Obama and Eisenhower (Updated)

I suspect that for most liberals, any real sense of progress has now been lost. Yes, the left got a good-but-not-great health care bill, a good-but-not-great stimulus package, a good-but-not-great financial reform plan: these are a formidable bounty, and Obama and the Democratic Congress worked hard for them. But they now read as a basically par-for-the-course result from a time when all the stars were aligned for the Democrats -- rather than anything predictive of a new direction, or of a more progressive future. In contrast, as should become emphatically clear on November 2nd, the reversion to the mean has been incredibly swift.

What liberals haven't had, in other words, is very many opportunities to feel good about themselves, or to feel good about the future. While the White House has achieved several wins, they have never been elegant or emphatic, instead coming amidst the small-ball banality of cloture vote after cloture vote, of compromise after compromise. Nate Silver

The administration feels that it isn't getting enough credit for what it has accomplished in a very hostile environment, but its problem lies in that it was elected to change the direction of the last thirty years and to change the rules of the game as it's been played for the last thirty years.

The frustration for people like me lies in that Obama and the congressional Dems accept that the game has to be played by the rules established during the Reagan era in the same way that Eisenhower accepted the rules established in the New Deal era. But a sane future for the country requires that Obama be for the Left what Reagan was for the Right. The disappointment lies in learning that he's quite satisfied to be Eisenhower and never had any intention to be Reagan.

If you accept to play the game on the terms defined by the right, you are defeated on day one.  That's why Obama's health care reform felt like such a defeat for people like me. Its main thrust was to benefit the insurance and pharmaceutical industries while throwing some crumbs to people in need.  In its essential structure it differed hardly at all from the Bush corporate giveaway in the Medicare prescription drug bill that I opposed for similar reasons. 

Obama sent very strong signals during the campaign that he understood that changing the rules and changing the mindset in Washington were essential if he were to govern effectively. The deep disappointment and frustration from people like me lies in that he has not even tried and seems never to have intended to try. I'm not saying that he would have succeeded if he tried, but in refusing to push back he  essentially conceded his defeat before even beginning. 

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UPDATE: Can we push the analogy between Obama and Eisenhower to suggest that in the same way that the relative domestic peace of Eisenhower's fifties preceded the left-inspired turmoil of the sixties, that the relative domestic peace of the Obama years will precede right-inspired turmoil to follow in the twenty-teens?

In the fifties leftish discontent was churning beneath the surface in the black civil rights community, in the anti-nuclear movement, and in cultural movements like the Beats which morphed into the counterculture in the sixties and seventies. Can we see a similar kind of rightish churning in militias, birthers, teapartiers, and nativists?  Do we really think they are going away?  Do we really think that even if they fail at the ballot box in the next couple of cycles that they will give up?

Comments

[Deakskunk.blogspot.com]

One reason for the disappointment is the rules of Reaganism are rules for oligarchy, great extremes of wealth, and the reduction of the United States to the status of a banana republic. The left had hoped Obama would at least try to reverse these trends. Since Reagan became president we drifted further to the right with each election. Only Bill Clinton's election in 1992 and the congressional election of 2006 went against this trend. The hope was Obama's election would bring us back to the mean. But is seams we are now doomed to begin a drift back to what can now be called the extreme right.

[Jack]

Yes, the problem lies in that all the momentum is still with the right even when the Dems are in power. When Dems takeover, as they did with Clinton and now with Obama, it's just time for the right to consolidate its gains and to get ready for a new push when they're in power again. It's remarkable to me how little this is commented upon.

This idea that we should be satisfied with the modest accomplishments by Obama requires that we accept that the Reagan rules are the only rules we can play by. They're not, but too many complacent Dems are satisfied to play that game, and they have no intention of supporting efforts to change it. That's why the changes have to begin with primary challenges, and that kind of challenge cannot succeed unless there is a broad grassroots support for it, because otherwise there's no beating the corporate money that rigs the game.

We're not even close to being where we need to mount such a challenge. We're not hurting enough yet.

[Obama Mosque]

The voices crying out to disallow this project are the same intolerant bigoted voiced that led to the rise of the brutal regimes in Germany and China and Italy in the middle of the last century. The sensitivity of the victims - is not a real excuse - that is a simple excuse to allow xenophobic, hostile, racist and prejudiced thinking to take root in our democracy. muslims died in the collapse of the towers as did jews and christians and non-believers. This was not an attack by the world muslims on America. It was an attack by a handful of thugs. We cannot let our own native thugs take control of this debate. Please people, come to your senses.