December 9, 2009
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(politics) The Obama Experiment
These are the things I am eager to learn about the Obama experiment:
1. Can an intelligent person if put in the right place in power actually make amazing positive changes to the world that stick?
Adrian Veidt: It doesn't take a genius to see the world has problems.
Edward Blake: No, but it takes a room full of morons to think they're small enough for you to handle.2. Can the American populace respond well to a well thought out agenda that isn't about ideology or instant gratification?
3. Can said intelligent person maintain their integrity from start to finish in such a position of power?
I can't find the article I read a long time ago about his concern as a candidate about this. If anyone else knows, link me!4. Can the landscape of petty partisan politics actually be leveled up to something better or will it just go back to the way it was when said person leaves the arena?
Discuss!
Outro:Obviously I'm interested in lots of issues as far as Obama and politics go, but these are the most important broad themes I'm personally interested in seeing play out. I liked Michael Moore's perspective in an interview he did with Sean Hannity. We're giving Obama lots of slack and time to figure out some very big complicated problems. And if he doesn't come through, a whole generation of people are going to give up hope, and retreat back into the political cynicism their parents are so used to. And I can see that. Easily.
Ben
Comments (11)
I think you're exactly right to describe the nature of Obama's presidency this way. And it will be fascinating to see how it all comes out. I personally don't have a lot of hope, because as I see it the roomful of morons is always capable of preventing any geniuses present from accomplishing anything of note. The wisdom of crowds. Maybe if Obama was elected philosopher-king things would go differently.
"Discuss!" YAY!
1. Yes. But will those good deeds be recognized? Depends on which side has the biggest propaganda budget.
2. Some can. But you will find that people won't go for something that can't offer them security in the short/mid-term. For example, sure we'd all love a more energy efficient transportation system. But wait, I've worked at an oil refinery my entire life. I'm going to lose my job and my livelihood. Now I'm not so sure I can support the long-term plan...
3. Was this the link? Anyway, I honestly don't know. I suspect that the pressure of having to succeed might blur the ethical lines worse than what the average person would experience.
4. I think both parties are reinventing themselves. And that's a good thing. But post-partisanship? Never. The reason is that the average voter can't (or won't) take the time to look into all the issues. They're counting on the parties to do that legwork for them. And when that sort of power structure is in play, there will always be some petty elements that surface from time to time.
Question 2; Right now I think the flux of American politics are only capable of instant gratification, instant and temporary. America doesn't have the patients that a well thought out plan would take. This puts Obama at a disadvantage, because he isn't impulsive, and must be accurate in what he does. That takes time, but will they give it to him is the question. I don't think they will.
Q 4. I think it will go back. The two party system seems to be a hitching post for polarization of grand social attitudes. The GOP isn't made of people who all believe alike, they believe all sorts of things collectively that often the majority doesn't agree with, and the same for the democrats or any large organization for that matter. Without this grand polarization, petty squabbles would rule the day which is pretty much what politician do anyway.
Q 1. History already answered that one.
I do not disagree with Mr. Moore, but I think either way it goes the people will revert back to political cynicism. You'll simply have less of them with a success in important broad themes, than a failure. I thinks its kind of a simplification to say that just because Obama didn't fix the world in 4 years everyone loses hope and goes back to cynicism like a needle, I don't think people will every out grow it no matter what.
I said that last part, "no matter what", with a British accent.
There's a problem with the claim of "slipping poll numbers", and it has been noted at least as far back as the Carter administration, and it's starting to bug me how often it's coming up.
I voted for Obama in the election. His administration has consistently failed to do anything which I would want him to do. His actual policies (as opposed to rhetoric) on practically everything are as bad as Bush's were. The Obama White House has consistently moved to defend torture (see Glenn Greenwald's articles on Salon.com for the records on this -- they're appalling), avoid prosecuting the criminals (and yes, they broke actual U.S. laws and could be prosecuted) from the previous administration or the banks, avoided producing any actual reform in the various realms which need it (banking, health care, etc.), and defended the "blue dog" Democrats who are the ones who keep stopping any attempt at reform from even gaining traction in Congress. (Heck, even before the election, he went back on his promise not to vote in favor of granting the telecom companies immunity from prosecution for aiding the government in invading citizen privacy; remember the FISA vote?)
We don't need to discuss all that, though -- the point is that Obama has lost my approval because he has moved from the "may do the right thing" column to the "is actually doing the wrong thing" column. (Seriously, who starts off negotiations on healthcare reform by saying "well, single payer is the only thing which would really work, but we're going to start by asking for less than that"? It's a basic rule of negotiations that you don't step back from your demands BEFORE coming to the table. If the Democrats had started off by demanding single payer, the Republicans would have been fighting for a public option instead. Instead we started off asking for a public option and got bubkes, even though the pro-"reform" party had a majority. Way to go, losers.)
Obama's sinking approval is precisely because he keeps giving inspirational speeches -- and then doing nothing worth doing. The people changing their ratings by and large aren't going to run out and vote for some cretinous Republican theocrat in the next election. But they might choose not to vote at all. This might lead to a situation similar to the Clinton administration: the Democrats lose control of Congress because of their idiotic moves in the beginning, but the Republicans immediately start screwing up again and thus lose the presidency two years later.
(And as I said, this happened under Carter, too. There was a move to claim he was less popular than Nixon, which Gary Trudeau rightfully pointed out was an attempt to portray disappointment with Carter as being equivalent to disgust with Nixon.)
@SirNickDon - "Philosopher-king" would work a lot better, wouldn't it?
