Jonathan Todd

I called upon President Obama to get a grip the other day. I don’t make such calls lightly and nor, I am sure, does Clive Crook. But Mr Crook also made such a call in the FT today when he wrote:

“When race came to the fore in his presidential campaign, in the form of the Jeremiah Wright scandal, he responded brilliantly, with a fine unifying speech that challenged the country to be calm, sober and enlightened. The mosque debate was a moment for a speech of that kind.

“Whether or not he made the case for the project to go ahead – as, on balance, I think he should – he could have reminded the country of its common purposes, he could have sought to unify, he could have insisted on tolerance and understanding on both sides. That was the Barack Obama the country elected. Where did he go?”

This is surely a question to ponder as we reflect upon the essential features of the Cordoba Centre as Charlie Brooker described them in the Guardian yesterday:

“When I heard about it – in passing, in a soundbite – I figured it was a US example of the sort of inanely confrontational fantasy scheme Anjem Choudary might issue a press release about if he fancied winding up the tabloids for the 900th time this year. I was wrong. The “Ground Zero mosque” is a genuine proposal, but it’s slightly less provocative than its critics’ nickname makes it sound. For one thing, it’s not at Ground Zero. Also, it isn’t a mosque.

“Wait, it gets duller. It’s not being built by extremists either. Cordoba House, as it’s known, is a proposed Islamic cultural centre, which, in addition to a prayer room, will include a basketball court, restaurant, and swimming pool. Its aim is to improve inter-faith relations. It’ll probably also have comfy chairs and people who smile at you when you walk in, the monsters.”

“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.”

What?

That is surely the sound of a President splitting hairs to such an extent as to abdicate leadership. While the Economist’s chronicling of the American left’s despondency with Barack Obama says as much about the lack of backbone and realism on the part of the American left as it does about Obama, this backbone would be significantly fortified by genuine leadership from Obama. 

He seemed to show this leadership when he initially appeared to endorse the plans for the Cordoba Centre in NYC with words which Alex Massie accurately described as his ”best words in god knows how long”. Yet he quickly rowed back from this act of principled leadership with the words I quoted at the start of this blog.

The likes of Harry Reid and Howard Dean may have shamefully betrayed the best American instincts in voicing opposition to the Centre. But Obama should be bigger and better than that.

If ‘yes, we can’ means anything it should mean, at least, ’yes, we can do things in a different way from right-wing Republicans’. I’ve consistently argued that Obama should reach across the aisle to form a radical centre with reform-minded Republicans and these Republicans have consistently proved themselves conspicuous by their non-existence. Obama’s instinct is invariably to seek compromise and to split the difference and such instincts on the part of the President are a precondition of America finding a radical centre. But non-Democrats being willing to play ball with Obama is also a precondition of a radical centre and this precondition has not been satisfied. The right response to this is not equivocation but for the President to draw some lines in the sand.

And a line in the sand should have been drawn over the Cordoba Centre.

Obama should have been clear that the aim of Al-Qaeda is to divide Americans against Americans; to make American Muslims be Muslims first and Americans second. It is astonishing that the likes of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin have opposed the Centre with logic – I use the term loosely – consistent with that of Al-Qaeda. America, obviously, needs to rise above such logic and demonstrate that it embodies and will continue to embody virtues of plurality, tolerance and diversity. This is why the Cordoba Centre matters. If it doesn’t go ahead, America will have compromised on and been seen to have compromised on its most precious values.

America is a beautiful idea as much as it is a wonderful country. Just as Al-Qaeda is an appalling idea as much as it is an organised terrorist network. If Obama can’t spell out and stand his ground on the relevance of the Cordoba Centre to this, he’ll only have himself to blame if the Democrats find themselves lacking in activists in November. Ok, some Republicans will be even less likely to his friend but they don’t want to his friend anyways and Obama should stop pretending that they do. Instead, he should concentrate, like Harvey Milk said, on giving his supporters some hope. This doesn’t mean stopping being pragmatic; stopping cutting deals with Congress where they have to be cut, as they had to be on health care.

But it does mean clearly and unambiguously articulating your most important beliefs, even if these beliefs may not be shared by everyone. In fact, it is even more important when they are not shared by everyone. Obama seemed to promise all things to all people when he became President, which always made his presidency a hostage to fortune, but the very least that we could expect him to be was more sane and humane than the administration that went before him and Republicans of that vintage. This demands that he sees the Cordoba Centre for what it is – everything that is best about America – and says so very loudly and clearly. Everyone who cares about all that is best about America should hope that he is capable of this.

