OT - Barack Hoover Obama
mozark
link it, but it's part of the pay site.)
Barack Hoover Obama:
The best and the brightest blow it again
By Kevin Baker
Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every
bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could
have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only
adult in the room, the first American president in at least forty
years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are
finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their
president.
It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries
to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression,
catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care
system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of
Guant·namo, a floundering education system.
Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now
are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—
to seize the radical moment at hand.
Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in
Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges
incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be
brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments
in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and
compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but
what must be done.
We have confronted such emergencies only a few times before in the
history of the Republic: during the secession crisis of 1860–61, at
the start of World War II, at the outset of the Cold War and the
nuclear age. Probably the moment most comparable to the present was
the start of the Great Depression, and for the scope and the quantity
of the problems he is facing, Obama has frequently been compared with
Franklin Roosevelt. So far, though, he most resembles the other
president who had to confront that crisis, Herbert Hoover.
The comparison is not meant to be flippant. It has nothing to do with
the received image of Hoover, the dour, round-collared, gerbil-cheeked
technocrat who looked on with indifference while the country went to
pieces. To understand how dire our situation is now it is necessary to
remember that when he was elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover
was widely considered the most capable public figure in the country.
Hoover—like Obama—was almost certainly someone gifted with more
intelligence, a better education, and a greater range of life
experience than FDR. And Hoover, through the first three years of the
Depression, was also the man who comprehended better than anyone else
what was happening and what needed to be done. And yet he failed.
The story of the real Herbert Hoover reads like something out of an
Indiana Jones script, with touches of Dickens and the memoirs of
Albert Schweitzer. Orphaned and penniless by the age of nine, Hoover
was raised by an exploitative uncle who considered him more chattel
than son. He had no illusions about the America he grew up in, writing
years later, “As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not
recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and
death came sooner.”
Removed from public school at fourteen to work as his uncle’s office
boy, Hoover nonetheless learned enough at night school to make the
very first class at the newly opened Stanford University, where he
studied geology and engineering. He paid his own way by working as a
waiter, a typist, and a handyman, and eventually running a laundry
service, a baggage service, and a newspaper route. (Unsurprisingly,
his favorite book was David Copperfield.) After graduation, he ran
mining camps and scouted new strikes around the globe. It was an
adventurous life; on one occasion he made a small fortune by following
an ancient Chinese map and tiger tracks into a moribund silver mine in
Burma. By the time he was forty, Hoover was worth $85 million in
today’s dollars, and he retired from business to take up public life.
“The ideal of service,” he would later write, was no burden on the
striving entrepreneur but a “great spiritual force poured out by our
people as never before in the history of the world.”
He had long lived up to his ideals. Caught in the siege of the Western
delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, only Hoover
and his fearless wife, Lou, cared enough to sneak food and water to
the Chinese Christians besieged elsewhere in the city. He first came
to national attention after the start of World War I, when he led the
effort to feed the 7 million people of occupied Belgium and France. He
worked for free, donated part of his own fortune to the cause, and
risked his life repeatedly crossing the U-boat–infested waters of the
North Atlantic. His postwar relief efforts rescued millions more
throughout Europe and especially in the Soviet Union; it’s unlikely
that any other individual in human history saved so many people from
death by starvation and want. Questioned about feeding populations
under Bolshevik control, he banged a table and insisted, “Twenty
million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be
fed!” In 1920, many people in both major parties wanted to run him for
president, but he opted for the Republican cabinet. As secretary of
commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he was a dynamic
figure, tirelessly promoting new technologies, work-safety rules, and
voluntary industry standards; he supervised relief to Mississippi and
Louisiana during the terrible 1927 floods and advocated cooperation
between labor and management.
“We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we
sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being
solved,” the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote of Hoover’s
inauguration in March 1929, in words that might easily have been used
in January 2009. “Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we
waited for the performance to begin.”
