Hendrik Hertzberg: One Year: Beware of Sudden Downdrafts

[babylonsister]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/01/one-year-beware-of-sudden-downdrafts.html

One Year: Beware of Sudden Downdrafts
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg


Having been around a while, I have some memory of the Years One of four previous Democratic Presidents. Turbulence during takeoff has been the rule. It is wise to keep one’s seat belt loosely fastened.

J.F.K. had the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a humiliating Vienna summit with Khrushchev, unforced errors both. He dazzled with imaginative, low-cost initiatives like the Peace Corps, but the really ambitious items on his agenda (health care!) stalled in Congress. Carter mismanaged relations with Congress and “gave away” the Panama Canal, a necessary move that had the side effect of turbocharging Ronald Reagan’s political rise. Clinton stumbled over gays in the military on the way to his own health-care debacle. Only Johnson had a stellar first year, and that was largely due to the tragically galvanizing circumstances of his taking office.

That Obama let the “outside game” part of the health-care drama get away from him, so focused was he on the “inside game” of trying to force the legislative elephant through the Congressional keyhole, can no longer be denied. He and his team can also be faulted for the political (and perhaps substantive) inattention that has allowed the right to profit handsomely from the economic disaster that their policies, not Obama’s, brought about.

Whether yesterday’s upset in Massachusetts turns out to be a catastrophe or merely a setback now depends largely on the grown-upness, or lack of it, of liberals in the House of Representatives. I don’t see any way out of the darkness right now other than for the House to tighten its stomach muscles, pass the Senate version of the health-care bill A.S.A.P., and move on to jobs and the economy. The Senate health-care bill, however inferior to the House version, is vastly superior to the status quo. The only alternative I can discern is no bill at all—a political, substantive, and humanitarian failure that would reverberate for a generation.

Thanks to my longstanding obsession with the obsolescence of our eighteenth-century political and electoral hydraulics (such as the separation of powers and the lack of a single government accountable to a national electorate) and this sclerotic system’s sadomasochistic twentieth-century refinements (such as the institutionalization of the filibuster), I am not astonished that Obama has had trouble “getting things done.” Absent only the filibuster—even while leaving untouched all the other monkey wrenches (committee chairs, corrupt campaign money, safe districts, Republicans, etc.)—Obama by now would have signed landmark bills addressing health care, global warming, and financial regulation, and a larger, better-designed stimulus package, too.

Obama came into office with a slightly better-than-average electoral mandate, but he was immediately faced with difficulties of a size and type that his post-mid-century Democratic predecessors were not: a gigantic economic emergency whose full effects weren’t felt until halfway into his first year; two botched wars in chaotic Muslim countries; an essentially nihilistic opposition party dominated by a pro-torture, anti-intellectual, anti-public-spirited, xenophobic “conservative” movement; and a rightist propaganda apparatus owned by nominally respectable media corporations and financed by nominally respectable advertisers. Excuses? Maybe. Good ones, though. Sometimes excuses actually excuse.

Meanwhile, President Obama forestalled a second Great Depression, turned the attention of the executive branch toward real problems, restored lawfulness and decency to foreign and domestic policy, damped down the flames of global anti-Americanism, and staffed the agencies and departments with competent, public-spirited officials who believe in the duty of government to advance the general welfare. In this generation, Obama is as good as it is likely to get. I’m not sure whether that’s good news or bad, and I’m not saying that liberals shouldn’t keep the pressure on him to do better. I am saying that their—our—anger and exasperation should be directed elsewhere, at systemic grotesqueries like the filibuster and at the nihilists those grotesqueries enable.

[Armstead]

1. Walking and chewing gum is possible

It is possible to acknowledge all of the obstacles -- But still push for meaningful change.

The only way to correct those temporal problems is by gettiung to the roots of what caused them.

[babylonsister]

2. If you don't think this man and his admin haven't been trying to

push for meaningful change despite so many obstacles, I just don't know what to tell you.

And no one suggested walking and chewing gum isn't possible.

[Armstead]

4. The underlying defeatism is the problem

They are avoiding the core issue -- which is the unGoldly concentration of wealth and power that underlines, and the screwed up value system that has imposed on the country, which underlies every other issue.

yes they want to put a nicer face on the abusive system, but they are just tampering aeround the edges, withpout really tacking to root causes, either in message or action. Either they have bought into the corporate conservative view of the world, or they are afraid to directly challenge it or harness public opinion to sup;port real reform.

Look at what happened to something very tiny, like opening up a public option or Medicare to more people. This man and his administration started with the assumption that even that was not worth fighting for.

Nor do they even begin to address the idea that certain financial institutions have become "too big to fail." All we get is tampering around the edges.

[babylonsister]

5. Very ironic of you to talk about defeatism, which is what you've

been all about. Nice touch!

And to call the PO "tiny" is a definite mischaracterization. We can't even get basic HCR done; how do you think people would react (and we saw how some did) were the PO to have been the focal point? You expected the impossible, and now you're bummed. What a surprise.

And ftr, I wish they'd gone for the PO, too, or better yet, Medicare for all. But maybe they thought that was biting off more than they could handle and knew the backlash they'd receive. I don't know.

[Armstead]

6. I don;t assume we'll be defeated before we even start....I get "defeatist" when it is merited

This post is reflective of the kind of defeatism I am talking about. "impossible....biting off more than they could handle...knew the backlash they'd receive...."

Look, most people know that the insurance companies are abusive bastards, they have far too m uch power over access and they are making it impossible for everyone to afford basic care....yes hard core conservatives and teabaggers may have a knee-jerk reaction against "socialist" healthcare -- but your average moderate American knows they are getting screwed.

If, instead of timidly nibbling around the edges, the WH and Congress had AT LEAST had the faith to offer to provide the option for people to choose a more reasonable, public insurance system, the "backlash" would have been minor compared to the support.

Assuming that is not true is defeatism. And that leads to waffling that does provoke peopel and allow the teabaggers to take over the conversation.

[FrenchieCat]

3. Sounds good.....

but that's about it.