Jonathan Todd

In some ways American politics now reminds me of British politics six months or so before the last general election.

Let’s begin with the challenge posed to America’s elites by E. J. Dionne Jr in the Washington Post:

“A funny thing happened to the American ruling class: It stopped being concerned with the health of society as a whole and became almost entirely obsessed with money … The ruling class now devotes itself in large part to utterly self-involved lobbying. Its main passion has been to slash taxation on the wealthy, particularly on the financial class that has gained the most over the past 20 years. By winning much lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends, it’s done a heck of a job … And you wonder where the deficit came from. If the ruling class were as worried about the deficit as it claims to be, it would accept that the wealthiest people in society have a duty to pony up more for the very government whose police power and military protect them, their property and their wealth … Where are those who will now take up this banner?”

The answer, it would seem, is resident in the White House but on the road. The Post also reports:

“President Obama will hit the road this week and forcibly deliver his message that a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes on the rich is necessary to rein in the nation’s rocketing debt — a high-stakes effort to rally public support ahead of a series of contentious budget battles in Congress. From Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale to Facebook’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, Obama will make a series of campaign-style stops in an effort to block a Republican plan that would reduce the deficit by dramatically changing Medicare and reducing spending on education and other social programs.”

I don’t think this strategy is really such a big risk for two reasons.

First, the Republican plan from Paul Ryan is absurd. The more it is debated the less credible it will appear. As Robert J. Samuelson notes:

“He achieves big savings by assuming deep cuts to most of the federal government beyond Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Ultimately, it would shrink to almost nothing. That’s defense, food stamps, highways, federal courts, basic research . . . and much more.”

Second, the polling evidence suggests that the principles behind Obama’s approach to deficit closure are popular. The Post reports:

“Polls show that Obama has work to do on the deficit but that many Americans agree with his broad approach. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll in mid-March, 55 percent of respondents disapproved of his handling on the issue, with 39 percent approving. But, playing to Obama’s advantage, only about a third of Americans prefer a “cut only” approach to the deficit; nearly two in three say spending cuts and tax increases should be included.”

So in taking up the challenge set by Dionne Jr Obama is providing the tax element that two thirds of Americans want to see. However, Samuelson is right to point out that this element on its own is not enough:

“We won’t make much progress until (a) Democrats concede that spending control requires genuine cuts in Social Security and Medicare, which now total $1.3 trillion annually and represent 35 percent of federal outlays; and (b) Republicans acknowledge that, even after significant spending cuts, tax increases will be needed to balance the budget. Last week, there was little sign of either. President Obama rebuffed Social Security and Medicare cuts. Most Republicans held fast on taxes.”

The evident impracticality of the Ryan plan means that Obama can convincingly win this key debate. But to do so he has to be prepared to do what Gordon Brown was so unwilling to do six months or so out from the general election: talk about cuts.

Brown’s unwillingness to do this meant that the economic debate in the general election reduced to a debate about whether or not to begin deficit reduction in 2010 (Labour said “no”; the Tories said “yes”; and the Lib Dems said “no” in the campaign and “yes” in government). A wider debate about the deficit would have better suited Labour. It was apparent by the end of 2009 that significant cuts over the next parliament would be necessary. Gordon Brown could have presented himself as a sensitive surgeon to the public services Labour had cultivated, in contrast to the brutal destroyer that David Cameron would amount to (and is now proving to be).

The Post reports:

“The Treasury Department has concluded that the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling will be breached next month and will have to be raised by early July. Republicans want legislation to reduce government spending to be part of the vote to raise the debt limit; the Obama administration has said that further deficit reduction is needed but that the issues should not be joined.”

I wonder whether there is a case for Obama calling the bluff of Republicans on this and going where Brown feared to tread. By being prepared to introduce such legislation Obama would close off the Republican attack that he has no plan for closing the deficit. Once this attack is closed then scrutiny will increasingly fall upon the inadequate Ryan plan and support for the mix of tax increases and spending cuts proposed by Obama will translate into support for the President. Taking the bull by the horns in this way is the stuff of the radical centre and bold leadership. This translates into the colour purple on both sides of the Atlantic.

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.