Genius got its chance less than eight months after Hoover was sworn
in, when the stock market collapsed. At the time, such an event wasn’t
seen as having anything much to do with the president. Wall Street
crashes happened every five to ten years in the old American economy,
and it was understood that these crashes would sometimes start
nationwide recessions. They might last a year or two, like the
recession that started in 1920, or for much longer, like the
devastating depression that began in 1873 and, according to some
economists, didn’t really end until 1897. How long would it take to
recover from the crash of ‘29? Who could know? Mere politicians were
supposed to leave the outcome to the workings of the market. But Hoover
—much like Obama—plunged right in, with a response that was designed
to rise above old ideological battles and effect a new partnership
between the public and private sectors. Less than a month after the
Wall Street crash, he began what would be weeks of meetings at the
White House with hundreds of “key men” from the business world. There
the president briefed them on everything he had done so far and urged
them to cut as few jobs as possible for the duration of the slump. He
also encouraged public and private construction projects, signed bills
recognizing the right of unions to organize, and used the fledgling
Federal Reserve both to ease credit and to discourage banks from
calling in their stock-market loans.
All of these projects were anathema to old-line conservatives in
Hoover’s own party, such as Andrew Mellon, the tax-slashing secretary
of the treasury throughout the go-go years of the 1920s boom, who
offered the president the absurdist advice to let the market
“liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate
real estate.” Cutting one of the main ties to the trickle-down wisdom
of what was suddenly a previous era, Hoover eventually shipped Mellon
off to serve as ambassador to England.
Yet there remained little immediate action that the president could
take, hobbled as he was by the limits of a federal government that
made up less than 4 percent of the GDP and by the reluctance of those
around him to interfere in any way with the sanctity of the markets.
At what John Kenneth Galbraith would later skewer as “no-business”
meetings, the key men of industry pledged their full support, then
went home to slash wages and cut as many jobs as they could. By the
end of 1930, the gross national product had dropped by nearly 13
percent, unemployment had shot up to nearly 9 percent, and over 600
banks had closed. The Democrats won a majority in the House of
Representatives, but the primary response to the Depression offered by
their laconic speaker, “Cactus Jack” Garner, was a national sales tax
designed to balance the budget. Liberal legislators in both parties
were more sympathetic, but they wielded little power.
As the Depression spread around the world, Hoover—like Obama—towered
above the squabbling, suspicious leaders of Europe as well. Only
Hoover, who had lived all around the world (like Obama) and also been
part of the U.S. delegation at Versailles, seemed to understand the
true threat the Depression posed to the global economy. Democratic
forms of government were under assault everywhere in the West, and
especially in the Weimar Republic, still staggering under the
indemnity the victorious Allies had imposed on Germany in 1919. Hoover
sought to alleviate the growing world credit crunch by pushing through
a moratorium on the repayment of Europe’s considerable war debt to the
United States—on the condition that the Allies also forgave Germany
its indemnity. It was an example of statesmanship at its most
enlightened, and if any single U.S. action at the time could have
prevented the rise of the Nazis to power, this would have been it.
Back on the domestic front, Hoover tried to organize national,
voluntary efforts to hire the unemployed, provide charity, and create
a private banking pool. When these efforts collapsed or fell short, he
started a dozen Home Loan Discount Banks to help individuals refinance
their mortgages and save their homes, and created an unprecedented
government entity called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
Authorized to spend up to the then-astonishing sum of $2 billion, the
RFC was a direct rebuttal to Andrew Mellon’s prescription of creative
destruction. Rather than liquidating banks, railroads, and
agricultural cooperatives, the RFC would lend them money to stay
afloat.
Hoover, as the historian David M. Kennedy writes, had shown “himself
capable of the most pragmatic, far-reaching, economic heterodoxy,” a
trait that “would in the end carry him and the country into uncharted
economic and political territory.” New Dealer Rexford Tugwell would,
many years later, claim that “practically the whole New Deal was
extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” Indeed, “Hoover had
wanted—and had said clearly enough that he wanted—nearly all the
changes now brought under the New Deal label.”
Tugwell’s appraisal, though considerably exaggerated, nonetheless
testifies to the boldness of Hoover’s program. The only problem was
that it did not work. The nation’s credit system still would not thaw,
banks kept falling like dominoes, unemployment rates and human
suffering continued to rise. For all of his willingness to break with
precedent and intervene directly in the economy, Hoover remained
unable to turn his back fully on what Kennedy describes as the
prevailing “legacy of perception and understanding of economic
theory.”
