The Art of Governing

US Capitol, 1917

President Obama does seem to have a deep adversion to seizing the opportunties handed to him by his political opponents. He seems to drawback from the arena of partisan politics. He has missed opportunities to comment specifically on a number of Republican missteps, distortions, and stumbles. Here, he differs not only from President Clinton but also from President Lincoln who he admires. Lincoln loved to engage in overt observations about his opponents actions and ideas. And Lincoln’s engagement was not lofty or philosophical nor did it stem from abstract ideals. His rhetorical heights came from deep immersion into the specific dynamics of the politics. His flights of rhetoric were inspired by details. Lincoln spoke truth without being negative and inspired by the nation by the truth he pulled forth from his opponents’ views.

In contrast, President Obama seems to fit circumstances to a formula. A photo-op, a statement declaring the road to our better angels, a pledge to compromise and listen to those who seek to destroy him to search out their best ideas, a sly swipe at his impatient base, a re-statement of his creed to work hard every day for the American people.

Where he is effective is in the trenches. Faced with tough resistance, he has been able to muscle through legislation which seemed impossible to pass. But again the specifics are messy. The stimulus was too small, healthcare had no public option, millionaires and billionaires got their tax cuts, banks to big to fail weren’t broken up, consumers are feeling the financial backlash of financial and insurance companies inflicting pain in advance of regulationary legislation, and many of his appointments languish, unapproved. The war lingers and is an offshore economic blackhole and killing ground, a carbon tax is delayed, and immigration is stalemated. The disarmament treaty and DADT eeked by, pushed by legislators as much as the White House.

The President needs to remember he is not only the country’s leader, but he is the leader of his political party. It is fair play to counterpunch; it does less damage to his credibility than his appearance of The View. He needs to rigorously call his opponents on their views, laying out in plain sight what their soundbites obscure. He does so for policies he supports. But to defeat Republicans he needs more than metaphors about the “car in the ditch.” The Professor must rebut the specious arguments of his opponents point by point, step by step, until the entire house of falsehoods falls. Each time he misses an opportunity, he only allows the foundation of deception to turn into a political fortress for his opponents.

During the next two years, the President needs to remember Lincoln’s adage: “You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.”

Oppression is a Many Splendored Thing

Protesting Congress Denial of Women's Rights. Photo, Library of Congress.

Denial is a part of every system of oppression. Republicans deny their oppression of working class families and the poor by pretending to be “for” family values and “free” enterprise, while shifting the balance of power and profit to those who exploit the public good for private and personal gain.

But what we are seeing with President Obama is a new class of denial. It’s a denial that denies it is denying. It calls for him to do things many–not all–but many don’t want him to do. Perhaps instructive is a story from my high school years, where as a member of the group of first African-Americans to integrate my hometown high school, I was encouraged to take full advantage of opportunities and activities. Except for the state BETA Club convention, when everyone wondered who would be my roomates, and the regional band clinic, another overnight trip, where we were suppose to stay with families (I was told I could decline the trip if I wanted to, although I had made first chair), and the Christmas parades where the good citizens of neighboring towns through cigarettes at the boots of our one African-American majorette. The point here is not to shock, open old wounds, or cite old history, it’s to point out that America never seems to know anyone who has done those things. We offer opportunity and equal expectations, but deny the invisible expectation of limits silently imposed by race–and then deny race is a factor.

With the President, remember the New Yorker magazine cover with his head wrapped and his wife in a 70s-styled afro with platforms with a fist bump, the American flag burning in the fireplace – the modern militant radical equivalent of the watermelon eating stereotype that supposedly was only a “parody”? Remember the discussions during the primaries as to whether the President had street cred (was he “black” enough)? So consumed were many with panning race and denying the panning, that no one saw what is obvious: it’s worse–his politics are neither racial or socialist (and socialist is simply another code word for race that can be denied by those who use it).

Now many who deny their denial have discovered they can have it both ways and are playing both sides. I feel like I’m watching an old Sidney Poitier movie, in which he is suffering silently under the yoke, as impotent as Gershwin’s Porgy, as tragic as Ellison’s Invisible Man’s battle royal–sympathetic, a source of fury–but safe.

This is meant to be a larger reading of Obama within the cultural dynamic of race outside of its usual confines of bias and prejudice. It is not a reading of his personality or politics, but of the subtle ways America invents to deny its denial that it (we) see race, and often hold out expectations which we don’t expect to be met. Newt’s “Kenyan anti-colonialism” was an unveiled, unvarnished clear academic reference to the Mao Mao, yet not one pundit, broadcast or print, labeled it or nailed it. I found it insidious and bankrupt. It labeled the President in a way that really labeled the broader image of African-Americans–no longer welfare cheats but now deadly killers of western civilization’s right to its manifest destiny. It shut a door for me that no one among the Republicans or Tea Party folk renounced the remark. To support those who hold or who let such views go by would be like fighting for the Confederacy. (Which incidently some African-Americans did not based on principles or beliefs; they were promised freedom and pensions, creating a win-win in their political hedge.)

