Obama on Trump and the Radical Republicans, 2018

Barack Obama's speech this past Friday was an important one, Former President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the ‘state of our democracy’ 09/07/2018 (Obama's speech begins around 8:04 in this video):

USA Today provides the full transcript (Read transcript of former President Obama's speech, blasting President Trump 09/07/2018)

It's an important speech because he is the former President and because he is such a widely respected figure within the Democratic Party and beyond. And because he explicitly condemns Trump and today's Republican Party for what they are, radical threats to liberal democracy. This struck me as an especially important clarifying moment:

We're supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we're sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.

How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.

This was also an important, quotable statement, "over the past few decades, the politics of division, of resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party."

And he elaborated:

This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outsized influence over our politics; systemically attacked voting rights to make it harder for the young people, the minorities, and the poor to vote.

Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could. Cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans. Embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi, or my birth certificate.

Rejected science, rejected facts on things like climate change. Embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America's debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic President. None of this is conservative. I don't mean to pretend I'm channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that's not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party.

It's not conservative. It sure isn't normal. It's radical. It's a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters, even when it hurts the country. It's a vision that says the few who can afford a high-priced lobbyist and unlimited campaign contributions set the agenda. And over the past two years, this vision is now nearing its logical conclusion.

And, yes, it's in the video and the transcript:

The point [George] Washington made, the point that is essential to American democracy, is that in a government of and by and for the people, there should be no permanent ruling class. [my emphasis]

Don't expect to hear that phrase "ruling class" from Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer! Obama even said that NOT having such a "permanent ruling class" is "essential to American democracy."

I'm also going to take a deep breath here and say I like Obama's image of American history. If you were discussing it with him in an academic forum, he would probably agree that what he is doing in a speech like that is presenting a narrative of American history that highlights the development of democracy and human rights.

I wish I could say that was a cliche narrative. But these days, it's not really. Because the Democratic Party is unwilling to defend its own Democratic (and democratic) symbolism prior to 1860. And on the left and center-left, the Whig narrative in which monarchist Alexander Hamilton and plutoratic-minded John Quincy Adams are the heroes of democracy has become dominant at the expense of other democratic traditions in early and antebellum American history.

That is partially because the left and center-left are very aware of the disgraceful histories of slavery and the Indian Wars, and that's a good and necessary thing. As time pushes forward, it becomes harder for Americans to look at the pre-Civil War United States and see something familiar. And most Democrats are too timid to express any admiration for the guerrilla fighter ("terrorist!") John Brown, who is the only well-known white public figure prior to the Civil War who had attitudes toward equal rights for blacks and women that were pretty much like those considered democratic norms now.

But Obama described the development of democracy by holding up the slave-owner and Indian-fighter George Washington as quoted above as an example of responsible democratic governance and leadership and an opponent of a "ruling class". And quoted the slaveowner and Indian-fighter Thomas Jefferson (though not by name) in the Delaration of Independence, invoking the American Revolution as an important democratic development that should still inform and and inspire defenders of democracy today.

This is a sensible way of looking at democratic history, both in terms of political symbolism and historical analysis. And it's the kind of framing that the Democratic Party needs to use on a wider scale. Leaving the symbolism of the Revolution and the Constitution to be mangled by the Republicans is just nuts. (Trump's thing about Andrew Jackson being a prime example.)

As Charlie Pierce wrote of the speech in his appreciative analysis of it, "Yes, toward the end he got back into how there are people of good will on both sides who are drowned out by the noise of our politics. Low, high, you know the spiel." And he explained, "He could say nothing else because that hope is his entire political raison d'être. This is the way it is with Barack Obama."

This doesn't mean that I didn't have to resist the urge to bite my arm several times listening the long speech.

Because Obama steps on his own better messages when he starts singing the praise of Bipartisanship and "common ground". Even though he included in this speech an excellent description of the real existing Republican Party's version of the kind of bipartisanship they will accept:

And that doesn't mean, by the way, abandoning our principles or caving to bad policy in the interests of maintaining some phony version of "civility." That seems to be, by the way, the definition of civility offered by too many Republicans: We will be polite as long as we get a hundred percent of what we want and you don't call us out on the various ways that we're sticking it to people. And we'll click our tongues and issue vague statements of disappointment when the President does something outrageous, but we won't actually do anything about it. That's not civility. That's abdicating your responsibilities.

Although the fighting passages will get more play in the media, and I'm happy about that, most of his talk about "common ground" steps on or even contradicts those fighting messages. Because that passage just quoted is the reason that his Presidential model of Bipartisanship and Grand Bargains was such a flat-out failure. No, that doesn't mean his whole Administration was failure. It means that his no-red-America-no-blue-America paradigm isn't founded in reality.

In that connection, this passage for me was a real WTF moment:

So if you don't like what's going on right now – and you shouldn't – do not complain. Don't hashtag. Don't get anxious. Don't retreat. Don't binge on whatever it is you're bingeing on. Don't lose yourself in ironic detachment. Don't put your head in the sand. Don't boo. Vote.