As Europe faltered, for instance, foreign gold began to flow out of
America’s banks and back home. Hoover reacted by increasing interest
rates and raising taxes, in an effort to further deflate the economy,
balance the federal budget, and thereby lure the gold back. This was
the textbook economic response of the time to fleeing gold reserves;
in the midst of the Great Depression, it was a disaster.
Meanwhile, the RFC was derided by populist critics as “bank relief”
and “a millionaire’s dole”—criticisms echoed today by all those who
see George W. Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and Obama’s own
Public-Private Investment Program as outrageous giveaways. And, as
Kennedy points out, once Hoover had set in motion the great bank
bailout of 1931, he “had given up the ground of high principle” and
“implicitly legitimated the claims of other sectors for federal
assistance.” Critics raised the same criticisms they would raise about
Obama’s bailout plans seventy-eight years later. If the banks get a
bailout, why not everyone else? Were bailouts only for the rich?
Exacerbating the entire situation was the RFC itself. Hoover’s leading
weapon to combat the Depression performed with TARP-like languor,
secrecy, and nepotism. Throughout 1932, as banks continued to topple
by the hundreds, the RFC disbursed only three-quarters of its
available money. Although Hoover had declared that the agency was “not
created for the aid of big industries or big banks,” a record of its
operations revealed that most of its money had indeed gone to a very
few of the country’s biggest financial institutions. In June of 1932,
the RFC’s president, Charles G. Dawes—who had just served as vice
president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge—resigned his
post, took a new job as head of the Central Republic Bank in Chicago,
and promptly secured for his employer an RFC loan that nearly equaled
the bank’s total deposits. Dawes’s successor, Atlee Pomerene, then
lent another $12 million to a Cleveland bank of which he remained a
director.
These facts were, in the end, wrestled out in the open only by
congressional fiat. The recipients of some $642 million of the RFC’s
loans—nearly half its total expenditures—were not revealed at all.
Hoover, like Obama, had insisted on secrecy to keep the proceedings
from being “politicized,” but, inevitably, this fear of politicization
in the end only led to more politics. The writer John T. Flynn, who
reported much of the RFC scandal in the pages of this magazine, found
that most of the money was distributed “by a group of directors drawn
from those business groups whose performances during the pre-crash
years have rendered them objects of suspicion to the American people”
and that the “immense sums they dispensed were given to borrowers,
many of whom, to put it mildly, have forfeited, justly or unjustly,
the confidence of the people.”
The RFC’s deliberations were understood—with good reason—not as
effective management but as insider dealing: common financial practice
through the 1920s, but politically and morally insupportable at a time
when millions of Americans were losing their jobs, their homes, and
their savings, and when some were literally dying of starvation.
What’s more, even the loans that were made proved less than effective.
The rescued banks, much like the rescued banks today, simply hoarded
the new capital and refused to venture out into the marketplace.
Neither the RFC nor any of Hoover’s other programs did anything to
seriously address the other major problems then plaguing the American
economy: the decades-long farm crisis that was sweeping away Dust Bowl
farmers’ actual soil along with their holdings; the near annihilation
of the labor movement; a wildly unequal distribution of wealth; the
lack of any real safety net for the old, the indigent, and the
unemployable; a corrupt, non-transparent financial system that
remained largely unregulated—in short, the need for systematic,
wholesale reform of a nation that had foundered on the changing
circumstances of the modern world.
It would have been very difficult to make most of these changes,
because by and large they were advocated only by what were then the
most radical individuals on the fringes of the political system. The
one thing to be said in favor of such changes was that they were
absolutely necessary.
By the summer of 1932, the country was in a state of near rebellion,
with the “Bonus Army” of angry veterans camped out in Washington,
farmers dumping their produce on the highways in protest, and mobs
forcibly stopping evictions in the cities. The liberals in Congress
had moved at last beyond Hoover, with even Jack Garner backing a $2.1-
billion package of public works and direct relief. Hoover vetoed it,
warning against the moral entrapments of “the dole.”