Anthony Painter has recently written about movement politics for Progress. He recounts how “equal voting rights and civil rights”, the fruits of the civil rights movement, ”changed America. But it was the movement that followed it and, in part, was a reaction to it, that was America’s most successful ‘movement for change.’ That was the audacious and many headed conservative movement. If the civil rights movement was driven by a sense of moral injustice, the conservative movement was motivated by a sense of moral outrage.”

Painter doesn’t, however, draw the more contemporary parallel: the movement that powered Barack Obama into the White House was driven by a sense of moral injustice, while the Tea Party movement, the most visceral counter reaction to this victory, is motivated by a sense of moral outrage. They are outraged with the ‘socialism’ of Obama-care, outraged with the free market perversion that is the bank bailouts, outraged with the extension of the big government leviathan that has been the fiscal stimulus, outraged by illegal immigration, outraged with plans to build a Mosque near Ground Zero and outraged by the indifference of Washington DC to all of this. They want their country back.

But who took their country from them?

Some fusion between socialists and al-Qaeda, which may very well be personified by Obama. His middle name is Hussein, after all. Sarah Palin trades on the same suspicions that the name Hussein arouses when she describes the proposed Cordoba Centre in NYC as the ’9/11 Mosque’. “Of course”, as Alex Massie sarcastically points out, ”it’s planned as a tribute to al-Qaeda and of course it’s perfectly reasonable to suppose that all muslims are really just the same and we know what that means don’t we?”

The main contribution of Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, to the debate on the Cordoba Centre has been to declare, ”there should be no mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia”. As the Economist points out, “to Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and an American second. Al-Qaeda would doubtless concur.”

Sarah Palin’s contribution to this debate has been more illiterate, just as offensive and has passed the bumper sticker test: her argument can be condensed into the space available on a bumper sticker. And, as certain as night follows day, the bumper stickers have arrived. And the t-shirts. They are a celebration of a misspelling in that they build on Palin’s infamous ‘refudiate’ tweet to attack Obama and socialism.

It is striking both how easily they conflate a dispute about a Mosque with Obama and socialism and how willing they are to proclaim, literally as a badge of honour, Palin’s spelling error. This proclamation speaks to the anti-intellectual fire in the bellies of many of Palin’s followers; many of whom make up the Tea Party movement. What they want, as Palin puts it, “is a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor lecturing us from a lectern”.

Palin has an ability to tap into a raw nerve that many middle and working class Americans seem to have about being ‘talked down to’ by a liberal, east-coast elite. This raw nerve makes her straight-talking the stuff of authenticity and empathy. Her misspelling, and the condescending response to it, has deepened this emotional connection between her and her followers. “She validates me and she validates my life”, as I recall one of her followers once telling a TV camera. No constitutional law professor could ever provide such validation.

Now, it’s all too easy to look at this and sneer about people clinging to their guns and their bibles. Obama once seemed to do exactly this. However, reading this fantastic reportage from the FT makes me wonder whether something else is going on.

“Mention middle-class America and most foreigners envision something timeless and manicured, from The Brady Bunch, say, or Desperate Housewives in which teenagers drive to school in sports cars and the girls are always cheerleading. This might approximate how some in the top 10 per cent live. The rest live like the Freemans. Or worse.”

The Freemans are a family in Minneapolis that the article very movingly describes.

“Last year the bank tried to repossess the Freemans’ home even though they were only three months in arrears. Their son, Andy, was recently knocked off his mother’s health insurance and only painfully reinstated for a large fee. And, much like the boarded-up houses that signal America’s epidemic of foreclosures, the drug dealings and shootings that were once remote from their neighbourhood are edging ever closer, a block at a time.”

There are some harsh economic realities underlying the position that the Freemans’ find themselves in.

“The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the ­multiple is above 300.”

Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, reflected upon the consequences of this economic position by telling the FT:

“I have this gnawing feeling about the future of America. When people lose the sense of optimism, things tend to get more volatile. The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to ­orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years … To be pessimistic about the future is so new for Americans and so strikingly un-American.”

As the swings from the civil rights to the conservative movements and from the Obama to the Tea Party movements attest, movements are both part of and create the weather of American politics. However, perhaps, one doesn’t have to be a fully signed up Marxist to see these movements as being in some senses superstructures determined by the economic base. The Tea Party seems as much about the economic exasperation of the anxious middle as about guns and bibles. Still, it is testimony to the enduring power of movements and conservatism in America. As the likes of Palin fire fear of the other – be that ‘socialists’, Muslims, illegal immigrants or anything or anyone who isn’t carrying a gun and a bible – and China’s rise heralds an era of contested modernity, it’s hard not to share Spence’s concerns that the Tea Party are a harbinger of more angry and troubled times in America.

