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Liberalism’s Glass Jaw

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  • Liberalism’s Glass Jaw

    Liberalism’s Glass Jaw



    Last month, Republicans staring at defeat in November alternated between blaming Mitt Romney and blaming the American people, when they should have been looking harder at the flaws in contemporary conservatism. Now that Romney has surged back into contention, liberals are making a similar mistake. They’re focusing too intently on the particular weaknesses of President Obama’s debate performance, rather than on the weaknesses in Obama-era liberalism that last Wednesday’s Denver showdown left exposed.

    Four years ago, the Obama presidency was hailed as the beginning of an extended liberal renaissance — a new New Deal, a resurrected Camelot, a return to the glory days of Lyndon Johnson before Vietnam wrecked his presidency. Health care reform was the highest priority, but it was supposed to be only the beginning. With the Democrats enjoying huge Congressional majorities, everything seemed to be on the table: immigration reform, a program to combat climate change, card-check legislation, a wave of trust-busting in the banking sector — and at the least, the very least, a return to Clinton-era tax rates.

    There is no world in which all of these hopes could have been perfectly realized. But the ways in which they’ve been disappointed have delivered some hard lessons. It isn’t just that Obama failed to live up to the (frankly impossible) standard set by his 2008 campaign and the media adoration that accompanied it. It’s that the nature of his failures speak to the limits of the liberal project, and the tensions and contradictions within the liberal coalition.

    Liberals have rallied behind a White House whose only real jobs program is “stay the course.”
    Sometimes Obama-era liberalism has disappointed because it has failed outright. The defeat of cap-and-trade legislation and the stillborn push for immigration reform exposed the deep fissures within the Democratic Party, and particularly the divide between the enlightened do-goodism of the party’s upper-middle-class supporters and the economic interests of its remaining blue-collar constituents.

    The steadily worsening deficit picture, meanwhile, has been a reminder that an expanding government balance sheet makes sense only if you can persuade taxpayers to pay more to cover it, which Obama’s party hasn’t done. More important, given the limit to how much money can be extracted from the wealthy, it makes sense only if you persuade middle class taxpayers to pay more, which Obama’s party hasn’t even tried to do.

    But the Obama administration’s legislative successes have offered hard lessons to liberals as well. Indeed, it’s the failures of the successes, if you will, that have cast the longest shadow across his re-election effort.

    First, there was the failure of stimulus bill to deliver anything like the kind of rebound that Obama’s technocrats confidently projected. This failure isn’t necessarily an indictment of the theory behind Keynesian economics. But at the very least it exposes two limitations on Keynesianism in practice: the difficulties that even experts can have assessing the true state of the economy, and the ways in which the push and pull of democratic politics makes it difficult to simply keep throwing money at a problem.

    Then came the White House’s failure to sell the public on its health care bill, which exacerbated the stimulus’s underperformance — by leading to months of wrangling when Washington should have been reckoning with the economy instead — and then cost the Democrats dearly at the polls in 2010. This failure of salesmanship doesn’t in and of itself discredit the bill’s provisions. But at the very least it demonstrates that the redistributive policies liberals favor will be accepted only if they’re founded on a secure base of economic growth — growth that Obama’s policies, unlike F.D.R.’s or L.B.J.’s, have conspicuously failed to produce.

    More broadly, all of Obama’s signature accomplishments have tended to have the same weakness in common: They have been weighed down by interest-group payoffs and compromised by concessions to powerful insiders, from big pharma (which stands to profit handsomely from the health care bill) to the biggest banks (which were mostly protected by the Dodd-Frank financial reform). It may have been an empty rhetorical gesture, but the fact that Romney could actually out-populist the president on “too big to fail” during the last debate speaks to the Obama-era tendency for liberalism to blur into a kind of corporatism, in which big government intertwines with big business rather than restraining it.

    Again, every administration has its share of disappointments, and every ideology has to make concessions to political reality. But what we don’t see in this campaign cycle is much soul-searching from Democrats about the ways in which their agenda hasn’t worked out as planned.

    Instead, in a country facing a continued unemployment crisis and a looming deficit crunch, liberals have rallied behind a White House whose only real jobs program is “stay the course” and whose plan to deal with long-term deficits relies on the woefully insufficient promise to tax the 1 percent. When Obama insiders wax optimistic about what a second term might bring, they mostly talk about pursuing legislation on climate change and immigration yet again, without explaining why things will turn out differently this time around.

