One of Barack Obama’s biggest cheerleaders has awaken with a hangover today. For Bob Herbert it’s a matter of credibility.
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Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but also who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.
Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.
There is no doubt that the American fiscal house is in disarray. But considering Pres. Obama helped make it worse, I find his cynical fiscal “freeze” campaign not only laughable, however politically opportune, making all the usual suspects cluck in delight, but revealing, because it doesn’t address Obama’s real problem.
Obama is behind Bernanke, Summers and Geithner, continuing to back people who are responsible for the latest fiscal mess. Obama also championed the bailouts and got cozy with Wall Street. These are facts that everyone knows.
Obama had a full year to make a decision about health care, interrupting the interminable debate, guiding the Democratic Party towards a smaller bill, but instead he did nothing.
Obama missed the signs of Virginia and New Jersey, and many other political warnings, losing Massachusetts, and now has decided to respond with a fiscal “freeze” that is a political move, but in the long term won’t fix the economy. He’s hoping people prefer cosmetics, and Blue Dog Democrats and many others hope he’s right.
Independents and others, like myself, as one of the millions of suburban women Obama is losing, none of us like his cozying up to big banks, Wall Street and the corporate class, choosing them over the middle class, including unions. We’d all welcome a real economic policy that wasn’t politically motivated and purely cosmetic for the moment. Many of us voted for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, so we get how this works. The difference being that Bill Clinton knew how to create jobs, empathize with the middle class, and talk to grade school kids without a teleprompter.
Last year it was well known that jobs were being drained from the American landscape.
What did Pres. Obama do?
Nothing.
Now we hear all about Obama moving to the “center,” with the talking heads babbling on about the notion of a “center-right” country, without realizing that voters don’t care from right or left when it all comes down to it. Voters care about their own lives. Whoever makes it better for them, finds solutions to their problems, or looks like they can, gets the nod.
If Obama had actually led on health care, getting a decent bill by the first declared “deadline” last August, “death panels” would never have arisen as a talking point.
If Obama had come into office with his eyes open, instead of focusing on his own presidential persona, he would have seen that jobs was issue one. That an energy JFK type “Go to the Moon” project was required, as was a substantial infrastructure spending to create jobs.
Voters want solutions and we don’t care where it comes from as long as it works. When it doesn’t, we want the bums in power to be thrown out.
Perhaps Obama’s lip service to economic fiscal discipline on the “freeze” will offer political manna. Democrats need it and I hope they get it, because the Republican alternative is frightening. On the other hand, at least Republicans pick a target, announce it and usually hit it, even if the target’s the wrong one. The Democratic Party under Barack Obama can’t even make a decision, and when they do it’s a Republican one that still doesn’t address the issue.
It’s why so many people are independents. There is no difference in the parties; people just picking the persona at the top who talks the best to lead us, hoping it won’t be a disaster. The current “freeze” an effort to reach out to the unaffiliated middle and bring them back into the Obama fold.
Now because of all of his gyrating political inconsistencies, Bob Herbert thinks Obama is “creating a credibility gap for himself.”
That’s bad enough, however, the problem is worse. It’s incompetence. Because there is enough evidence now to prove Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing.
You hit this one out of the ball park Taylor. And the reason Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is because he’s not a Democrat and has no clue what the Party he represents stands for. What happened to “We the people?” I always thought that was what the Dem Party stood for but I guess I was wrong.
“That an energy JFK type “Go to the Moon” project was required, as was a substantial infrastructure spending to create jobs. ”
I have been thinking for the past week or so abut the difference between JFK and Obama, and the moon landing project offers a great comparison: JFK was a leader, and Obama is not. Setting a goal as bold as a moon landing within ten years, with no real indication that it could be accomplished, galvanized the nation, and thousands of dedicated engineers and scientists made it happen.
How well do you think that would have worked if it had been proposed incrementally? We’ll ramp up things slowly, and in a few years we can have more Americans than Russians in orbit…
To repeat from an earlier post:
“We at the height are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
We are now declining precipitously, and have lost our ventures. We can’t rewind the tape and try it again.
