Friday, September 24, 2010

"Obama's Could-Have-Been-Worse Presidency"

Newsweek Senior Washington correspondent and political columnist Howard Fineman is leaving the magazine to join The Huggington Post. Here are some excerpts from his final article for Newsweek that are worth pondering -- especially here on ShrinkRap, where the arguments over Obama's performance often become contentious and reflect two caring liberals, one more half-glass-full and one more half-glsss-empty. Watch for those in the Comments from Richard and me, with Mickey joining in occasionally. Now let's listen to what Finemant tells us. He began with the Katrina disaster.

"Obama was elected as a sensation, but he isn’t governing as one. He is putting points on the board, sometimes with little notice and comparatively less fuss than either was anticipated or was the case in the past.

". . . . The BP crisis and its political aftermath are apt symbols for what ails, and what ultimately might save, the president and the Democrats. They are going to get hammered in November. He and they overpromised and underperformed. But if they avoid a blowout it will in part be because voters see the Obama that is, not the fiction they worshiped or dreaded. He is the plodding “national incident commander” for our beleaguered era, and his accomplishments—to the extent he has them—so far are mostly about how our predicament would have been worse had it not been for his bailing of water. It’s a hard message to sell in the midst of 9.5 percent unemployment, when dollar discount stores are all the rage, and the gap between the rich and everyone else in the country is as wide as it has been since the Progressive Era.

But he is what he is. To get a real fix on our 44th president and what he has done—or not done—it’s best to leave behind the grandiose language and grand expectations. He is a singular, history-making character, yet he is best defined by what he is not. He is neither the we-are-the-change savior his acolytes saw early on, nor is he the radical his foes see now. Obama is labeled a socialist by the hungriest recipients of government welfare in the history of commerce—Wall Street banks—but he is nothing more nor less than a legalistic believer in the regulatory state.

He is branded an alien Islamist by the same conservatives who would, in another context, celebrate his Alger-like rise to prominence from ethnic obscurity. And he is derided as timorous and unskilled by the same Democratic insiders whose clocks he cleaned in 2008—and by the same reporters (including me) who didn’t see him coming, and who had no real idea what Facebook was until it hit 'em in the face. Oddly, his foes think he is viciously effective; it’s only his friends who think he is ineffectual.

In fact, he’s neither. Halfway into his second year, we can see that he is just a smart but cautious guy who succeeds by dogged effort and not by eloquence (he really isn’t very eloquent) or by grand gesture. Critics on the left and right—from Paul Krugman to Sarah Palin—can say what they want, but the truth is that Obama and his team did help avoid, or forestall, a global economic collapse, in part because his demeanor was cool and his ability to grasp the details (and desire to do so) was evident well before he was even elected.

That told “the markets” that adult supervision and a steady hand were on the way. Yes, the “stimulus” was a throw-it-against-the-wall mess, but it also had some tangible results in jobs saved and deeper recession avoided, and those results came and now come, and at a time when a sense of governmental motion was critical. The official arbiters of business cycles just declared that the recession ended in mid-2009. Recovery is anemic, to be sure, but the system survived.

"Obama is a victim of the overheated rhetoric of his aides (“never let a crisis go to waste”) and his own evident desire to make more history than he made by merely being who he was. The vast health-care and financial-services bills were, taken as a whole, a political disaster when described in grand terms. But in their granular details are specific measures that do specific good for specific Americans: family-based insurance for kids up to 26; no dumping or automatic denial of beneficiaries; tight supervision of credit-card rates and of the deliberately impenetrable terminology banks use in consumer transactions. The health-care features go into effect this week. The president doesn’t have the rhetorical chops to tout such items with Clintonian, kitchen-table vividness (you can just imagine Big Dog with all this material to work with). But that doesn’t mean the incremental achievements aren’t real.

"Obama was elected as a sensation, but he is isn’t governing as one. He is putting points on the board, sometimes with little notice and comparatively less fuss than either was anticipated or was the case in the past: a pay-equity law for women; two quite liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court (without a filibuster in a filibuster-mad Senate); a renewal of Mideast peace talks. Road and bridge projects, however delayed, are now underway—bright spots in the much-derided Stim. “I didn’t vote for it because I wasn’t in the Senate yet,” says Sen. Al Franken. “But everywhere I go in Minnesota the people thank me for it.”