Why was Herbert Hoover so reluctant to make the radical changes that
were so clearly needed? It could not have been a question of
competence or compassion for this lifelong Quaker, who had rushed
sustenance to starving people around the world regardless of their
nationalities or beliefs. Ultimately, Hoover could not break with the
prevailing beliefs of his day. The essence of the Progressive Era in
which he had come of age—the very essence of his own public image—was
that government was a science. It was not a coincidence that this era
brought us the very term “political science,” along with the advent of
“nonpartisan” elections and “city managers” to replace mayors.
Since the 1890s, Hoover and his contemporaries had promoted this brand
of progressivism as an alternative not only to the political and
corporate corruption of the Gilded Age but also to the furious class
and regional warfare that progressivism’s predecessor, populism,
seemed to promise. Progressivism aspired to be something of a
political science itself, untrammeled by ideological or partisan
influence: there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and all
unselfish and uncorrupted individuals could be counted on to do the
right thing, once they were shown what that was.
There were plenty of progressives, led by Teddy Roosevelt, who
understood that bringing real change meant fighting to bust up trusts,
regain public ownership of utilities, and secure rights for labor,
women, and others. But the great national effort inspired by World War
I softened memories of the bitter class conflict that had
characterized much of American politics since the Civil War, just as
the rollicking prosperity of the 1920s erased memories of the postwar
Red Scare and the crushing of labor unions. Throughout the decade, big
business sought to co-opt any lingering labor resentments by forming
“company unions” under what they called “the American Plan.”
Volunteerism and boosterism would take care of the rest. Prosperity
would come through an always rising stock market.
Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the
sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood
intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was
compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much
as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself
to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had
believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new
was required.
Such a transformation would have required a mental suppleness that was
simply not in the makeup of this fabulously successful scientist and
self-made businessman. And it was this inability to radically alter
his thinking that, ultimately, distinguished Hoover from Franklin
Roosevelt. FDR was by no means the rigorous thinker that Hoover was,
and many observers then and since have accused him of having no fixed
principles whatsoever. And yet it was Roosevelt, the Great Improviser,
who was able to patch and borrow and fudge his way to solutions not
only to the Depression but also to sustained prosperity and democracy.
It was FDR, brought up with the entitled, patronizing worldview of a
Hudson Valley aristocrat, who was able to overcome attachments to all
classes, all theories. It was Roosevelt who understood the
imperfections, the rough-and-tumble of politics. The programs of the
First and Second New Deals were a hodgepodge of ideologies—which is
precisely why they worked. The innovations they brought about, however
sloppily, were the core of twentieth-century American liberalism in
that they reflected the complex ever-changing realities of the modern
world.
Originally, Roosevelt, too, endorsed much of the progressive vision—or
at least its pale 1920s imitation—as evidenced by his National
Recovery Administration, a flabby utopian plan that would have had
business, labor, and government collaborate to set prices, wages, and
industry standards down to the most minute details. The NRA would have
carried 1920s-style business progressivism right to the doorstep of
the corporate state, had it been even vaguely workable. But right from
the beginning, Roosevelt also endorsed reforms, from regulating Wall
Street to saving the farmers to backing labor unions in their
organizing wars, that required _conflict—_the only way in which a
political and economic system can be fundamentally remade. When the
NRA quickly proved to be a bust, FDR discarded it, and replaced his
failure with the Second New Deal, in which business, labor, and
government were situated as countervailing forces against one another—
a fundamental power shift that enabled advances in both prosperity and
democracy unmatched in human history.
Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize
a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from
the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like
Hoover, he is bound to fail.
President Obama, to be fair, seems to be even more alone than Hoover
was in facing the emergency at hand. The most appalling aspect of the
present crisis has been the utter fecklessness of the American elite
in failing to confront it. From both the private and public sectors,
across the entire political spectrum, the lack of both will and new
ideas has been stunning. When it came to the opposition, Franklin
Roosevelt reaped the creative support of any number of progressive
Republicans throughout his twelve years in office, ranging from New
York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to Nebraska Senator George Norris to
key cabinet members such as Henry A. Wallace, Harold Ickes, Henry
Stimson, and Frank Knox. Obama, by contrast, has had to contend with a
knee-jerk rejectionist Republican Party.