Hey JA, thanks so much, I so appreciate that.
Barack Obama had no history of leadership when this began, and as we have seen demonstrated over his first year, he still doesn’t.
For me, this goes well beyond party affiliation. This goes to the weakness of the man himself. He’s been in over his head from the beginning. Bringing Plouffe in to “help” is just further evidence that Obama doesn’t have his own compass, his own truth north, and that he’s just fumbling through his presidency from one political campaign moment to another.
Daches says:
26 January 2010 at 1:29 pm
Absolutely. We needed a jobs moon project a year ago.
The talking heads are wrong about left & right. It’s getting it done with the people able to see something manifest that matters. All the rest is just noise.
In a word Taylor – he has to know what he stands for before he can lead and since he doesn’t have any “ideology” for lack of a better word, he will never be able to lead. That in itself is frightening.And I don’t know what Plouffe can do at this point in time “to help,” not that it matters I’ve never been a Plouffe fan.
Obama has created a political problem that is rooted in policy that they all believe simply requires another political messaging campaign. But see Deval Patrick, with Obama now having the same sorts of problems. Both were Axelrod creations out of whole cloth.
Trouble is we’ve now seen Obama in action for a year. Whatever he was in 2008, and I reported on him after talking to Chicago pols and supporters who’d seen him come up, it was *never* about any leadership qualities or beliefs he had. Like he said recently, it won’t be like 1994, because now you’ve got ME. The “magical me” of Obama.
Slap a slogan on your troubles, send Obama out to campaign on them, and the people will follow.
Maybe that will continue to be true. Dems better hope so, because the alternative is a wilderness akin to what happened after Carter. That’s how bad the burn will be if Obama can’t finesse his way out of this one.
Which is exactly what people on this site saw during the primaries. The idea of the “magical me” of Obama was just that–an illusion. Cripes, he could have been Puff the magic dragon for all I know. Where’s the substance or in other words, “where was the beef?” It wasn’t there and many of us saw it exactly that way.
Think of Nike ads….Obama’s marketing lifted much from Nike…kinda like Tiger Woods. I’m starting to think it’s not just Obama it’s the character of our citizens.When did trends start replacing substance? How did everyone get so dumb?
Oh…Sam’s awake gotta go!
If Obama is the problem does that mean there is no expectation other than to watch the decline until the republicans take over in the next election.
The biggest sign for me that there was no change about to happen is when the wall street insiders were put back in charge. What’s that definition of insanity again?
chigeeng
When were the Wall Street insiders not in charge?
Daches
Lets also remember Frank Rich discussing JFK and Obama:
“The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.
Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”
Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.”
Taylor, Belated – fantastic post!
Christopher Buckley at Daily Beast puts Obama into perspective. And, well, I needed a good laugh. You might too. So, read this:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-25/the-audacity-of-oops/full/
djjl says:
26 January 2010 at 2:09 pm
How I remember that little “dress down” of US Steel. I was cheering JFK just as loudly as the rest of the little people. In all honesty the people back then really believed that JFK had their best interests at heart regardless of his class. This is not what I’m hearing about Obama.
Noogan
Ya’ gotta love it. And let’s remember Mr Buckley endorsed Obama.
You can only operate any system by using smoke and mirrors for so long before everyone finally catches on. It’s just unfortunate for Obama that he was the guy driving the bus when the shit finally hit the fan. For example the Washington pols tell us that Social Security represents 21% of our total budget. Except that Social Security is paid for by each of us through our, and our employers, matching taxes. In 2007 the taxes taken in and the interest paid on those taxes exceeded all Social Security benifits paid out by $2.2 trillion dollars. That’s in the bank $2.2 trillion. Medicare is pretty much the same up until 2017. So why are Social Security and Medicare said to be budget items. They pay for themselves. Unlike Defense, which will cost us $741 billion in 2010, and is something none of us actually gets any benifit from except in some illusionary way. Defense is a true budget item. The entire budget is a scam and the politicians know it. And now so do lots of people. Peace
Yes, the jury has returned its verdict on Obama, but the defendent is not in the courtroom.
