Charles Krauthammer, a political commentator for America’s Fox News channel, generally spouts off forgettable Republican Party-line homilies. Last March, however, during the debate over President Obama’s health care legislation, Krauthammer came up with a pithy one-liner that sums up Obama’s failures and explains the Republican resurgence in last November’s congressional elections. “President Obama is a visionary,” he said, “not a leader.”
Obama was elected on a wave of revulsion against Wall Street putrefaction and two rudderless wars. Not since 1932 had an American president scored such a mandate for reform. His party controlled Congress and even enjoyed a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate. The corporate forces that opposed him were in disarray after the 2008 financial meltdown. Obama’s vaguely-expressed vision of an America built upon a new base of clean, renewable energy, next-generation technology, and a soft-spoken foreign policy seemed within reach. Let the apostles of honest government sweep away the lobbyist agendas of old! Let the industrial and financial dinosaurs from the twentieth century perish in the mess they made, and ring in the new!
Of course, nothing of the sort happened. The first beneficiaries of the trillion-dollar economic stimulus package were the Wall Street geniuses who caused the meltdown; they immediately put the money to good use by granting themselves seven-figure bonuses. The second beneficiaries were the Detroit automakers who, after a brief period of lip-service to the idea of electric cars, have now staked their recovery on sales of high-margin SUVs and minivans. Most of the rest of the package has been spent on restoring the existing industrial and transportation infrastructure, rather than on converting it to anything new or sustainable. In other words, a trillion dollars has been spent on rebuilding the old machine, design flaws and all.
In governance, too, nothing much has changed except the party labels on the bureaucrats’ stationery. Lobbyists had a banner year in 2010, thanks largely to health care reform. That law, Obama’s single legislative victory despite his Senate supermajority, has turned out to be an unworkably complex, 2000-page tome of regulations and commissions that seek to curb some of the health industry’s more egregious abuses, such as insurance companies that cancel people’s policies when they get sick. Like the economic stimulus package, it tries to patch up an entrenched system instead of redesigning it. America’s health care network soaks up three times as much of the nation’s GDP as that of any other industrialised country, with lower-than-average results in terms of life expectancy and disease survival rates. The new law does almost nothing to address this cavernous inefficiency.
One could argue (and many did) that politics is the art of the practical, and Obama was just doing what he could. No one could take on the combined might of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical cartels and the military-industrial complex and expect to win, could they? Yet this is exactly what the voters of 2008 expected him to do, based on his own campaign promises. Were they really unreasonable expectations? Look at Wall Street, for example. Its executives rewarded Obama’s bailout by generously funding the Republican opposition in the 2010 elections. To avoid that humiliation, all the president had to do was to let the suits sink in their own quagmire, and use the trillion dollars to set up new investment houses whose charters would direct them to earn their money through actual investments (as opposed to arbitrage games and derivatives packaging).
Or look at Detroit. Dozens of new automotive companies have formed around technical wizards, proposing everything from hydrogen fuel-cell engines to autopilot navigation systems to hot-swap batteries for electric cars. If the money that was poured into General Motors had instead been divided among ten of these companies, and just one of them succeeded, the American automobile industry would once again lead the world – even if General Motors was in the corporate graveyard.
In summary, the economic crisis of 2008 presented Obama with an opportunity to remake America, and that opportunity was wasted.
It’s not hard to see why. President Obama, as Mr Krauthammer pointed out, is not a leader; that means the role of leadership has devolved onto the Democratic Party leaders in Congress. These august gentlemen (and a few ladies, like Nancy Pelosi) are uniformly focussed on one objective, which is the next election, never more than two years away. Imagine asking John Dingell, a Democratic Congressman from Detroit, to support policies that, at least temporarily, would have thrown 100,000 General Motors employees out of work. Imagine asking Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, to antagonise that state’s drug industry. Never mind the long-term benefits of such policies, or the fact that neither of those industries can long sustain their present structures anyway; if the voters are upset at the next election, that’s all that matters. Therefore, nothing gets done that would rock the boat.
So the hopes for change that the 2008 voters invested in Barack Obama – what Sarah Palin has derided as “that hopey-changey thing” – have turned sour. Obama was not capable of leading the charge, Congress was not willing to do so, and it is now too late.