Don't boo?!? I get his point that without mobilizing votes, those things in themselves won't change government in the way that is needed. Do not complain? Do not hashtag? Please. I know he's making a standard community-organizer motivational appeal here to focus his audience on taking the action he's advocating. But that doesn't just step on but stomps on the activist message he tries to convey in other parts of the speech.

It will be a great day when Obama or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer can give a speech like that without mentioning the word "deficit." Obama rightly called out the Republicans' hypocrisy on deficit spending and deficit taxing. Republican politicians don't care about the deficit and neither do their voters. The thing is, nobody cares about the deficit outside of the mainstream talking heads who appears on Morning Joe and economists who are more concerned about professional respectability that actual public policy in the real world.

Also, yes, Obama is Obama, so he's always going to say things like this:

And it also means appreciating that progress does not happen all at once, but when you put your shoulder to the wheel, if you're willing to fight for it, things do get better. And let me tell you something, particularly young people here. Better is good. I used to have to tell my young staff this all the time in the White House. Better is good. That's the history of progress in this country. Not perfect. Better. The Civil Rights Act didn't end racism, but it made things better. Social Security didn't eliminate all poverty for seniors, but it made things better for millions of people.

Do not let people tell you the fight's not worth it because you won't get everything that you want. The idea that, well, you know there's racism in America so I'm not going to bother voting. No point. That makes no sense. You can make it better. Better's always worth fighting for. [my emphasis]

There no point in trying to quibble about the specific words there, because they are on an abstract level not connected to pending controversies. Here the tone is the important thing, the idea being that anyone who suggests that a compromise might be a bad one or that right now is not the time to surrender to the opposition is a naif who doesn't understand the Real World. This is his way of poo-pooing the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

But, gosh, look at this! Another passage that got a lot of coverage says:

So Democrats aren't just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they're running on good new ideas like Medicare for all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate debt-free. [my emphasis]

He didn't go so far as to say he endorses Medicare For All or free college. But he's only talking about them because progressives like Bernie Sanders pushed for them, campaigned on them, and exposed the ideas to a wide enough public that they became popular with a signiicant number of voters.

If your a strict political careerist, platitudes like "better is good" or "better's always worth fighting for" are useful excuses. But they are unlikely to inspire militant commitment to ideas that aren't already widely accepted.

I won't go into detail here, but Obama's political legacy also needs to be carefully evaluated in understanding why we wound up with the Orange Clown in the White House backed in his destructive policies by a fanaticized Republican Party. A good starting point would be the Grand Bargain he made a centerpiece of his Prsidential strategy. It involved repeated attempts by Obama himself to convince Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare. That was not a strategy of better is good. It was very much a position of worse is better.

The conservative Heinrich Brüning (German Chancellor 1930–32) was better than Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. The reactionary Paul von Hindenburg was better than Adolf Hitler as President. Which is why the Social Democratic Party supported Hindurburg in the final round of the 1932 election over Hitler. But Brüning's disastrous Herbert Hoover economic policies had a great deal to do with Hitler's becoming Chancellor in January 1933. A position for which President Hindenburg accepted him.

In thoses cases, better was not good enough.

Very importantly, Obama's Administration had a solemn obligation under the Torture Convention to seriously legally investigate and prosecute the torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration. They didn't. Giving that kind of de facto immunity to Presidential crimes has the problem I described in a post in 2008 (Why the Obama Justice Department has to prosecute the torture perpetrators 11/25/2008):

It's precisely because the Cheney-Bush administration broke the law extensively while preserving the basic governmental structure that makes prosecutions even more necessary in our present case. What's the point in having a rule of law if the Executive can arbitrarily set it aside? And what's the deterrence for the next set of Cheneys and Roves if there are no legal consequences for the criminal acts of the current administration?

Cheney and Bush created a real-life template for who an American government can use an authoritarian political party to establish a truly lawless Presidential government. The next set of Roves and Cheneys that come to power need to think that if they are ordered to implement similar lawless actions, that the law may very well catch up to them.

If the guilty participants in this administration don't experience direct legal consequences, i.e., prosecution and legal punishment, for what they did, then the Cheney authoritarian model has worked. Next time around, it's just a matter of finding the right combination of voter suppression, fear, de facto control of the media and suppression of real dissent to make it permanent.

Cheney's idea of democracy was articulated back in 1949 by East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht, as he explained to his Party comrades in 1949 what kind of government they were founding in the new "German Democratic Republic": "Es muss demokratisch aussehen, aber wir müssen alles in der Hand halten." (It has to look democratic, but we have to control everything.)

Not prosecuting known major crimes from this [Cheney-Bush] administration would validate the Cheney-Ulbricht approach to governance. And that would definitely not be a good thing.

Because, as Dark Lord Cheney himself said at a reception in Poland for Auschwitz survivors in 2006,, presumably with no irony intended, "Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine." (Vice President's Remarks at Reception for Survivors of Auschwitz George W. Bush White House Archives 01/26/2005)

Political messages from McCain funeral

Since this past week has been a non-stop celebration of John McCain ideology in the American press, I'll add my own bit of praise for McCain's posthumous accomplishment: he made his funeral a slap in the face of the current President, who McCain had good reason to despise. And he managed to have the last Democratic President be the main deliverer of the message of McCain's greatness. And to do so in a way that reflected his famous no-red-America-no-blue-America speech of 2004 at a time when McCain's own party is practicing willing partisanship in support of a criminal President while the Democratic Party is afraid to take a partisan stance against that President and in favor of the Constitutional order.