Let’s hope that enlightened government from Obama can avert this. But no matter how intelligent Obama’s policies may be, they are unlikely to resonate unless the arguments for them can be summarised on a bumper sticker.

My Father-in-law, Walter Urbanek, has recieved a letter from John Kerry. My Father-in-law isn’t a top level politician. (Though, he was school friends with Peter Welch). It is a letter that asks him to donate to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

Kerry begins:

“I have never seen anything like this: as President Obama works to dig us out of a deep hole and build our country back up, the Republicans in Washington at the highest levels have adopted an entirely different goal: force his failure. It disgusts me every time I see it.”

He later argues:

“Since the Democrats lost the super-majority, Republicans have even more power to obstruct every initiative President Obama puts forward, and they’ve shown an unyielding willingness to continue to do just that. Republicans said no to health care reform. They said no to regulating the big banks whose recklessness nearly sank our economy. They said no to the economic stimulus bill that has created or saved over two million jobs and provided immediate tax relief to 95 percent of working Americans.”

Republican senators have been no more co-operative with Democrats on the legislative response to the BP oil spill. “You’ve got a situation where the Democrats control both houses of Congress as well as the White House, and even then, they’re finding it extremely difficult to move forward,” Jerry Taylor, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the New York Times.

“They figure”, claims Kerry’s letter, “if they can kill a few more bills, it’s smooth sailing in November, Democrats will fall and President Obama will fail.” They expect voters to say to Democrats “you’re fired”, as Sarah Palin encourages a Tea Party audience in the video below. (Incidentally, Palin refers to bumper stickers in this speech, prompting people to approach drivers with Obama bumper stickers and say, “how is that hopey changey thing working out for you?”) 

But will voters do this?

If they do, it will be taken as a rejection of agenda of change that Obama and the Democrats have tried to take forward. However, in the absence of a super-majority, it can be very difficult for a party to achieve what it wants to achieve even when in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, especially if the other party makes a determined and co-ordinated effort to stop them, which is what the Republicans have done.

Their strategy would blow-up in the Republicans’ faces if the American people, instead of saying “you’re fired”, say “the Republicans have failed to act in the constructive and bipartisan spirit that our political system is based upon. As a direct consequence, major issues, such as immigration and climate change, have not been acted upon. We cannot reward such irresponsible behaviour and will, therefore, be voting Democrat.” 

This seems the fundamental question at the heart of November’s mid-terms. The deeper structural questions are how broken and what can be done to fix a politics that is institutionally based upon bipartisanship but whose parties, especially the Republicans, have abandoned bipartisanship. Essentially, as Jonathan Chait has asked, is America ungovernable? This structural question won’t be answered by November but we will know a lot more about whether America still wants to stick with the change agenda that swept Obama into the White House.

I had the piece below published on Labour Uncut on 16 June 2010:

The budget response is the great set-piece political challenge. Your opponent has an age to prepare and all the resources of treasury. You stand up when they sit down. By the time you sit down, the political context is virtually set, not least because your opponent’s spinners have tried to fix this. Given the centrality of economics to present politics, it is a bigger challenge than ever. Harriet Harman must rise to this as our acting leader.  Which transience of tenure, of itself, reduces her potential agility compared with a permanent leader. You have to feel for her. Here are a few, hopefully helpful, suggestions.

The first task is to distinguish pragmatic economics from small-state ideology. As the need for deficit management is widely acknowledged, pragmatism is required, but only Thatcherites see this crisis as an opportunity for ideological resurgence.

The second task is to oppose the manifestations of this ideology, while the third is to provide a coherent alternative economic prospectus. This prospectus must contain tax increases and spending cuts, but the mix should reflect a very different ideology from that supported by Tory MPs agitating for a budget akin to the Thatcherite “cold shower” of the 1981 budget. Overarching all of this is the need to gain an audience in a media climate favourable to the coalition.

These steps are crucial to Labour’s hopes of returning to government. However, while this budget intends to frame public finances over the full parliament, Labour’s navigation of these steps will evolve. Harman cannot provide a definitive take. This isn’t just because events – for example, a double dip recession; the risk of which is increased by Osborne’s cutting – could overtake whatever fiscal consolidation plan Osborne has. It is also because the necessary Labour policies will only emerge under new leadership.

