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.”
Had the stimulus lived up to its hype, Republicans would
have taken the political hit no matter how many experts they
brought into massage the message and we’d all still be listening to
the president yammer on about
how he put the car in “D” and pushed it out of the ditch while
Republicans drank their slurpees.
I’m quite sure Stanley Greenberg would have had the time
of his life drafting polling questions under that scenario. Alas,
what the poor man has been left to work with is something a
stable-hand might call truly shovel-ready.
“Barack Obama can’t catch a break from the American public
on the economy,” Greenburg writes, “even though he prevented a
depression and saved global capitalism.”
I guess we could charitably deem that assertion
questionable. For the sake of argument, though, let’s say
Greenberg hit the nail on the head. Well, then, a shame the
president didn’t set the barometer accordingly rather than tell us
“generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our
children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for
the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the
rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this
was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and
restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”
Call me a cynic, but nowhere in that (in)famous speech
does Obama say, “Also, just to keep expectations in check, let me
add that we will make no progress or move in the right direction
until the second term, but if it makes you feel any better I can
promise my presidential robot will sign a full extension of the
Patriot Act into law.”
I suspect this is why one of Greenberg’s remedies for
Democrats’ current flailing is to “detoxify” politics by passing
laws to “severely limit or bar individual and corporate campaign
contributions” and impose a forced regime of public campaign
financing.
It’s much easier to build frameworks, I imagine, when
there is a regulator in your corner rearing to chop down the ones
erected by the other side.
HERE’S THE THING: Barack Obama is doubtless a
compassionate, caring man — in fact, it is probably self-awareness
of his own virtuous intentions that allows the president to behave
so churlish and imperious while maintaining a clear conscience.
This is why we have a constraining Constitution — to paraphrase
Thomas Jefferson, whatever Obama’s most ardent fans or Woody
“Make Obama Dictator for a Few Years” Allen believe, we have
not found angels in the form of kings to govern us.
Whatever the intent of its designer — or perhaps in this
case, figurehead — you cannot instill reason or a soul
into technocracy.
Peggy Noonan stirred up a lot of mud
tossing the “loser” epithet at the president last week, but I
was more struck by this remarkable paragraph:
The secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn’t really very good
at politics, and he isn’t good at politics because he doesn’t
really get people. The other day a Republican political veteran
forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read
like politics as done by Martians. The “Analytics Department” is
looking for “predictive Modeling/Data Mining” specialists to join
the campaign’s “multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,” which
will use “predictive modeling” to anticipate the behavior of the
electorate. “We will analyze millions of interactions a day,
learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of
experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical
decisions.”
I ask you, dear reader, does that sound like a campaign simply
searching for the best way to honestly project its candidate’s
innate passions? Or does it sound like a political machine
determined to say and do whatever it takes to get to the next
zero-sum round where the framework will consist of fiat rule by
executive orders and rule-making delegation? For our own good, of
course.
