Obama, Incorporated
by David Bromwich
January 30, 2011
The 2011 State of the Union was Obama's first rhetorical step to seal his new reputation as an anti-government Democrat. It has been said that, facing a determined and hostile Congress, Obama had no choice but to placate and again extol the virtues of bipartisanship. Certainly this was not a moment when he could pretend to speak for liberal reforms.
What is surprising is the warmth with which he has embraced the premises of his opponents: in matters affecting public life and the economy, government is now said to be the problem, and private enterprise the solution; and far from deregulation having been a major cause of the financial collapse, the way to a healthy economy now lies through further deregulation. This rhetorical concession, adopted as a tactic, will turn against Obama as a strategy. The enormous budget cuts, for example, which he volunteered to make yet steeper will work against the ventures in job-creation which he has asked for without giving particulars.
Every advance that he makes on these lines as a gain to himself is a loss to his party. For without the idea that government is the heart of constitutional democracy and not a useless appendage, there is nothing much for Democrats to be; just as, without the idea that big business is the preserver of the American Dream and taxation is the enemy, there is nothing for Republicans to be.
By offering himself as the rational corporate alternative to the Tea Party, Obama is taking a tremendous gamble, but with his party's fortunes more than his own. If the 2012 election were held tomorrow, both houses of Congress would pass into Republican hands and Obama would stay on as president. Not a word of his State of the Union address was calculated to alter that asymmetry.
Again, he did ask that the Bush tax cuts for the rich be allowed to expire in 2012. But it was President Obama who pushed his party to surrender their expiration at the end of 2010; in 2012, with the demands of an election close, how many Democrats will take the risk Obama himself feared to take in 2010? On immigration, another issue of the mid-term election in which Obama's liberal position was unpopular, he has gently instructed Congress to conduct a polite debate and try to be decent to honest and hard-working immigrants. He did say children of immigrants, including illegals, hard-working or not, should have equal access to education without "the threat of deportation." And he suggested that foreigners who came here to get advanced degrees should be allowed to stay. But he made no mention of the Dream Act, or any specific policy that would achieve such goals.
What is hard to take in at a glance is the extent of the change in the political description Obama has dedicated himself to earning over the next two years.
All his general pledges now bear the stamp of the corporate ideology. This ideology assumes that the energy, initiative, and technical knowhow that contribute to our society .... originate in the private sector and are generally stunted, impaired, adulterated, or degraded by public supervision. The favor shown to charter schools by the president and his secretary of education Arne Duncan, in their endorsement of the testing regime of Race to the Top, draws on that ideology without much skepticism; and as Diane Ravitch has shown, it has encouraged a broad disdain for the supposed lack of "results" in public education that is not supported by facts.
Read the full article at:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jan/28/obama-incorporated/#
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