How can the country leave unnoticed the Kenyan anti-colonial reference while wanting him to “man up”? Actually the country is doubling down on its denial; from the Duchess who found him uppity to the pan cake boxes that bootstrapped him to recyled imagery, no one seems to be able to find anyone who thinks race is an issue, when it fact, it’s all over the place, but outside of the narrow confines of bias or prejudice by which we have been conditioned to think about it. Cultural attitudes are difficult to identity and can not be counted in surveys or polls, or one by one. They linger and reproduce as a interior legacy–and a big part of that legacy is that the complexities of the culture of race are denied.

To borrow and paraphrase an image from my favorite Ismael Reed poem, “Jacket Notes,” the President is like a man going over Nigara Falls in a barrel. Many of the gawkers hope he falls on his face. Some don’t think much of his act. The barrel makers don’t think he can cut it. “But what really hurts is / he is bigger than the / barrel.”

Interstellar Influences

The lunar eclipse on the day of the winter solstice had mystic effects on Congress and embrazoned the President with new unearthly powers. Or perhaps he has simply turned the executive operations into an apparat, with his almost invisible staff being apparatchiks who wielded the levers of power whhile remaining on the down low. In either case, things have been drastically different since Rahm left to go to the city of blues and polkas.

Putting aside interstellar influences and Marxist metaphors for his wins, the President’s record this week has certainly been impressive. Most impressive was the mandate sent to Sen. Kyl by his own Republican collegues that their role as apparatchiks for Obama’s future defeat was not worth risking enhanced national security and undermining world peace. The ghosts of former Senators could be seen in their votes that actually put country first and did pretend that the treaty, a 17 page document agreed to and available since last April, was being rushed through. Kyl’s objections bordered on being bi-polar; at best his was a transparent, brazen attempt to co-op the executive branch and dishonor America’s word and leadership around the world for flimsy procedural reasons.

More impressive was the vote to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Extending dignity and rights to those who fight for and are willing to die for freedom really does express our “better angels.”

This season, I’m really glad to be sitting around the fire with the television on mute.

“Be Lifted Up, O Ancient Doors”

     In a $14 trillion economy, still the world’s largest, just a few days after Ford announced record profits of $1.69 billion for the quarter, and even after Bank of America posted $3.1 billion in profits in Q2 2010, one would think the idea of scary conversations about Republicans returning to power would be null. Especially in light of the crisis we averted. Yet the Republicans have managed to make the recovery scary.

Fear has more impact than the hard core numbers, so large they are insulated from their own good news. Fear brings it home. Fear lives next door, not across town. Fear feels more smug than common sense, or hope or freedom. To paraphrase W. H. Auden, fear “surrounds us like a baffling crime.”

And fear is closing the eyes of voters at precisely the time when their eyes need to be opened. It should be said that fear serves a political purpose. As do discussions of witches, anchor babies, headless bodies, and Newt’s Kenyan anti-colonialism (code for the Mau Mau who beheaded British whites). In 1868, Harper’s Weekly wrote, “How easily wicked and treasonable organizations may gain the control over the peaceable and the industrious members of society has always been signally apparent at the South.”

So do the crimes and ethic scars that are celebrated as being “just like you.” It’s all a sleight of mind! It’s framed as compassion spoken as a warning without acts of safety.

It ignores the questions: how did we become a nation divided? How we can be rich and poor?

The Economy

 

The drummed and hammered complaints that inspired fear have been a stimulus debt that provided a tax cut and clearly plugged the vortex into which the US economy went into free fall, and job growth.

But look at the economy and corporate outsourcing, cash hoarding, and profit expansion have deliberately inhibited job growth. This truth is hidden by the Republican spin. Profits are increasingly seven times faster than company revenues. Much of that very generous profit comes from down sizing and outsourcing, by zeroing out the employment revenue stream. The pay check is a target; it is snatched back for profit. As a poet e. e. cummings wrote: “strong men are in the streets digging for bread.”

The Powers That Be, 1868. Harper’s Weekly

The Republican positions simply mask the slash, smash, and burn techniques by which they plan to legislate another ill-fated take over of the economy, with more cash shipped to the private sector by no bid contracts, and more profits from lower wages and non-existent jobs.