Of course, George W. Bush gave a eulogy, too, at McCain's request. Bush, Liberator of Peoples and Scourge of the Heathen, managed to read his text without notably stumbling. And there was also the signature smirk, when he seemed to take special pride in getting out a complete sentence.

George W. Bush: John McCain 'Made Me Better' NBC News 09/01/2018:

According to Shrub Bush, McCain spoke for "the little guy" and for "forgotten people and forgetten places."

I suppose some of the beneficiaries of the plutocratic tax cuts which he supported were short, so I guess that could be standing up for "the little guy."

What was consistent with McCain's record was the neoconservative refrain that Bush and McCain used to justify the Iraq War that it was all about liberating "death camps" and the like, the mission to bring freedom to countries like Iraq by invading their country, killing hundreds of thousands of their people, and plunging them into protracted conflict and instability. Or, in Shrub's words in the eulogy, "the true peace that comes only with freedom." The peace of the grave is more like it.

Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney created the torture program and the parallel system of "justice" thjat still stumbles along at Guantanamo. McCain criticized the torture policy. But he certainly wasn't willing to take any drastic political action to stop it. And the Torture President is one of the people he specified he wanted to give a speech at his funeral.

Barack Obama's presentation was more than twice as long as Bush's. Barack Obama On John McCain: 'We Never Doubted We Were On The Same Team' NBC News

As I predicted last week, one of the two Presidents giving eulogies was a Republican praising a Republican. And that Obama's speech would inevitably be the more eloquent or memorable of the two. That was true. Not that it took any great predictive powers to guess that.

I'll give Obama credit for noting, in his mild way, that "John was a pretty conservative guy." But it was in the context of praising his Maverick greatness. And, of course, as I also predicted, he praised the virtues of moderation and bipartisanship. McCain "did understand that some principles transcend politics," Obama said. That some values that transcend party." Those principles he listed as self-government, the Constitution, etc., etc. "even the arcane rules and procedures of the Senate." And, of course, the bold Maverick would "occasionally work across the aisle," that dreadful phrase that has come to basically mean that Democrats like to surrender to Republicans.

Democrats will mostly gush about how Obama's mom-and-apple-pie invocation of American virtues to be a mighty putdown of Trump's Administration. Obviously, he didn't go so far as to explicitly condemn the kidnapping of immigrant children.

And then the talking heads even on the "liberal" MSNBC will advise the Democrats to follow his advice by surrendering to Republicans. Which way too many of them are inclined to do anyway!

The recollections Ben Norton shares in this report for The Real News wouldn't have been appropriate for a funeral service. But they are very relevant to what McCain's actual historical legacy is, John McCain: Hawkish Voice of Military-Industrial Complex, Paved Way for Trump 08/31/2018:

The establishment Democrats' conservative instincts

A number of considerations are shaping my understanding and expectations of the this midterm election year:

• Democratic primaries are critically important for the direction of the party and whether or not the intensity gap with Republicans will be reduced. If progressives do well and a few conservative Dems like Diane Feinstein in California lose to progressive challengers, that will be an excellent sign on the policy and intensity fronts.
• The "out" party that does not hold the White House typically loses Congressional seats in midterms.
• Polls are showing a good likelihood that Democrats will retake the House in this year's elections. ( Seth Masket, A House forecast holds good news for Democrats Vox 02/12/2018)
• October will almost certainly see a flood of sexual harassment allegations of varying degrees of substance against Democratic candidates as a result of the Senate Democrats' hasty defenestration Al Franken under the Gillibrand Standard ("We should not have to be explaining the gradations between sexual assault, harassment and unwelcome groping.")
• Ginning up a war can give a President a burst in popularity. (See: Iraq, Invasion of, 2003)
• Even aside from the unique features of the current occupant of the Oval Office and his professional wrestling style, Republicans are terrible and governing but good at campaigning.

The Democrats have some well-established bad habits. Chief among them an instinctive conservatism on economic issues and a bad habit of distancing themselves from "the left," aka, their voting base. Let's recall The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)

Establishment Democrats will be sorely tempted to look at the current situation this way: We have a big possibility of cruising to a win in November. So we have to be cautious not to offend any Republican voters who would never vote for us anyway. Our base voters have no place else to go! And we need to keep courting big donors and stick to our strategy of relying heavily on the same media consultants who we're used to losing with. So we'll complain a lot about the deficit, which gives us something to complain about even though no actual voters care about it. And we certainly don't want to disturb any rich people by loose talk about rolling back Trump's bandits' tax cuts. Or talking about Medicare for all. Or, Lordy no, we can't talk about bloated military budgets because that would step on our Russia-Russia-Russia talking points and might disturb military-contractor donations.

