If Only Obama Had Done the Things Obama Actually Did

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Matt Stoller, who has repeatedly dismissed the Obama administration as a failure, tells the New York Times that candidates who sound like Obama will face suspicion from voters. “We tried that and it didn’t work,” Stoller said. “And it’s pretty obvious to everybody now that it didn’t work.” By “everybody” he apparently means the 5 percent of Democrats who don’t approve of Obama.

It may well be the case that an influential progressive intellectual like Stoller, in observing his own milieu, believes more or less everybody in the Democratic party to consider Obama a failure. Barack Obama is a figure of near uniform approval among the Democratic voting base. Yet he is a subject of bitter contention among the progressive intelligentsia. The socialist left believes the Democratic party took a sharp right turn away from the New Deal in the 1970s, and has never returned. This premise, which is at best simplistic and at worst completely erroneous, is used to indict every Democratic president since that time for the identical charge of “neoliberal” betrayal of the party’s Rooseveltian creed.

A recent Washington Post op-ed by Lawrence Glickman helpfully illustrates what makes this accusation so maddening. Glickman charges all the post-Johnson Democratic presidents with a “surprising reluctance to celebrate Roosevelt or the New Deal.” This reluctance is supposedly in contrast with the enthusiastic pro-Roosevelt leanings of socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who of course represent the party’s return to the old, true faith.

It’s difficult to substantiate a charge like “reluctance to celebrate Roosevelt or the New Deal,” and Glickman doesn’t really try. But it’s worth pointing out that Obama has celebrated Roosevelt many times — including his 2008 convention speech (“We are the party of Roosevelt,”) the 2010 signing of his health care law, and his 2012 convention speech (“It will require common effort, shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one”). I’m not sure where Glickman gets the idea that Obama refused to draw on Roosevelt’s legacy, but it doesn’t seem to have any basis in reality.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/if-only-obama-had-done-the-things-obama-actually-did.html

[Farmer-Rick]

1. I wanted him to be more liberal

But he was 1000000000000% better than Trump.

And he's not a Traitor

And he didn't sell out the country for political gain.

And his wife and children are beautiful and classy and intelligent and admirable.

I could go on............

[zipplewrath]

2. Chait's mostly right

Green New Deal: Obama passed into law the largest green energy subsidies in history, as a portion of his stimulus bill that also happened to be as costly, on an inflation-adjusted basis, as the stimulus spending in the New Deal. Obama reinforced those reforms — which created a viable market for solar and wind power, electric cars, and battery storage out of virtually nothing — with a broad suite of regulations that drove a historic drop in carbon emissions.

I don't see how anyone can claim that Obama didn't do much here. CAFE standards, carbon restrictions, air quality standards, and more were instituted. His weakest areas were probably fracking and oil drilling and mostly that's a case of not going as far in reversing these activities as the green coalitions wanted him. And I don't really think of FDR and conservation unless one is talking about the CCC.

Medicare for All: Obama did not successfully institute single-payer health insurance for all Americans. But, then neither did New Deal Democrats Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson. What Obama did pull off, after all those previous Democrats proved unable to add health insurance to the welfare state, was a historic expansion in coverage, through a combination of Medicaid and new subsidized and regulated markets.

This is about the only complaint listed with any legitimacy at all. Obama declared that single payer "wouldn't work" in the US, which is way more than any of those predecessors did. He kept the advocates out of the process entirely. And he ultimately caved on the public option. And it was health insurance reform, not health care reform. Strangely, it probably helped fewer people than Medicare Part D, which all the democrats voted against. Alternately, it may have helped the MOST needy, as compared to Part D.

Progressive taxation: Obama cut taxes for the bottom income brackets and raised it for the top. The result was a direct transfer of income from top to bottom (see below).

This was a mixed bag. He cut taxes for the lowest household incomes, something for which he never got credit. He raised taxes on the highest incomes, something for which the right would never forgive him. He did leave in place the Bush tax cuts for folks in the upper middle class ($250K - 450?) for which many on the left wouldn't forgive.

Corporate regulation: Obama passed the Dodd-Frank reforms, the first major curtailment of the financial industry since Roosevelt’s time. His administration created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, rolled back private control of college loans, created net neutrality, cracked down on for-profit colleges, and beefed up workplace safety regulation and enforcement, among other reforms.

Again, I think he's mostly right here. Dodd-Frank really wasn't a return to FDR type reforms, but they were reforms. And he did crack down on the whole student loan fiasco. He isn't responsible for when congress made college loans exempt from bankruptcy.

I can't get to Glickman's Washington Post op-ed because it's behind a paywall. So I can't tell if these are all of Glickmans' points, or merely the ones Jonathan Chait chose to focus upon. I am suspicious because the lists tend to be longer than this. Strangely, when waxing nostalgic for FDR people tend to forget his militarization policies and his foreign policy, much of which Obama could be thought of as to the "left".