"On a personal level, there is much to be said for Obama—though little of it has been said. Again, his achievement is in the negative: the absence of disaster or embarrassment. He isn’t the egregious and impeached glamour hog/party guy that Clinton was, to be specific. For all his purported charisma, he’d rather shoot hoops and watch ESPN and play horse with his daughters than go to a party. He has an odd but useful gift for siphoning the tension out of things, including his own private life.

"I write this knowing that it will be seen by some as a parting valentine to the president. It isn’t meant as such. As a NEWSWEEK reporter and columnist for more years than I can count, I am paid to make judgments, some of them harsh. But I try to remember to step back and try to see the panorama, not just the particular. I hold no brief for any politician or persuasion, and never have. When Bush was president, I was widely accused of giving him too many breaks early on. Same with Obama now. But as I leave the magazine to write full time for the Huffington Post, I can say this about the president. It could have been worse. And if we aren’t careful, it probably will be.

Welcome to the HuffPost, Mr. Fineman -- and to frequent quotes here on ShrinkRap.

Ralph

2 comments:

  1. So, what's this Ralph - you're baiting me? Okay, I'll bite.

    Actually, this taps into something I ran on Facebook. I asked the question, Would you inconvenience yourself now to go hear Obama talk if he were in your area?

    It generated an incredibly intelligent, wide-ranging and thoughtful discussion about what O has done the last few years.The gist of it wasn't dissimilar to this column. A recognition that he has picked away and done some good things. And there was a general consensus he has not been the leader we hoped he would be.

    The point of the question, for me, was to gauge the enthusiasm level for Obama. Fineman sort of touches on that.

    My take is, recognizing someone has done a number of small good things, while failing to pass more important progressive legislation - I benefit from my 2 sons being covered until they're 26, but I would gladly give that up if Obama had instead fought to allow the elderly to buy low cost drugs from Canada - does not translate to an enthusiastic, motivated electorate.

    I see a distinct enthusiasm gap between the right and left. All of the people on my wall were thoughtful, intelligent, well-spoken, analytical, except for one. My partner's niece was rabidly emotional in spouting out attacks in the way Tea Party supporters do. Stupid things. The problem with public schools are bad teachers. Illegal immigrants are the reason we pay high health care costs. Obama "snowed" us.

    Of course, she presented no evidence to support her wild assertions, and wouldn't answer a single direct question she was asked. Her basic attitude, ala Palin and O'Donnell, was nobody knows anything but her. If you don't agree with her you're a - a multiple choice of names called.

    This woman was incapable of presenting a single coherent thought, but she was passionate as hell in her attacks on everything Obama and defense of everything right wing.

    These are the people who will go to the polls.

    As for my survey results - out of all the people who responded, including many who worked for Obama and donated money, all of whom will vote for him again, only 1 said she would go hear him speak. "And only if I knew he wasn't going to give the same predictable political speech" he's been giving lately.

    There is a recognition he has done good things, but has missed the boat on a lot, too. There is an even more heightened awareness the forces of ignorance we are facing aren't just stupid people, but dangerous people.

    But do people mobilize to vote against an evil? I think not. I think we're going to have frenzied masses out there incoherently mobilized by Beck, Palin, Hannity, etc. rushign from those rallies and storming the polls.

    From the Left? Who is going to lead us? The only people I see capable of mobilizing a crowd are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

    For a large number of his former passionate supporters, now turned disappointed but grudging supporters, Obama is a man they will vote for, but won't put a lot of hope in.

    I'm not making a judgment on whether this is right. It's just the way I think it is. And it is not a recipe for electoral success.
    richard

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  2. Richard -- I agree and am increasingly alarmed that time is running out to get people fired up to go out and vote for Democrats in November. This is going to be bad.

    As to Obama's achievements: I don't disagree with what you say. I only look at it from a different angle: could someone else have done better, all in all? Perhaps on some things, and maybe would have had to give up some other things in order to do so.

    We don't know. You can't rewind it and make different choices to compare the outcomes. But there is no question: we continue to lose the message war, as well as the enthusiasm gap.

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