Or is it? By any rational analysis, the Obama revolution is over, and we lost; the old guard is back in the saddle. But there is one viewpoint that remains immune to rational analysis: it is called American exceptionalism.
According to American exceptionalism, God has chosen America to be His beacon to the world. The laws of history, the rise, prosperity, corruption and fall of civilisations and empires, do not apply to America; therefore there is nothing to learn from the study of history or of other countries. Like the Hebrews of the Old Testament, America experiences God’s glory or God’s wrath directly, depending upon how loyally its people worship Him; but God never abandons His chosen people. All it takes to restore America’s economic and military might is a religious revival.
American exceptionalism has always been a good sell for a politician. Obama himself has spoken positively of it. Most Americans, however rational they might think themselves, or how left-wing or atheistic their viewpoints, have a patriotic weakness for it. But the bedrock of exceptionalism is found in the religious right wing. It is therefore no surprise that the reaction against Obama’s agenda started with the religious right. To them, Obama’s failure was a foregone conclusion – not because he was a poor leader, or because he failed to attack the roots of the nation’s problems, but because his program did not include prayer.
Within weeks of Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, the religious right joined forces with the frightened and weakened industrial and financial oligarchy to form what has been dubbed the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party protests began from a website owned by a stockbroker named Karl Denninger, who mistakenly believed that the Wall Street bailout would result in a federal takeover of the banking system. Using viral marketing tactics, Denninger’s website spread the protest against Obama’s “Godless socialism” through the Christian right. Fox News, the most conservative media outlet in the United States, caught wind of the Tea Party movement and gave it unlimited free publicity. Soon the Tea Party was being funded by oil billionaires such as the Koch brothers, who saw it as a means to frustrate efforts to limit their greenhouse emissions. It also attracted racists, homophobes, gun-control opponents, warmongers calling for an attack on Iran, and those who were convinced Obama was a closet Muslim who wanted Al Qaeda to win. Everyone in the movement had their own agenda, but they all shared a fear that the Obama administration might actually accomplish something.
As we have seen, they needn’t have worried. The Tea Party should therefore have withered away, its concerns unfounded, its sacred cows unthreatened. Yet as the contrast grew between an aimless government and an energised Tea Party movement, a strange thing happened. The legions of angry voters who had sent Obama, a liberal, to the White House in 2008, found themselves drawn to the conservative Tea Party in 2009. Its dynamic seemed so much like the early days of the Obama campaign, with its mass rallies of plain good-neighbour folks who were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. If Obama had betrayed their hope for change, maybe the Tea Party was worth a try.
The Republican Party correctly saw this development as a golden opportunity. If they could posture their candidates as Tea Party supporters, instead of the Bush-era hacks that they mostly were, they would be able to ride the movement back to power. It largely worked: In the 2010 elections, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and came within three slots of taking the Senate as well. Perhaps more importantly, they far outpaced the Democrats in the state governorships and legislatures that will control the upcoming electoral redistricting based on the 2010 census figures. This means they will tailor the electoral districts to maximise Republican gains for the rest of this decade.
So the Republicans are strutting proudly, but the Tea Party has now peaked. The established Republican Party, with its genetic bias towards big business, has no intention of changing anything, except to try to reverse the few positive accomplishments of Obama’s first two years. Wall Street, Detroit, and the whole American medicine show will be allowed, even encouraged, to return to their short-sighted ways. Sustainable economy? Who needs it, when all things are possible with prayer. Open government? Hey, we’re at war, remember. The Tea Party supporters, apart from the movement’s hardcore founders, will drift away as quickly as they abandoned Obama, one more revolution smothered in the dusty corridors of Washington.
Obama might even get re-elected in 2012, depending on which dunce the Republicans put up against him. But he will never again enjoy the constellation of opportunity that he had two years ago. That chance comes perhaps once a century, and Barack Obama’s mark in history will be that he blew it.
Waiheke Island, January 2011
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Copyright © 2011 T. Mark James
This article first
appeared in the Gulf
News,
Waiheke Island, New Zealand, on 6 January 2011.