood what was required of the new president in a way that Clinton did not. So now we're to accept that he was no different from Clinton all along?  We're to accept that this appeal he made to people like me was meaningless campaign rhetoric that had no relationship to his philosophy of governance? And I'm supposed to be ok with that, or I should not have been so naive to hope for it in the first place?

No. He sold himself as a transformational politician who understood better than everyone else how the last eight years damaged our country and how he would come in to change the mindset in Washington that made doing that damage a possibility.  And instead we find a man who has, if anything, enthusiastically embraced that mindset in both his thinking and in his actions. It's as if Ronald Reagan ran as Reagan and then governed like George H. W. Bush.  Reagan ran as Reagan and governed as Reagan. He and other key figures in our history (e.g., TR, FDR, LBJ) showed that it could be done, and we had good reason to expect that Obama could be one of them. But he hasn't even tried. Give the GOP credit--their leaders go for it no matter how ridiculous or unpopular. They do it because they believe they can bend reality to their wills. They don't always succeed, but they often do because they're not afraid to let out all the stops. The Dems, not so much. 

Obama's style is not to lead but just to go with the flow, a flow that for the most part is channeled by the Owners through the GOP. And that's why I feel justified when I call Obama gutless. He's smart and shrewd, but he's proving himself to be just another Democratic empty suit when it comes to the assertion of his will and vision for the country as the representative of the broad public interest that elected him.

I wish him well, as I would wish Clinton well if she had managed to get elected, but he's someone who has become just another bland, uninteresting Dem hack, another Bill Clinton without the zipper problem, and as such someone who is hard to care about and whom history will forget except for his being the first African-American president. Maybe something will shake him out of this passivity, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

I guess you might say I've come to accept the amorphous, gelatinous Obama reality.  What a waste. What a missed opportunity.

Comments

[Patrick]

"And I'm supposed to be ok with that or I should not have been so naive to hope for it in the first place?"

This sentence struck me. I liked Obama best of the Dems in the primaries. He did seem like a unique, possibly transformational figure, I was up late celebrating on election night, as happy as the next fellow with leftward inclinations.

But yeah, I think a lot of that was naivete. Neither Clinton nor Edwards could have been any better than Obama, but they did warn us, and accurately. This guy has never gone to the mat for *anything*. He's never put it on the line for his beliefs. When one examines the context in which any of his ostensibly courageous stands were made, he stood either to gain or lose very little by making them.

The optimism does seem unwarranted, in retrospect. Backbone is usually something someone has, or doesn't. We should have been able to see it, instead of hoping he was just hiding it until he got to the Oval Office.

[Jack Whelan]

I think it's true that he was always an unknown, a kind of blank screen, and I was prepared to be disappointed. But it really is amazing to me that someone who could campaign so effectively could be so incapable to translate that into his governing style.

Not. even. a. little. bit.

A lot of people shrug their shoulders and say, what do you expect, life goes on. But more is at stake here, because life going on means life getting worse--which is that the Right keeps pushing, inequality keeps increasing, civil right keep shrinking, and the Dems just consolidate GOP gains. Americans mostly don't care because they don't feel it yet, but some do, and many more will be feeling it soon enough.

We needed somebody special to step up and turn the tide, and the guy who had an historic opportunity to do it just went out with the tide. He was our best shot, and his failure means that there is no possibility of reversing the last 30 years, because with Obama in the WH and majorities in both houses, it's not going to get any better than this. That's where the disappointment lies for me--it's this deep sense of missed opportunity. We needed boldness, and we get process.

[jim prentiss]

Who are the "Owners"? It seems that the two political parties, Dems and GOP, each have their own "Owners". The world in Washington,D.C. is quite different than in the rest of the country. This country DOES NOT produce so-called great leaders anymore.

[Jack Whelan]

The Owners are just a shortcut name to describe factions within the country's power elite, the first tier comprising key people in the defense and finance industry, a second tier those in insurance, pharmaceuticals, energy, etc. Their agendas are not identical, but they have far more influence in the political sphere than the electorate. The first tier is distinguished from the second tier in that the first tier gets everything it wants, the second tier mostly what it wants.

They completely own the GOP and mostly own the Dems. They use the GOP when its in power to aggressively advance their agenda, and the Dems when they are in power to consolidate their gains. That's the way it's been the last thirty years or so, anyway.

[Robert Lipton]

Paraphrasing I forget who: There is one party in America. It's the Money Party. It has two wings, the Republican and the Democratic, but it's still the Money Party.
A lot of us hoped Obama would be the agent of change. Fewer of us are surprised that he is not. Martin Luther King did not tell us he was "transformative." He didn't have to. The ones who tell us such grandiose things about themselves are to be watched very skeptically.
People who presume to judge Obama's presidency on the basis of its first year are obviously too impatient. But are we wrong to ask if there has been a single instance of his showing unusual courage?