David Miliband last week produced some neat ideas: mansion tax on £2m homes (ok, but why not simply a land tax?); extending the bankers’ bonus tax (fine, while it works – evasion this year was surprisingly low and the tax take, therefore, unexpectedly high, which is unlikely to persist); and ending the tax subsidy to private schools (great for Croslandites like me, but Friday’s “Miliband’s class war” editorial in the Evening Standard indicates that it won’t be a completely easy sell).

Ed Balls has played the VAT card, stressing its regressive nature. However, the coalition probably sees this coming and will try to protect those who are on low incomes through changes to income tax – and in so doing, protect themselves from Balls’ attack. Balls isn’t wrong to be assertive on VAT, but our VAT-based attacks should acknowledge the full consequences of the coalition’s tax changes or we will appear partial.

While I expect any VAT increase to, rightly, produce Harman fireworks, as acting leader she has limited ability to pick up the good ideas that the leadership contest is generating and craft them into a response redolent of Labour philosophy. Perhaps a permanent leader would have already made a better fist of the case that, rather than scrapping the child trust fund, it would be fairer to reduce tax relief on ISAs, say. Sadly, we can expect many occasions today when it would be preferable to have someone at the dispatch box able to say: “you wouldn’t need to do X if you had done Y”, where, to paraphrase J K Galbraith, X equals something disastrous done by the coalition (e.g. scrapping the child trust fund) and Y equals something unpalatable that Labour would have done instead (e.g. reducing tax relief on ISAs). The coalition knows this and will try to take advantage.

However, disastrous things have already been done and popular protest has been underwhelming. Since the election of President Obama, possibly the biggest change to the American political landscape has been the emergence of the tea party movement. This has been fantastically effective at mobilising grass-roots opposition to Obama’s “big government”. Labour leadership contenders grasp towards elements of Obama’s movement politics. But, this is already slightly old-hat. Alternatively, they could plant more seeds for the emergence of a leftist equivalent to the tea party movement to rally against injustices like the abolition of the child trust fund.

Robin Cook once said that millions of people think that they benefit from tax credits due to obscure machinations of the inland revenue, not because of Labour decisions. A leftist equivalent to the tea party movement – building on campaigns like don’t judge my family – would leave people in no doubt as to which politicians are responsible for reversing popular Labour policies.

The utility of such a movement is underlined by how quickly media coverage of the deficit has shifted since the General Election. Then, the main focus was when to start cutting and the £6bn at issue is the tip of the iceberg to come. We rightly conceded, during the election campaign, the need to address the deficit over this parliament, but were also right to argue that this job shouldn’t begin this year, as to do so would imperil a fragile recovery. Harman should repeat these points in her budget response, but she shouldn’t expect much media kudos for them. Coverage has moved on, swallowing the coalition’s line that cuts had to come this year, with too few tears shed for the child trust fund and the future jobs fund. The outrage that these cuts merit won’t come from the media, but should come from a mobilised grassroots movement.

Another thing illustrated by the speed with which debate has moved on since the General Election is the thin, but real, distinction between economics and ideology. Were the cuts this year pragmatic or Thatcherite? Certainly the micro consequences – the loss of the child trust fund and the future jobs fund – should be resisted. But lots of economists who would balk at being labelled Thatcherite, including the Labour peer Lord Desai, indicated that cuts this year should be part of a pragmatic deficit response. Economists do not speak as one and it’s usually possible to find one who buttresses your ideology.

The easy course is to seek out this economist and use their arguments to provide a veneer of protection for ideological positions. However, like most veneers, cracks can easily be exposed. The tell-tale sign of this tactic is argumentation predicated upon less than credible claims. For example, the coalition’s habitual canard that their austerity programme is needed to stop us turning into Greece. Harman should read Rachel Reeves on why their scaremongering is ideological motivated. But, just as the coalition are grasping towards economic arguments that allow them to retreat to their Thatcherite comfort zone, so, too, there are economists who encourage Labour to remain in our ideological comfort zone.

Their charms should be resisted by Harman, who should instead be carefully studying last week’s report by the office of budget responsibility (OBR). It showed that the economy is in stronger shape than the coalition’s apocalyptic talk implies. Consequently, if Osborne takes actions as dramatic as this talk suggests, then, he will have defaulted to Thatcherite instincts. If Harman can use the OBR’s report to expose this, she will have done a great job. The other things that we need – a full Labour plan for deficit management and growth; a left-ist movement to resist the coalition’s extremes – are for further down the line; hopefully, to be crafted and inspired by our next leader. But an important task can be accomplished today: to damn Osborne’s fiscal trajectory as regressive, ideological and Thatcherite.