David Dayen has an excellent essay on the politics of the deficit. And how badly the Democrats played it during the Obama Administration, although the title maybe isn't the best for it, The Big Budget Deal Isn’t Irresponsible The New Republic 02/13/2018:

[Fred] Hiatt [of the Washington Post] longs for the halcyon days of 2012–2013, when [Republican] House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama came together in a bid to slash Social Security and other domestic spending, nearly destroying the country’s full faith and credit in the process. While Social Security survived, the Republicans’ failed attempt to hijack the debt ceiling to cut the deficit led to the sequester, a painful, mindless policy that capped discretionary spending automatically across the board, regardless of whether the program was useful or not.

The result was the lowest public investment in the United States since the demobilization after World War II. Budgets for serious needs like infectious disease outbreaks or public defenders for the indigent were reduced indiscriminately. The United States wasted the chance to use low borrowing rates to rebuild outdated infrastructure, one of the biggest missed opportunities in recent memory. The output lost by capping spending amounted to trillions of dollars in lost income and reduced economic growth.

This unquestionably denied work and prosperity to millions of people, simply to feed the irrational desires of people like Hiatt. Public sector jobs sagged under Obama more than any president of the past 40 years. And because public spending disproportionately assists poorer and more vulnerable Americans—an inverse of a tax code which largely benefits the rich—the historic cuts fueled income and wealth inequality. [my emphasis]

The Democratic Party paid dearly for Obama's bipartisan obsession and his economic conservatism.

And the establishment Democrats haven't given up those habits, as Cenk Uygur reports, Democrats: Progressives KEEP OUT 02/12/2018:

Remembering the limits of Obama's political project

As they have been doing for years, The American Prospect team have been presenting insightful analysis on current politics over the last year, the first of the Trump Presidency.

Julian Zelizer reviews Jonathan Chait's account of Obama's Presidency, In Search of Obama 05/05/2017. Zelizer uses the review for some worthwhile commentary on his own. More critical commentary than the erratic Jonathan Chait would be comfortable making. As Zelizer explains:

In his book, the left comes across as a bunch of whiny, unrealistic neophytes who don’t know much about how politics work. In his chapter on revered earlier presidents, Chait means to show that the critics of Obama have little understanding of what actually happened in the past. But for Obama and all other mainstream, pragmatic liberals, the left has been an essential force for generating ideas and creating grassroots political pressure. Historians such as Doug Rossinow and Michael Kazin, whom Chait criticizes, have demonstrated that many of the best moments for liberals—such as the mid-1930s or the mid-1960s—come when the left keeps the feet of the Democratic leadership to the fire, forces issues onto the agenda, and helps create the kind of political momentum that leaders need to overcome political opposition. The left pushes Democrats as a whole to address big questions—like racial injustice or economic inequality—that seem unrealistic or out of bounds, until they are not. If Democrats had ignored the cries of the left, we might never have obtained the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the ACA, for that matter. Chait downplays the role of congressional Democrats and the left in driving the health-care legislation in 2009 and 2010 even when the administration buckled.

I've been very critical of both the left and the center-left for surrendering way too much of American democratic and historical symbolism to the Republicans and the rightwing extremists. The Republicans branded their opposition to Obama's liberal policies and his entire Administration with the symbolism of the American Revolution via the "Tea Party" activists. Astrotruf activists to a great extent, often funded by the Koch Brothers and similar Republican Party sugar-daddies.

The Democrats, meanwhile, can't even manage to defend the progressive sides of their own party founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and the progress in democracy and human rights they rightly came to represent, despite the extent to which those advances were restricted to the white males who constituted the political community of their times.

So I think it is important to recognized the elements of distant and more recent progressive moments in American history, even when those who led it had their inevitable limitations, perhaps even seriously reprehensible ones. Obama's stimulus in early 2009, passed by the Democratic House and Senate against intransigent Republican opposition - the Reps claimed to be terribly worried about it effects on the federal budget deficit, you may recall - was sufficiently large to contribute substantially to kickstart the economic recovery. The EU, by contrast, relied on the ludicrous neoliberal notion of "expansionary austerity," which caused their economic recovery to lag noticeably behind that of the US. On the other hand, a considerably larger stimulus recommended by outside economists like Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz and by some of the Administration's own advisers, would have facilitated and faster recovery and perhaps have left fewer swing voters in 2016 feeling like they needed a change of the kind that Donald Trump was putting on offer.

Zelizer includes observations like this:

Chait recounts the many ways that the Affordable Care Act succeeded in expanding insurance coverage and containing costs. The economics of health care forever changed as a result of the policy. ... Dodd-Frank constituted a bold piece of financial regulation that curbed Wall Street’s riskiest and most destructive form of behavior. Chait even depicts more modest programs such as education reform as crucial policy innovations that would have been considered breakthroughs in other presidencies if it hadn’t been for the overwhelming number of other changes that took place.