More frustrating has been the torpor among Obama’s fellow Democrats.
One might have assumed that the adrenaline rush of regaining power
after decades of conservative hegemony, not to mention relief at
surviving the depredations of the Bush years, or losing the vestigial
tail of the white Southern branch of the party, would have liberated
congressional Democrats to loose a burst of pent-up, imaginative
liberal initiatives.
Instead, we have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places
stepping forward to tell us what is off the table. Every week, there
is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota,
another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing
that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon
tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax
loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat
for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note,
who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush
Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not
concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to
do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—yet another small gray man from a
great big space where the tumbleweeds blow—seems unwilling to make
even a symbolic effort at party discipline. Within days of President
Obama’s announcing his legislative agenda, the perpetually callow
Indiana Senator Evan Bayh came forward to announce the formation of a
breakaway caucus of fifteen “moderate” Democrats from the Midwest who
sought to help the country make “the changes we need” but “make sure
that they’re done in a practical way that will actually work”—a
statement that was almost Zen-like in its perfect vacuousness. Even
most of the Senate’s more enlightened notables, such as Russ Feingold
of Wisconsin or Claire McCaskill of Missouri or Sherrod Brown of Ohio,
have had little to contribute beyond some hand-wringing whenever the
idea of a carbon tax or any other restrictions on burning coal are
proposed.
President Obama, with a laudable respect for the separation of powers,
has left the details and even the main tenets of his agenda to be
worked out by these same congressional Democrats. This approach looks
like an exercise in democracy drawn from his days as a community
organizer, the sort of strategy that helps a neighborhood to decide
whether it wants, say, a health clinic or a youth center. What he
doesn’t care to acknowledge is that, in the case of the U.S. Congress,
he’s dealing with a neighborhood where maybe half want a health clinic
and the rest are holding out for grenade launchers and crystal meth.
Some have suggested that this is a subtle strategy to ensure that the
White House retains the whip hand, that Obama is reserving for himself
the role of “decider” over competing plans. But what is the decision
then? Half a health clinic and one grenade launcher? A plan for
universal health care that is not universal and doesn’t cut costs will
not work. A plan for combating climate change that perpetuates the
shibboleth of “clean coal” will do nothing. Far from controlling the
process, Obama’s procedure is more likely to commit him to one of
Congress’s nebulous non-plans.
Yet Obama’s lack of direction, his lack of accomplishments in his
Hundred Days and counting, cannot be attributed solely to his
illusions about the august body he just vacated. Obama, like Hoover in
his time, is almost alone among politicians in grasping the magnitude
of the crisis. In his masterful February speech before the joint
houses of Congress, Obama explained to the country why we cannot
afford to continue with a tottering health-care system that has left
46 million Americans uninsured and that impedes our exports by adding,
for instance, $1,500 to the cost of every GM car; why it is that
climate change has to be addressed now, and how by addressing it we
can regain our industrial base and actually begin to make things
again; why it is that our financial system could not simply be bailed
out and patched up but must be fundamentally reformed and re-
regulated. Above all, he explained the necessary interaction of all
these reforms, of how they were not just some liberal wish list but
the actions that the radical moment demanded.
Speeches almost as powerful have followed, always linking these ideas
together. But, like Hoover, Obama has been unable to make his actions
live up to his words. Health care is being gummed to death on Capitol
Hill. Obama has done nothing to pass “card check” provisions that
would facilitate union organization and quietly announced that he
would not seek stronger labor and environmental protections in NAFTA.
He has capitulated on cap-and-trade in the budget outline and never
even bothered to push for an actual carbon tax. Only minuscule
portions of the stimulus bill or his budget proposals were dedicated
to mass transit, and his indifference to the issue—what must be a
major component of any serious effort to go green—was reflected in his
appointment of a mediocre Republican time-server, Ray LaHood, as his
transportation secretary.
