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Political Hay
The Zebra’s Focus Group
Barack Obama can change his rhetorical stripes, but not reality.
Contra the mewling hordes of Democratic strategists and liberal columnists currently wailing and gnashing their way across op-ed pages and cable television panels, Barack Obama is not the first leader in history to find his legacy-baiting megalomania frustrated by limited resources and popular discontent.
“Formerly it was faith which was the chief supporter of the throne; nowadays it is credit,” the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed long ago. “If in times past it was the guilty debt of the world which was lamented, now it is the financial debts of the world which arouse dismay.”
I’ll let readers determine for themselves what the famous stoic who declared, “It is easy to see how dull and stupid are the philosophasters who in pompous phrases represent that the State is the supreme end and flower of human existence,” would think of President Yes We Can. For now let us merely note how unoriginal and pedantic this desire for one’s subjects to be malleable and credulous truly is then move on to Stanley Greenberg’s recent New York Times piece, “Why Voters Tune Out Democrats.”
“A crisis of government legitimacy is a crisis of liberalism,” Greenberg writes. “It doesn’t hurt Republicans. If government is seen as useless, what is the point of electing Democrats who aim to use government to advance some public end?”
This underestimates, I think, how far the libertarian reed within the GOP thicket is forced to bend when Republicans are ascendant. The desire to punish political foes subsumes ideological alliances with depressing frequency — just ask whatever Liberaltarian Jackalopes managed to survive the 2008 culling.
Yet the more fundamental issue here is that Greenberg’s formulation sets up the “crisis of government legitimacy” as a strictly partisan problem — that is, illegitimacy reaches a crisis point only when the electorate doubts “Democrats who aim to use the government,” not when voters look askance at the unrelenting expansion of the regulatory state and its accompanying fetid, amoral governing bureaucracy, which, often as not, appears bound and determined to prove Albert Jay Nock’s maxim that “whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.”
A political party as sure of the soundness of its policies as it is of its noble intentions might welcome skepticism as an opportunity to decisively win a given policy debate.
But, no, the political class in this country wants faith to be the chief supporter of the throne and blind partisan trust is more valuable to them than any professed ideal.
IF GREENBERG WOULD REALLY like to know why voters are tuning out Democrats he should, ironically enough, take a gander the most recent memo from his own polling firm, Democracy Corps. Bluntly entitled “Winning on a Losing Economy,” the report may not be a blueprint for substantive philosophical engagement, but it does promise a framework that will enable Democrats to “dominate conservatives and Republicans,” virtually guaranteeing it a wide audience.
I have two initial responses to this: The first is, Ooooh, tough boys say, Grrrr! The second is a sort of deep sigh that says in a respectful, nonverbal way, Framing, Mr. Greenberg? 2003 called — it wants its manias back! What’s next? A Fahrenheit 9/11 viewing party hosted by George Lakoff?
Whatever criticisms one may lodge regarding the framing frame, however, its fresh rhetorical approach cannot be denied. That musty old framework of blaming George W. Bush for every ill and promising quantifiable progress at some point in the near future? James Carville kicked that to the curb with last week’s garbage, friend! The new framework “rejects the battle over who is to blame for the economic crisis as old politics” and “at no point does it say we are making progress or moving in the right direction but instead says we have immense economic problems that will take years to solve,” which, conveniently, “makes the crisis and recovery the work of the first term and it makes the task of changing the economy the work of the second.”
“By putting the crisis into the first term,” Democracy Corps assures Democrats, “Obama is freed to acknowledge the pain of the real economy and make it his passion.”
Quick question: If the “pain of the real economy” really were Obama’s passion, wouldn’t he be able to figure it out without an extensive series of polls testing “frameworks”?
Never mind. All of this, Democracy Corps contends, is a necessary reaction to a “Republican message framework centered on spending and deficits, the failed recovery and continued spending and tax cuts is quite powerful, though not stronger than the Democrats’ strongest messages.” (I presume here Greenburg is referring to arguments other than the ones he hears across the dinner table from his wife, Democratic congresswoman Rosa DeLauro.)
You cannot blame hacks of whatever stripe for encouraging distillation and clarity, of course. But this so-called “Republican message framework” did not spring sui generis from the RNC’s underground Evil Corporatist Lab for Language Manipulation. The stimulus, for example, did not fail spectacularly by Republican benchmarks, it failed against the wildly off-base estimates the Obama Administration brazenly touted in the lead up to the vote. It failed according to the standards of Vice President Joe Biden, who loudly brayed at the outset of Recovery Summer 2010 the doubters would soon see the economy creating “500,000 jobs a month.” It failed by the lights of Nancy Pelosi, who insisted a vastly unpopular healthcare reform bill would create “400,000 jobs almost immediately.” It failed because, according to Obama himself, “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”
About the Author
Shawn Macomber is a contributing editor to The American Spectator.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (16) | Leave a comment
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chuck| 8.5.11 @ 7:06AM
Obama is the cause of the economic woes. This will be corrected in the next election.
That said, the GOP missed a perfect chance to prove to the country that this huge government is not necessary, or useful. They should not have agreed to anything less than Cut, Cap, And Balance. This would have led to a partial shutdown. After a couple of weeks with the Dept. of Education, Commerce, Housing, Energy, and some other nonsense, people would realize that these really have no benefit whatsoever, certainly none that justifies the cost.