But he also notes some of the very real limitations of Obama's project from a progressive and even a narrowly partisan Democratic viewpoint:

The organizational strength of the Democrats at the state and local level has withered under bad leadership, as Theda Skocpol has argued. To the dismay of congressional Democrats, the president has not always worked hard enough to help the party amass the resources that it needed to fight an aggressive GOP. His Democratic critics complained that Organizing for America, his political campaign operation, had always focused on Obama over the interests of the party in the states and localities. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, Obama does not leave behind a coalition that, at least in the short term, has the muscle to protect what he built.

Obama had an unyielding belief in the potential for bipartisanship and civility. This was the promise of his brilliant speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, when he questioned the idea of a hardened red and blue America and claimed the divide did not have to be permanent. He continually attempted to reach out to Republicans early in his term, putting compromises on the table even when it became clear that the Republican compromise would never come. [my emphasis]

Zelizer also alludes to what George Lakoff famously describes as Obama's and the Democrats' framing problem. Noting the beneficial effects of the stimulus, Zelizer rightly notes that " nobody seemed to give the administration any credit for what it had achieved." And that is in major part due to the fact that Obama insisted on defending his program in conservative terms, i.e., expressing apparently serious concern about the size of the deficit that most Republicans haven't cared about since 1980 at the latest.

Cautionary lessons of Obama's centrism

"Obama didn't play the hand that history dealt him. He didn't play it exactly right, and the Republicans did play the game very, very well." - Thomas Frank on why the Obama Administration was a disappointment to present-day New Deal-minded Democrats, aka, progressives. (Clinton and Obama Helped Make the Dems a Wall Street Party just after 4:25)

With the pollsters now talking about a good possibility of a "wave" election favoring the Democrats in 2018, I've started to worry how Democrats will approach such a political moment. And, if they do gain control of the Senate and/or House, how they will use that strengthened position against Trump and the Republicans.

Recent history gives the Democratic base good reason for concern. One of the things the Democratic Party did right during the Bush II ascendancy was Howard Dean's 50 state strategy as head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). That involved building the party infrastructure in all states, including ones considered safely "red" (Republican). Because the Democrats were to a point where they were letting Republicans run unopposed in Congressional elections, and not even trying to seriously compete in others. This allowed Republican candidates in safe states to send money from their campaign funds to other Republicans in more actively contested districts or states.

The successful result was that the Democrats retook a majority the House and the Senate and won a majority of governorships in the 2006 elections. But their general strategy was to play it safe, i.e., not aggressively challenging the Cheney-Bush Administration on policy, hoping to cruise to a Presidential victory in 2008. Which in retrospect seems like a pragmatic approach. But only in retrospect.

John McCain, the 2008 Republican Presidential candidate, was the darling of the mainstream press and widely considered to be a strong candidate, which of course he was. The fact that a black candidate running on a seemingly strongly reformist program defeated him could be taken as a validation of the play-it-safe strategy. An argument that the corporate Democrats will no doubt be eagerly making after any 2018 "wave."

But there was also the beginning of the Great Recession, punctuated by the dramatic financial crisis of 2008. Obama's vote was also in very significant part a vote for serious progressive change, as Thomas Frank argues. After the radicalism of the Cheney-Bush Administration and the numerous disasters clustering around it - the Iraq War, the Katrina response, the financial crisis - people wanted a real change at the national level.

Obama took office with Democratic majorities in both Houses, and for a while during the first half of his first term, even a two-thirds majority in the Senate. And Obama's Administration had some substantive accomplishments in those first two years: a significant stimulus package, which is now widely credited by realistic economists with providing enough of a boost to give the US a notably more healthy recovery than the austerity-burdened EU. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), now generally known as Obamacare, was passed. And it has so far proved durable enough to withstand the Republican onslaught during the Trump Administration. The auto industry was bailed out. The financial sector was stabilized and the moderate Dodd-Frank law approved. And, of course, Democratic judges got appointed.

And the entire eight years were plagued by Obama's still difficult-to-explain obsession with bipartisanship, seemingly for its own sake. Even the accomplishments noted above were limited by restraint at least partially due to the obsession with Bipartisanship.

But once the Republicans took back a majority in the House in the 2010 elections, they were largely able to block major initiatives by the Administration. And to go wild on investigations of Hillary Clinton pseudoscandals. The dynamic and innovative phase of Obama domestic legislation was heavily concentrated in those first two years. The chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, advised going for a much larger stimulus, echoed by outside economists like Paul Krugman. The dropping of the public option from Obamacare not only deprived the program of an important restraint on private insurance costs. It may still prove a decisive factor in the program's surviving the current Republican rule. The auto industry bailout extracted major concessions from labor, very unlike the obscenely generous terms of the bank bailouts. Millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure, a very large number of them due to lender misconduct, and Obama's efforts to help them could be very generously described as nominal.

Obama often seemed to follow the cynical advice long ago attributed to Richard Nixon of giving liberals the rhetoric and giving conservatives the substance. The maddening obsession with budget deficit and "fiscal responsibility" involved the ridiculous Simpson-Bowles Commission with its recommendations for cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which Obama repeatedly attempted to enact. The whole mess about the "fiscal cliff" and making permanent most of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy were clear signs of Obama's commitment to Wall Street economics. And repeatedly using that kind of conservative framing constantly reinforced the Republican narrative.