Still worse is Obama’s decision to leave the reordering of the
financial world solely to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, both of
whom played such a major role in deregulating Wall Street and bringing
on the disaster in the first place. It’s as if, after winning election
in 1932, FDR had brought Andrew Mellon back to the Treasury. Just as
Herbert Hoover could not, in the end, break away from the best
economic advice of the 1920s, Barack Obama is sticking with the “key
men” of the 1990s. The predictable result is that, even as he claims
to recognize the interlocking nature of the problems facing us and
vows to solve them as a whole, the president is in fact abandoning
most of his program, at least for the time being.
No doubt, President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would
claim that by practicing “the art of the possible,” they are ensuring
that “the perfect does not become the enemy of the good.” But by not
even proposing the relevant legislation, Obama has ceded a key part of
the process—so much so that his retreat seems not so much tactical as
a reversion to his core political beliefs.
A major theme of Obama’s 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience
with “the smallness of our politics” and its “partisanship and
acrimony.” He expresses frustration at how “the tumult of the sixties
and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political
discourse,” and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan’s
ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most—
ironically enough, considering the campaign that was to come—is Bill
Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama’s eyes, “instinctively
understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the
American people” and came up with his “Third Way,” which “tapped into
the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans.”
This is an analysis consistent with Obama’s personal story. Like
Herbert Hoover, Obama grew up as an outsider and overcame formidable
odds—hence his constant promotion of personal responsibility and
education. He came of age in a time when hardworking young men and
women like him went to Wall Street or to Silicon Valley, and—once
properly “incentivized” by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—
seemed to save the national economy, creating what appeared to be
great general prosperity while doing well themselves. There’s no need
to do battle with these strivers and achievers, individuals as
accomplished in their fields as Obama is in his. All that’s required
is to get them back on their feet, get the money running again, and
maybe give them a few new rules to live by, a new set of incentives to
get them back on track.
Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the “business
progressivism” of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile,
counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama
internalized what might be called Clinton’s “business liberalism” as
an alternative to useless battles from another time—battles that
liberals, in any case, tended to lose.
Clinton’s business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as
much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover’s
1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here,
espousing a “pragmatism” that is not really pragmatism at all, just
surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running
through all of Obama’s major proposals right now is that they are
labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank
bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools—all of
these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 1993 health plan,
simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too
threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They
bear the seeds of their own defeat.
Obama will have to directly attack the fortified bastions of the
newest “new class”—the makers of the paper economy in which he came of
age—if he is to accomplish anything. These interests did not spend
fifty years shipping the greatest industrial economy in the history of
the world overseas only to be challenged by a newly empowered, green-
economy working class. They did not spend much of the past two decades
gobbling up previously public sectors such as health care, education,
and transportation only to have to compete with a reinvigorated public
sector. They mean, even now, to use the bailout to make the government
their helpless junior partner, and if they can they will devour every
federal dollar available to recoup their own losses, and thereby
preclude the use of any monies for the rest of Barack Obama’s splendid
vision.
Franklin Roosevelt also took office imagining that he could bring all
classes of Americans together in some big, mushy, cooperative scheme.
Quickly disabused of this notion, he threw himself into the bumptious
give-and-take of practical politics; lying, deceiving, manipulating,
arraying one group after another on his side—a transit encapsulated by
how, at the end of his first term, his outraged opponents were calling
him a “traitor to his class” and he was gleefully inveighing against
“economic royalists” and announcing, “They are unanimous in their
hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
Obama should not deceive himself into thinking that such interest-
group politics can be banished any more than can the cycles of Wall
Street. It is not too late for him to change direction and seize the
radical moment at hand. But for the moment, just like another very
good man, Barack Obama is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably
toward disaster.
VicXnews
7812ee...@s21g2000vbb.googlegroups.com:
> Very long, but an awesome piece from the new Harper's magazine. (Would
> link it, but it's part of the pay site.)
>
another clippers fan?
mozark
> > link it, but it's part of the pay site.)
>
> another clippers fan?
Another stupid remark?