The Republicans, as usual, has the winning hand, and folded.
massmile | 8.5.11 @ 9:30AM
The list of political lost political opportunities is endless. Carter looks like a veritable Lee Atwater at this point.I am a 28 years old doctor, mature and beautiful.and now I am seeking a good man who can give me real love , so i got a username sammyshine2002 on--a'ge'l'ov'e'r.c óm--.it is the first and best club for y'ounger women and old'er men, or older women and y'ounger men,to int'eract with each other. Maybe you wanna ch'eck 'it out or tell your friends!
James Solbakken | 8.8.11 @ 6:44PM
GFY!!!
you
Troll.
Mattled| 8.5.11 @ 8:27AM
If the Obama Govt had been shut down, the media would have been in overdrive inflating the fictitious "damage".
We have to damage the media, by name, by face and attack them relentlessly for their lies, bias and under- reporting ( think John Edwards).
It's the media folks-------it's the media.
We need offense.
rb| 8.6.11 @ 3:56PM
Mattled is correct. Should a group form to deal with this?
R Martin| 8.5.11 @ 8:38AM
“Barack Obama is doubtless a compassionate, caring man…”
Doubtless? I have some doubt. A compassionate, caring, virtuous man does not include Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright as friends and mentors. He does not work for and advance the cause of criminal enterprises such as ACORN. He does not hire senior advisors such as Anita Dunn and Van Jones and he does not make a partisan, bumbling hack like Joe Biden his vice president.
Mr. Macomber, your whole piece serves to disprove that assumption about Obama.
Michael Crites| 8.5.11 @ 11:12AM
Perhaps the author's sarcasm was missed ...
Bob Grant| 8.5.11 @ 8:56AM
Excellent article. That Peggy Noonan paragraph you included struck me when I read her article last week. It seemed apparent to me early in his presidency that he was no Bill Clinton - politically speaking. It's as though he expected the mainstream media to carry this water and handle those duties, all the while Obama can look above the fray.
He's simply horrible at politics. He has no knack for it what so because, as Clinton was keenly aware, a favorable media doesn't always carry your water and you sometimes had to do the dirty work yourself...think fast on your feet. Obama is poorly lacking in this department. As a matter of fact, he's shockingly inadequate and getting worse by the day. The list of political lost political opportunities is endless. Carter looks like a veritable Lee Atwater at this point.
W| 8.5.11 @ 11:27AM
Peggy Noonan endorsed, and I assume therefore, voted for Obama. Now she sees the wind changing, and being fashionable, criticizes Obama.
Jack Olson| 8.5.11 @ 9:12AM
I have read Greenberg's essay several times. He mainly argues that the Democrats's problem is distrust, that the voters regard their political platform as "just words" and that slogans like "reinventing government" as well as promises like "middle class tax cut" are empty. Since Greenberg worked for the Clinton-Gore campaign which promised these things, how could he fail to notice that once his candidates took office there was no middle class tax cut and government certainly did not get re-invented? Don't the voters think the Democrats' slogans are "just words" because that is what they are?
davelnaf| 8.5.11 @ 12:21PM
We’re all a little spooked that someone like Obama became POTUS, and we’re all thinking ‘if it happened once before it can happen again.’ But an Obama presidency would not have happened had it not been for a slew of circumstances and situations smiling down on him before the election. One of which was that the presidential template provided by the political process had been degraded enough to allow someone like him to become president. In other words, the electorate was softened up—or softened itself up—with the likes of Clinton and the two Bushes.
The silver lining in the dark Obama cloud is that we won’t be seeing another like him for a very long time, which is as cheerful a thought as can be salvaged from the ash heap that is the Obama presidency.
Oldefarte| 8.5.11 @ 12:23PM
SOME of us here get it and some do not, in that IT'S THE DEMOCRATS AND THIS PRESIDENT, STUPIDS!!!!!!!!!
Dai Alanye | 8.5.11 @ 2:22PM
"Barack Obama ... prevented a depression and saved global capitalism." /Stanley Greenberg
Sure, in the same way Lenin saved the Russian Empire.
Peggy Noonan, by the way, has been out of touch with the conservative movement--and possibly with reality--since the early nineties. There's no other way to put it: Republicans like she and David Brooks are doofuses.
Scott Tucker| 8.5.11 @ 8:24PM
Shawn, The Zebra's Focus Group is one of the best commentaries I've ever read! WELL DONE SIR!
FIY I blog online at yahoo.com as WHILE WE ARE STILL FREE with an eagle head avatar.
POST American| 8.5.11 @ 11:25PM
----'90's Show' Tavistock/Rockefeller
'Calm-place-n'--SEE' and SAP OP ---ALERT!---
Globalist directed, EUGENICS feuled,
psychopathic, God mocking, creation hating
---USURY remains ------THE------- issue
here, and worldwide.
REALLY
TRULY
jackc| 8.6.11 @ 11:40AM
Visionary economic leadership - not politicians obsessed with greed, titles, position and power - is the elixir that is needed to extract America out of the economic disaster, perpetrated by Obama and big government policies.
All policies over the last three years must be immediately erased.
Apple now has more money than the onerous Obama government, without printing bills or pontification.
Free markets are indispensable, in an economically-oriented world of the 21st century and beyond.