Not one single idea offered by the Party or its candidates has the substance of growth or jobs. Their plans for austerity will not bring prosperity. They make only vague references to the power of the private sector. That power smashed the economy, fired workers, and now records record profits. (And strong men are digging bread.)

Jobs? Jobs are created by demand; to hire, there must be work to do. A tax cut doesn’t make work. It’s a private stimulus. It doesn’t have to be spent. It doesn’t automatically increase demand.

That power so extolled by Republicans is now driven by greed. It stole the principle of the common good and hung it in effigy. Shouting in the crumbling streets, uttering blame and inciting fear, the Party that anchors itself to the constitution has surreptitiously stolen the meaning of democracy in order to serve and enrich the select.

The Democrats

 

Push and pull once made for good politics and lively campaigns. And achievement used to count. Take Strom Thurmond; despite his horrific rhetoric on civil rights, his defense of segregation, (full disclosure: I’m African-American), I voted for him. When I was unemployed but actively seeking work, a phone call to his office and a 70 minute walk (saving bus fare), and I was a GS-10 in less than 72 hours. And after he invoked cloture on Jesse Helms’ filibuster of the King Holiday Bill, and delivered sewer, paved and lighted streets, and safety grants to SC’s small predominantly black towns, I voted by the deed rather than the word.

Now, the first African-American President and his party face the opposite problem. They have been matchless in acting for progress, but can’t get the message out. They have delivered, but have weak defenses and little attack. Quick: what is Chris Coon’s position on social security?The President

Now there are “kinder, gentler” attacks that cite mostly personality and psychology with a little parody and cute word play to render the administration ineffective. In dry training speak, whenever any system is out of kilter, it is usual to single out and blame an individual for the failures and shortcomings of the whole.

Bad weather? Hang the ship’s captain. Bad economy? Blame the President. Reduce complex dynamics to a single, identifiable cause.



But start with Obama and work backward. There were “many” who sought to de-legimitize him with unprecedented withering attacks. He was shouted at, tsk-tsked, signed, caricatured, ballyhooed, cartooned, cursed, labeled, slimed, belittled, disrespected.

He took the wrong vacations at the wrong time, he waited too long to visit the Gulf, he hesitated too long before taking the lead on healthcare, he overlooked too long the shape of the economy. Yet the Gulf (take a deep sigh here and say a prayer) is doing well, healthcare is slowly rolling out, and the macro-economy, at $14 trillion and counting, is doing relatively well. In fact, Obama created more jobs in the first eight months of 2010 then Bush did in eight years. And it was Republican incumbents who lost their conservative seats to those who felt they were not conservative enough. Was Barack Obama supposed to campaign for them?

But as people pile on, at the top of the pile are jobs lost and not regained. Yes, like a stake, jobs stand above the buzz “of calling shapes, and beck’ning shadows dire, and airy tongues that syllable men’s names.” (Milton.)

“You didn’t fix the jobs crisis, dude.” You were supposed to turn the ship of state around in 24 months. Audacity meet mendacity; all blame and little help; all “socialist” and no capitalists to the aid; he was all calm when confronting fury: and now judged as weak, absorbed, even mediocre; a contradiction which has become an antithesis. But remember again this fact: Obama created more jobs in the first eight months of 2010 then Bush did in eight years.

Change hurts, whether it institutes new programs or people. It disturbs the status quo. It shifts power. Charismatic, reflective, Obama symbolizes the last broken barrier of America’s racial past. He challenged an ideal that many Americans cherished and he has suffered their contempt. He broke that barrier at the worst possible time; he became president at the arc of elite corporate political power; he spent billions on their bail-out while they acted in distain. But there is no going back.

 Even after next week, Obama’s got two more years. And things can’t really get much worse. If they do, despite the mantras that lay doom at his door, there will be plenty of real blame to go around.

 
New Jersey election, 1867. Harper’s Weekly.

–Walter Rhett
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Mississippi Children on the 4th of July 1937. Dorothea Lange Master Photograph. Library of Congress.

Could it be that the new source of wealth and prosperity is sourced in the permanent loss of jobs? (Republicans want to dismantle the safety net, shifting even more wealth to corporations.) The complaint, that Democrats have overspent, stimulated fear, and not messaged well, has partial truth. But it does not equal the massive truth of the Republican distortions and wackiness. DeMint, Boehner, McConnell, Cantor and the others are no Strom Thurmond. Thurmond didn’t neglect the message to his base or service to his constituents, and did both aggressively, delivering the goods by word and deed, even when they were at odds, and while getting his fair share, never uttered blame.