The result was that while reinforcing the Republicans narrative on many issues, the limits of his policies meant that the recovery's benefits were very disproportionately enjoyed by the wealthiest. The economic metaphor on which the Democrats have long depended, the rising tide that lifts all boats, is leaving more and more people foundering in the water as the decades roll on.

Thomas Frank has done a series of interviews with The Real News over the last few months dealing with the effects of Obama-style corporate-Democratic thinking that I've assembled into a playlist, Thomas Frank on Obama-Clinton Wall Street Orientation. Chapter 8 hits some of the high points, Obama Chose Wall St. Over Main St. - Thomas Frank on RAI 12/28/2017:

Almost any engaged Democratic activist could list several more examples from Obama's Presidency: the Firing of Shirley Sherrod (2010); the eloquent rhetoric against the Citizen's United decision followed by a half-hearted political response and a de facto embrace of it. The war in Libya (2011).

But this isn't just carping after the fact. In 2010, Democracy Journal 16 (Spring 2010) did a symposium on the alarming signs of opportunities being squandered, introduced by Michael Tomasky in What Happened?, half a year before the 2010 "wave" elections benefiting the Republicans. Michael Sandel (Obama and Civic Idealism) encouraged the Democrats to engage in class issues with the goal of restricting corporate power:

Unlike the anti-bigness liberalism of the progressive era and early New Deal, the social-welfare liberalism of FDR in 1944 is recognizable as the liberalism of our time. The great liberal causes of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s — civil rights, Medicare and Medicaid, racial and gender equality, federal support for education, a more generous welfare state — were about using government to provide equal opportunity and a social safety net, not about using government to rein in the political influence of big banks and corporations.

Social-welfare liberalism seems a more practical doctrine than the anti-bigness version of earlier progressives. It is hard to imagine how to break up the large financial institutions and corporations that dominate modern economic life. And yet I believe it’s a mistake for contemporary liberals to give up on the old progressive project of exerting democratic control over economic institutions. In fact, it’s a mistake that has backfired on the Obama presidency. The initial reluctance of Barack Obama and his economic advisers to take a tougher line on the banks has led to a populist backlash that now threatens his agenda. [my emphasis]

I would note that Obama's fight to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - even while he was trying to expand access to health insurance - showed a considerable distancing of the Democrats even from what Sandel calls "social-welfare liberalism."

Bob Reich (Principles Before Heroes) also criticized the essential timidity of Obama's reform positions:

If anything, the Great Recession has accelerated the trend toward greater concentration. Under its pressure, more firms have discovered how easily they can increase profits by shrinking their payrolls and laying off their workers, and how cheaply jobs can be done using computers and advanced software or using the Internet to outsource jobs to foreign workers who have become nearly as productive as Americans, but charge far less. This means many more Americans are facing the Hobson’s choice of joblessness or lower wages. At the other end of the income ladder, top corporate and Wall Street executives and traders with reputed “talent” and connections–those charged with discovering more ways to increase profits–are commanding ever higher salaries and bonuses.

Meanwhile, the political power that comes with wealth has shown no sign of abating. ...

Obama might have had more success if he had framed the challenge in broader terms. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson saw and described the economic and political challenge the nation then faced in structural and historic language: to use the power of the federal government to reduce poverty among the elderly and the chronically poor, to widen the circle of prosperity, and thereby to complete the agenda begun by Franklin Roosevelt and taken up by John Kennedy.

But Obama defined the economic crisis he inherited not in structural or large historic terms but, rather, as a cyclical downturn – albeit an especially deep one – after which, he assured Americans, the economy would return to normal. [my emphasis]

Social theorist Martha Nussbaum observed that "in the United States, the progress of liberalism is hampered by a mistrust of government and the legacy of Reagan-era policies." (Learning from the World)

This was in 2010, real-time criticisms of the dangers of Obama's Bipartisan ways. There was still time for a course correction. The costs for not doing so has been high.

Obama this week

Former President Obama had a kickoff summit for his Obama Foundation this week. Obama himself gave the closing keynote speech, which starts just after 1:56:00. Obama Foundation Summit Closing Session 11/01/2017:

The summit was for the purpose of training activist leaders. So Obama's speech sounds like what I imagine his presentations as a community organizer were in his early career. (Full disclosure: I was actually trained in "Alinskyist" organizing methods by the United Farm Workers union once upon a time. So I have a good idea of what community organizing presentations sound like.)

Hearing an Obama speech is a reminder of some of the things that made him so attractive as a politician. He's sharp, impressive, persuasive, professional, and upbeat. It was probably very much in the mood of the rest of the conference.

It was always ironic to me that rightwingers, for whom facts don't much matter, treated "Alinskyism" as though it was akin to a full-blown anarchist ideology or something. Because one of the criticisms of Saul Alinsky's approach to community organizing was that it was largely an ideology-free approach. It stressed organizing people around specific goals like, say, refurbishing a neighborhood park. That doesn't necessarily translate easily into organizing around a larger ideology and/or parties or pressure groups that deal with a wide variety of issues. Obama's often non-ideological, "bipartisan" presentation of issues is partially an echo of that organizing style.