[MyOwnPeace]

3. But consider,

he was "working" with the guy that said, "Our only job is to be sure that he is a 1-term president."
Yep, that was McTurtle, the same guy that continues to work to screw up our country today!

[Proud Liberal Dem]

5. +1

[Proud Liberal Dem]

4. "Failure"?

He did a LOT in his first two years in office with a Democratic Congress and kept the country from falling into the abyss economically. And things were mostly peaceful and government was stable and staffed with actual competent people and we didn't suffer any major disasters. Much of what he didn't- or couldn't accomplish- had more to do with endless Republican Tea Party obstructionism in Congress and the Courts than what he actually might have supported/enacted if he had had more bipartisan cooperation from Congress. Perfect? No. Better than what came before and after? That's a resounding hell yes! Also, we can't keep electing Presidents and then being upset that they are failing to deliver certain policy goals when the obstruction party keeps getting (re-)elected to Congress over and over again. President Obama's biggest sin, at least in the eyes of many people, is that he was a pragmatist/realist who came to understand the truth that only certain things can get done so fast and that things like Medicare For All was likely going to crash and burn and opted for more "conservative" legislation that would at least move the ball down the field. If and when the progressive utopia some people are wishing for comes, it will be a gradual process, not an overnight one.

[MyOwnPeace]

6. And also remember...........

that even in those first 2 years he had to battle "Blue Dog Democrats" - "conservative" democrats who were democrats in name only.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

7. That too

They wanted to make sure that everybody knew that they didn't "work for him"- not that it helped most of them much in 2010

[JCanete]

8. Yeah, my complaints fall more along the lines of Moore's, who rightly says, though with a heavy

heart, that inspite of his complaints, Obama is also the best President we've had in many of our lifetimes. That I entirely agree with. That's the problem with the article's claim that only 5% of the party disapprove of Obama. I would never mark on a poll that I disapproved of Obama's Presidency. I still have criticisms.

As to our sharp turn to the right, I'm sorry, on economic issues we have moved to the right of Johnson and Carter. We've made some corrections on the way, but where was the Democratic party before the Wall Street collapse? Who was sounding the alarm? Dodd Frank as a response to a failure that was forseen by those actually paying attention, is not something worthy of a gold star for Democrats. Also, how weak has our sauce been regarding unions for a long time now? We've watched them get gutted, and mostly, quietly.

Yes, the incremental ACA was at least something. The nation was ripe for something better though. It was members of OUR party that held that back. Not sure how much blame to put on Obama for that though. It was the initial attempt at compromise with the GOP (and again, infuriatingly, with those in our own party, and those who our party leadership had supported inspite of being turncoats).

Obama is a compassionate man, and his executive orders show that. He also did not have to go on record while in office, that it was time Gay Marriage was recognized as a right.

As to his use of the bully pulpit, I'd say he was successful using it to promote a kinder, more loving American vision, but I wouldn't say he used it effectively to promote policy.

As the adult in the room, he, like Democrats in the past when they've been in charge, cleaned up the GOP financial mess left behind. Hardly any legislation was passed to prevent this mess from happening in the future, regarding Wall Street, and nobody was held accountable, but we corrected course back to a stable economy making the millionaires and billionaires their money.

As to promoting progressive policy, we got the ACA. I think we should have gotten more, but our own party members stood in the way. Whether or not, had Obama turned the screws, we could have gotten more, is hard to say, since Obama, as our first black President, had all kinds of unique challenges regarding his demeanor, etc. and democrats already ran away from the ACA right after they passed it on into their 2010 and 2012 losses. But then, they did that anyway. So perhaps he should have attempted to pressure them into something better that would have been more unimpeachable in its results.

Obama's and the rest of our side's unwillingness to champion the ACA was certainly not a succesful approach to bolstering it and taking credit for the vast improvement over our previous situation, on the level of PR. The narrative was basically ceded to our corporate news media and the right.

Also, his attempt to work across the aisle by making massive overtures, was at first glance a clever attempt at being so reasonable that the GOP would be shamed into getting on board. But this course should have been corrected immediately when it was made clear that what it did was give the GOP nothing to fear from being the party of no. The worst case scenario for them became the watered down compromise bill. Instead, how long did it take Obama and team to realize that he needed to go it alone on some of these issues? His last few years in office?

That said, he was far from a failure. Stoller's premise would have to be that Obama wanted what the leftmost progressives want, and I don't believe that to be true. For all of the ways Obama inspired me, he rarely did so on policy. Aside from the ACA, when it comes to economic issues and those of the social safety-net, I'd say he was slightly to the left of the status quo(which is still better than most "viable" alternatives).

[Blue_Tires]

9. This is why anyone who casually tosses around "neoliberal"

I just block automatically..