I’m with those who say we better hope the Republicans can’t take over, as that would be a disaster.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/26/paulson-to-testify-with-g_n_436865.html
“Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the Bush-era architect of the massive bailout of ailing financial firms, will testify alongside his successor Timothy Geithner at Wednesday’s hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
snip
In addition, former New York Federal Reserve chairman Stephen Friedman will testify. He resigned in May 2009 amid a controversy over his role as a director of Goldman Sachs and his purchases of the firm’s shares.
Also scheduled to appear are Elias Habayeb, the former CFO of AIG’s financial services division, and Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Habayeb spent months negotiating with the counterparties — banks that had bought $62 billion of credit-default swaps from AIG — to accept discounts of as much as 40 percent on the dollar, reported Bloomberg News in October. In the end, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par — or 100 cents on the dollar — a decision which has sparked endless debate.”
If chigeeng is not here now, can anyone else say when the Wall Street insiders were NOT in charge?
Oops, indeed, djjl! Obama’s lack of cojones, coupled with the SCOTUS decision allowing unconstrained expenditures by zombie “citizens” (AKA corporations) to buy our politicians at all levels, leaves me in a state of near-terminal despair.
I was already verging on hopelessness after reading The Family of Secrets by Russ Baker, an exceptionally well documented compendium of the Bush family’s ascent to power. Although focused on the Bushes, it really has much broader and more ominous implications about how our political system really works. It is 500 pages long, with another hundred pages of references.
I had the pleasure of meeting Russ during last December’s Nation magazine cruise, and just finished reading his book about a week ago. It is not clear how we can overcome the systemic disease of corporatism afflicting our political system. But at least it will give you a clearer idea of the enemy’s methods and hidden power.
SOTU -
Should be given in a barn where the surroundings are better suited for what will be thrown our way.
SOTU will be just another of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Could be called Snow White and the 535 Dwarfs. Peace
Thaks for that Daches. I’ll check that out.
BBL
imhotep…lol
The only path that might work would be to change the filibuster rule, which my home state senator, Harry Reid, could help along by getting on board with Harkin. I don’t think that is very likely but will continue to push.
From an excellent piece by Christopher Hayes in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091123/hayes) :
“The filibuster has been reformed before, most recently when the Democratic majority in 1975 voted to bring the requirement to end debate from sixty-seven votes to sixty. As a constitutional issue, the Senate makes its own rules, which means a simple majority vote can change them.”
“As I write this, there are almost certainly fifty-one votes in the Senate for a healthcare reform bill with a public option and good subsidies, the Employee Free Choice Act, and cap and trade. But there aren’t sixty votes for any of those.”
If he is correct, we could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by passing a real health care reform, by just extending Medicare to everyone. We need a dramatic success to survive November 2010, which is a critical election for many reasons, including redistricting in 2011.
chigeeng says:
26 January 2010 at 2:03 pm
If Obama is the problem does that mean there is no expectation other than to watch the decline until the republicans take over in the next election.
__________________________
I hear you chigeeng. I am so disappointed in the Obama and the Democrats that I am about to go on political sabbatical. I’ve been pushing my Congressman to hold out for the public option and other improvements to the HCB, but you know? It won’t happen. Reid and Pelosi and the White House won’t do the right thing, so what’s the point. Unless a progressive candidate can be discovered, we’ll all be simply sitting out the next election, I fear.
chigeeng says:
26 January 2010 at 2:03 pm
It’s just one reason, there are many others, that some progressives are targeting Rahm Emanuel. Dems are stuck with Obama, so tackling Rahm, who is the cheerleader for a win is a win, is seen by some as the next best thing.