And that's what strikes me the most about this speech. It talks about "change" in an almost completely issue-free context. He doesn't talk about organizing to address the climate crisis, or to promote labor unions, or for single-payer medical care, or for college-for-all. It's not that what he says is bad. It's just that there's nothing particularly politically liberal or progressive about it.

In this speech, he revisits his famous hope-and-change theme of the 2008 campaign. In the cautious, deliberate voice that marks his attempts to tiptoe around something, he says, "People always misunderstood, sometimes, that slogan we used. Hope, the audacity of hope."

Edward-Isaac Dovere reports for Politico on how Obama expanded on the thought (The strange, new-age Obama reunion 11/02/2017):

“Hope does not mean that tomorrow everything’s going to be better,” he said. “Where hope comes in handy is when you’ve put everything you have into something and it hasn’t worked yet —and it hasn’t worked the week after that, and the week after that, and six months later and a year.”

I found this comment a bit depressing. Because it walks right up to saying, hey, all that talk about hope and change didn't mean that I really wanted to change anything.

It seemed a miracle in 2008 that a liberal African-American man could be elected President of the United States. A big reason was that in his person and his rhetoric, he seemed to promise substantive change in the midst of the Great Recession after the Cheney-Bush Administration's war in Iraq and their stunning neglect of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And things like the 2009 stimulus bill and Obamacare were substantive, constructive kinds of change and improvement.

But he showed over and over again that on most other policies, we was very much a centrist. And in trying repeatedly to cut Social Security and Medicare, he was conservative. To use poli-sci language, he was a transactional President rather than a transformational one.

His speech Wednesday was mostly centrist boilerplate, however eloquently it was delivered. As noted above, he seem to be suggesting that "hope and change" was a largely empty slogan, meant more as a motivational slogan than a substantive program. Hope and Change didn't look much like the New Deal or the Great Society.

And the "fierce urgency of now" was not on evidence in the speech.

In bipartisan mode, he talked about long history of the civil rights movement as though there were no enemies involved. Classic Obama. No Martin Luther King-like jeremiads against "vicious racists" or mealy-mouthed self-styled moderates.

Obama's speech also reflects the comment that Dovere makes:

What the Obama Foundation will do, no one quite knows yet — including, admittedly, the former president himself. How the newly launched outfit fits in with like-minded groups or the former president’s own vision of using civic engagement to create political change is an open question, too.

The answers provided at the summit weren’t even close to what desperate Democrats are pining for: that Obama will save them by standing up to Trump, that he’ll stop the nuclear war they’re having nightmares about, or even just provide some reassurance they might start winning House races again.

Post-Presidential Obama in Latin America

Obama has been on a Latin American trip, stops including Brazil and Argentina. In both places, he was echoing his conservative policies during his administration. The emphasis was particularly clear in Argentina, where he dropped by for a highly visible golf game with Argentine President Mauricio Macri, a corrupt oligarch on the Trump model, whose conservative party is facing midterm Congressional elections in two weeks. Página/12 reports (Con el "amigo" Barack 07.10.20174)

En la jerga de los golfistas podría decirse que lo de Mauricio Macri fue un hoyo en uno. A dos semanas de las elecciones consiguió una foto en la Casa Rosada piensan utilizar para instalar la idea de su liderazgo internacional y se la sacó jugando el partido de golf que no pudo jugarle cuando el entonces presidente de Estados Unidos visitó el año pasado la Argentina. ...

A la foto de esta mañana le antecedieron los elogios de Obama le dedicó ayer a Macri. “Inició esfuerzos para reconectar al país con la comunidad mundial. Me impresiona mucho el trabajo que se ha hecho en la Argentina”, dijo el ex presidente de Estados Unidos en Córdoba, adonde fue a disertar a cambio de una suma cercana a los 450 mil dólares.

[In golf jargon, one could say that what Mauricio Macri had was a hole-in-one. Two weeks before the elections, he managed to get a photo in the Casa Rosada [Presidential building] thinking to use it to create the idea of international leadership, and he got to play the round of golf that he couldn't play when the then-President of the United States visited Argentina last year. ...

This afternoon's photo was proceeded by Obama's praises that he dedicated to Macri yesterday. "He initiated measures to reconnect the country with the international community. I'm very impressed at the work that he's done in Argentina" {my translation from the Spanish}, said the ex-President of the United States in Córdoba, where he went to deliver a speech for an amount around $450,000 dollars.]

Also similar to the Trump model, the golf game was at the Gold Club Buenos Aires, managed by the President's brother, Gianfranco Macri. (Obama plays golf with Argentina's Macri after energy summit AFP/Yahoo! News 10/06/2017)

Obama was speaking at a Green Energy conference. (Denis Barnett, Obama makes impassioned plea for clean energy in Argentina AFP/Yahoo! News 10/06/2017)

Emir Sader (¿Qué viene a hacer Obama a América latina? Página/12 05.10.2017) reports:

En el último mes, Obama ha tenido conversaciones con el Banco Northern Trust, con el banco Cantor Fitzgerald y con el grupo de compra en la privatizacion de empresas, Carlyle Group. Su Fundacion está financiada especialmente por donaciones de Microsoft y del gigante del sector eléctrico, Exelon, ambas con contribuciones de más de un millón de dólares. Obama ya ha hecho reiteradas presentaciones en Wall Street, por las que cobra alrededor de 400 mil dólares por cada una.