@Andrea_TheNerd - It will be interesting to see just what happens as really important issues bump up against Obama's positions and it seems that people are going to realize that just putting the GOP back in power isn't the solution as far as "post partisanship" is concerned.
@Da__Vinci - Well Obama doesn't have to fix the whole world in four years. I don't think any reasonable hopeful people will expect that. It just depends on whether sensible people can honestly say he gave us a good start and if the stupid dies down enough to get him re-elected.
@The Vicar - I can see where people are coming from with the health care negotiation thing, but in Obama's defense, he isn't negotiating. He's stating a balanced policy up front that he believes will work for the situation as he understands it. He's not going to advocate the wrong position, just so he can pretend to change his mind. If he starts with single payer, he's no longer the centrist he says he is and there are just as bad consequences to that. So, it's more complicated than people give him credit. And its just like the complaint that he has announced our exit date for Afghanistan. It's not that simple and he's not stupid. It's complicated and his generals aren't complaining. So that should tell us something. But no one seems to listen. *shrug*
I'm curious about the torture assertions. Have a good link?
Ben
Arrrgh! I just wrote and edited a huge reply, and then hit a key by accident which made this window in my web browser go to another site (I wanted a dictionary in a different program, and got a pizza menu in this one), and the back button didn't restore my text. Grrrrr! I'll try to remember what I had written:
Obama is negotiating. He knows he is. He was a constitutional law professor. He knows that the content of a bill is subject to negotiation and that reform bills are historically particularly vulnerable to this. To suggest that he thinks he can dictate a law to Congress autocratically is to suggest that he was a bad law professor in the past and is now a solipsistic fool.
Furthermore, the people who are killing off the reforms he claims to be championing are people he has been defending from reprisals: Lieberman (who has kept his committee positions at Obama's behest) and the blue dog Democrats (who Obama has been protecting from primary challenges). So if he's NOT a solipsistic fool, he is a traitor -- or absolutely, incredibly, mind-bogglingly bad at getting done the things he claims he wants to do.
Idiot, traitor, or incompetent: none of those options make me want to continue my support for him. I suppose it's possible he's playing a very deep game and will somehow manage to produce dramatic reform. If that turns out to be the case, I'll be ecstatic to restore my support. So far, though, he's just failing again and again and again. There comes a point where betraying your principles to keep from being labelled "partisan" becomes disingenuous; I am widely regarded as unduly cynical but I believe that point was reached back in January.
(And it's worth pointing out: Obama isn't even asking for what he claims is a good plan. He gave a speech on national television in which he said that single payer was the right way to do this, and then didn't even ask the Democratic leadership to go for it. Come on!)
As for "his generals aren't complaining": Our generals are out of control, and have been for decades now. (Even Ronald Reagan thought so! But then again, Reagan was strongly anti-torture, too, so he must have been some kind of anti-American, right?) If they aren't complaining about the plan, there's probably something wrong with it. I would be willing to bet quite a lot of money, if the Internet made it possible, that either those same generals will be complaining when we pull out -- they will blame our continued failure on the pull-out, because as in Iraq and Vietnam victory is just around the corner/we can see a light at the end of the tunnel/we merely need to show some intestinal fortitude/proclaiming a fixed end date gives the enemy courage -- or we will not in fact pull out when the deadline is reached. I'm inclined toward the latter. We shuffled troops around in Iraq without bringing any home, and then Obama told us the troop levels were reduced. No doubt either similar games will be played in Afghanistan, or else there will be some new startling-but-open-ended development (Bin Laden's ex-hairdresser claims he's hiding in a cave in the mountains! If we stay for a decade, no doubt we'll be able to find him at long last!) which will be used to justify keeping us there -- at an estimated cost of a million dollars per year per soldier -- and building more permanent bases like we're doing in Iraq. Ouch.
I'll try to remember to come back and give you some links about torture and civil liberties -- I had two really good ones from Salon, but the page titles for all the articles I looked at were identical, and Salon is now down for maintenance, so when I go back to look for them in my browser history I can't tell which two were the good ones.
Briefly, though (and you can verify these via Google if you want): Obama has not only defended the "extraordinary rendition" program (i.e. sending people to other countries to be tortured so we can claim the U.S. isn't doing it), he actually ordered the CIA to continue doing it. Obama has continued to argue for the right of the president to keep people in prison without due process by executive order. Obama has refused to make the documentation about our treatment of prisoners public. He has appointed as an advisor one of the intelligence analysts who thought the renditions program was a really good idea.
There were more points, but I have forgotten them, and it's long since time for sleep. Sorry.
@The Vicar - You're right. Negotiation certainly is a part of the deal. I didn't mean to overstate my point. But the fact remains that he has to advocate centrist opinions up front. The negotiation part, for example with the public option, is to say he doesn't care about the public option per se, but only its effect on the system as a means to an end to lower costs. That he's open to other ideas that accomplish the same goal. Of course, he wins either way by not being dogmatic. If they come up with nothing, he can sell the public option that way. If they come up with something else that works...oh noes! So he's doing both in terms of advocating a centrist position and negotiating. Just not in the way that people tend to immediately expect. The broad principles have to have immediate centrist appeal and that's why everyone gets to bitch about not having all the details chiseled in stone up front. Because that's room to negotiate at the appropriate level.
I'm not going to deal with all your claims, but you do seem a bit jaded right out of the gate. And I think unfairly so. So I'd like to at least look into one issue in depth that you bring up, since obviously I could be mistaken, if you could find me a good link on that torture claim of yours whenever you have time (and are awake, haha).
Hope you got some good sleep.
Ben