I’d love a progressive candidate, JB, but I’d settle for someone competent who could lead at this point. The US has big challenges. We simply can’t afford the current ineptitude.
Obama will just replace Rahm with Daschele,what will be gained? A smoother, less profane staight path to the lobbyists.
Competent would be great Taylor.I remember writing here with great excitement that the Bushies were leaving and we would get competent replacements.Wrong again! I think the incompetence runs very deep in our government. Some of the congress critters are dumb as posts. Maybe we should be voting for House and Senate staff also since they seem to be the ones who actually know something.I study their faces during hearings on c-span trying to catch them rolling their eyes.
straight path
Is it really incompetence or is Rahm/Obama/Reid/Pelosi getting exactly what they want? A Democrat majority (of sorts) with lots of campaign contributions coming in?
If you are progressive, the Democratic majority we have now is not all that much better than the last Administration.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/26/james-okeefe-arrested-in-_n_437506.html
“NEW ORLEANS — A conservative activist who posed as a pimp to target the community-organizing group ACORN and the son of a federal prosecutor were among four people arrested by the FBI and accused of trying to interfere with phones at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office.
Activist James O’Keefe, 25, was already in Landrieu’s New Orleans office Monday when Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel, both 24, showed up claiming to be telephone repairmen, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office said Tuesday. Letten says O’Keefe recorded the two with his cell phone.
Flanagan, the son of acting U.S. Attorney Bill Flanagan in Shreveport, and Basel asked for access to a phone at the reception desk. Then they asked for access to a phone closet so they could work on the phone system. The men were directed to another office in the building, where they again said they were telephone repairmen.
They were arrested later by the U.S. Marshal’s Service. Details of the arrest were not available. A fourth man, Stan Dai, 24, was also arrested, but Letten’s office said only that he assisted the others in planning, coordinating and preparing the operation.
Federal officials did not say why the men wanted to interfere with Landrieu’s phones or whether they were successful. Landrieu, a moderate Democrat, declined comment Tuesday. She has been in the news recently because she negotiated an increase in Medicaid funds for her state before announcing her support for Senate health care legislation.
Bill Flanagan’s office confirmed his son was among those arrested, but declined further comment.”
Big business is getting exactly what they wanted – a POTUS – DINO – at a time when it was clear that the Republican would not win. They went out, bought, paid for via marketing, the transformational candidate at a time when it seemed likely that a real Democrat might be elected.
I think I want to move to a democracy…..I’m tired of the capitalist fiefdom in which we’re a bunch of feudal slaves serving the lords of Wall Street, Big Business, and the Health Care Industrial Complex.
And where would that be djjl?
Not sure kris. But surely there are more advanced democracies than this feudal system.
When you figure it out, let me know I will be right behind you.
kris, there was no United States of America before there was one. The time has come to reinvent us, all over again. We can start today and make a big push in November by ridding ourselves of every incumbant up for reelection from both parties. A Peaceful revolution. Peace
Magical Me Obama. Like Bill Clinton said, biggest fairy tale ever. And we were all so charmed by it. (Not me, though.)
djjl says:
26 January 2010 at 5:47 pm
France.
I don’t like Obama. I think he’s a Narcissist, so I don’t trust him at all. He’s always had a credibility gap with me, so I’m gratified to see that even Bob Herbert has figured it out now. But, here’s the thing: Obama could have won me over easily; all he had to do was say, “We believe that the only viable path to equal opportunities for health care for all Americans–a legitimate goal for this country–is to have universal health care, provided for by the Government. To pay for it, we’ll have to raise everyone’s taxes a little bit; but we’re closing down our military bases–most of the 170 of them anyway–around the world, we’re bringing our troops home from Iraq AND Afghanistan, and we’re going to cut the defense budget in half.
Yay! I’d have been the biggest Obamabot on the planet.
And, even if he was unable to get universal health care completely, he’d have fought for what was RIGHT.
Well, that was a nice fantasy.
Carry on!