    This lack of a plausible vision, more than his stutters and missed opportunities, is what doomed the president in last week’s debate. His responses to Romney were strikingly backward-looking — alternating between “we’re already doing that” and “we tried that under Republicans, and it didn’t work,” and rarely pivoting effectively to “here’s what we should do next.”

    It’s not that Romney offered some detailed, brilliantly persuasive alternative. He didn’t, and couldn’t, because his party has at best a sketch of a policy agenda rather than a blueprint. But Romney isn’t running for re-election, and this was a case where merely seeming forward-looking, energetic and reassuring was enough to remind Americans of all the ways that the Obama era has disappointed them — and in so doing, sent shivers down liberalism’s glass jaw.
    In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.

    Leibniz

  • #2
    I feel like I'm watching Bear Gryllis set up a trap in his show on the Discovery Channel.

    Right Bear?

    Umm... I mean Pari? :)

    Comment


    • #3
      Please. I'll bet the only reason you're here is because Lesbianism's Glass Jew
      Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

      Abusing Yellow is meant to be a labor of love, not something you sell to the highest bidder.

      Comment


      • #4
        Sounds like a good place to tell the stories from another perspective. :pop:
        sigpic"If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees.
        If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children."

        Comment


        • #5
          douthat makes some very good points here. obama's main failings as a political leader is his hands-offish nature to legislative realities. the stimulus and healthcare bills tended to further fragment the Dems rather than to unify them.

          now the Dems have always been more fragmented and less disciplined than the Republicans, with an exception during early on in LBJ's presidency (which is why his political prowess is viewed so highly by dems today); but if Obama couldn't get his own factions to work together without large bribes, then it's also clear he did not have the ability to work together-- or coerce-- the other side into doing what he wanted.
          There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

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          • #6
            Originally posted by bigross86 View Post
            Please. I'll bet the only reason you're here is because Lesbianism's Glass Jew
            "Do they have those?"

            -dale

            Comment


            • #7
              I found a way to down some good alcohol tonight. Every time Biden says something stupid in the debate "take a shot". I am going to stock up as I have a feeling I will be drinking early, often and....pretty until the end of the debate. Who says politics can't be fun?
              Removing a single turd from the cesspool doesn't make any difference.

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              • #8
                I played a similar game with Netanyahu's speech to the UN. Every time he sees key words or phrases we swig some beer. Played the game 2 years in a row, and got completely hammered in no time. Like you said, politics CAN be fun!
                Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

                Abusing Yellow is meant to be a labor of love, not something you sell to the highest bidder.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Of course, with the normal Biden expectations, all he has to do is not shit his pants on stage and he'll be declared the winner. Being a known moron has some benefits after all...

                  -dale

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by dalem View Post
                    Of course, with the normal Biden expectations, all he has to do is not shit his pants on stage and he'll be declared the winner. Being a known moron has some benefits after all...

                    -dale
                    Actually, Biden is a very good debater, he goes to pot when he doesn't have some one face to face. He trashed Palin walking a very fine line between debating and not being condescending. Ryan is a much weaker debater with a history of very thin skin. Its likely going to be Biden getting Ryan to play wingnut. For Ryan to win he needs to put on his big boy pants and get Biden to play wing nut instead.

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                    • #11
                      As usual, I disagree with you. :)

                      -dale

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                      • #12
                        Liberalism's glass jaw: humans...
                        "Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

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                        • #13
                          Originally posted by dalem View Post
                          As usual, I disagree with you. :)

                          -dale
                          We will see shortly, but as usual your disagreement does not change the facts.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Biden may surprise us...










                            ... he may avoid dropping an F-bomb or breaking down in tears. ;)

                            Unbelievable... our local radio station is discussing what the two candidates had for lunch, as if it is a heavyweight boxing match. FWIW, Ryan had a tuna-salad sandwich, while Biden had BBQ chicken and M & M's.

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by zraver View Post
                              We will see shortly, but as usual your disagreement does not change the facts.
                              Not YOUR facts from zraver world, no. :)

                              -dale

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