En San Pablo [São Paulo, Brazil], Obama partipará del evento organizado en el periódico económico Valor, del grupo O Globo, patrocinado por el banco español Santander. Cínicamente dice que viene a “oír a los líderes jóvenes”. No va a encontrar a ningun líder joven ahí. Para ello, tendría que llegar sin el patrocinio de bancos y tendría que ir a la periferia de San Pablo y de Buenos Aires. Pero con los patrocinios de las empresas que financian su Fundación, viene más bien a buscar nuevas oportunidades de negocios para esas empresas, en especial en los procesos de privatización que los gobiernos de Macri y de Temer ponen en práctica.

En Argentina, Obama tendrá reuniones con empresarios y se anuncia un encuentro con Mauricio Macri. En Brasil, al parecer, no se atreverá a un encuentro con Temer, que tiene el 3 por ciento de apoyo entre los brasileños. Tiene programado un encuentro en Córdoba sobre “economía verde”, organizado por la Fundación Advanced Leadership, organización que tiene su sede en Washington, con el apoyo del BID, de la OEA, de la Fundacion Mediterránea y la Boston Seguros.

In the last month, Obama has had conversations with Northern Trust Bank, with the Cantor Fitzgerald bank, the group that buys into the privatization of business [i.e., merchant bank] Carlyle Group. His Foundation is financed especially by donations from Microsoft and the giant of the energy sector, Exelon, both with contributions of more than a million dollars. Obama has made repeated presentations on Wall Street, for which he earns about $400,000 for each one.

In San Pablo, Obama will participate in an event organized by the economic newspaper Valor of the O Globo group, sponsored by the Spanish bank Santander. He cynically says he's coming to "listen to young leaders." He won't encounter any young leader there. For that, he would have to come without the sponsorship of banks and would have to go to the peripheries of San Pablo and of Buenos Aires.

In Argentina, Obama will have meetings with businesspeople and has an announced meeting with [President] Mauricio Macri. In Brazil, it seems, he didn't dare meeting with [President] Temer, who has 3% support among Brazilians. He has schedule a meetings in Córdoba [Argentina] on the "green economy," organized by the Fundación Advanced Leadership, an organization who has its headquarter in Washington, with the support of the BID, of the OAS, of the Fundacion Mediterránea and of Boston Seguros.]

The Brazialian leg of Obama's trip, presented as being on behlf of the Obama Foundation, is reported in:

• Fanático de Brasil, pero ¿gambetea a Temer? ANSA Latina 04.10.2017
• Em São Paulo, Obama critica ascensão da xenofobia e do populismo O Globo 06.10.2017
• Obama viaja y factura Página/12 05.10.2017

The Portuguese text of the San Pablo (São Paulo) is available at Leia a íntegra da palestra de Barack Obama no Fórum Cidadão Global Valor 05.10.2017. Obama offered some platitudes about the Internet and globalization. And some pious and presumably sincere warnings against racism and xenophobia. He even made a passing reference to the concentration of wealth to the One Percent. And praise of free trade, of course.

The Obama Foundation is supposedly training young leaders for the future.

The New York Times reports (Shasta Darlington and Ernesto Lodoño, Obama, in Brazil, Offers Familiar Slogan to Corporate Audience 10/05/2017) that Obama told his audience, "My biggest regret is not being able to bridge the differences that were emerging in our politics as much as I wanted."

Not failing to overturn Citizens United. Not being unable to stop small arms proliferation. Not screwing up the future prospects for nuclear arms control by invading Libya and turning it into a playground for Sunni jihadists. Not neglcting to build the party organization so that the Dems didn't have historic losses in November. He most regrets not having tried harder during his Presidency to make nice with Republicans. Wow!

Friday's WaPo Russian hacking revelations

The Washington Post presented a new report on Friday about the Obama Administration's investigation and response to the intelligence of Russian hacking aimed at influencing the 2016 Presidential election, Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault 06/23/2017.

For me, this one was stunning in a kind of numbing way.

For one thing, it reminds me again of how much of this story is based on leaked claims from sources not known to the public. That's especially concerning since I'm hearing Democrats more and more talking about the Russian hacking in 2016 as an "act of war." And if we're going to take the kind of measures against Russia that countries take in response to acts of war, it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that we're not only so dependent on not just highly on very secret intelligence information but on a variety of unverified leaks from intelligence agencies and other anonymous sources.

It wasn't too difficult to believe that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor actually occurred. Or the bringing down of the Twin Towers in 2001.

Then there was a famous incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 whose exact nature is still in dispute. And it was still a long time untilt he covert American military actions that preceded it.

And of course, there were the famous "weapons of mass destruction" that made the invasion of Iraq necessary in 2003. The extent of the threat is still unknown, since none of those "WMDs" has yet to be found.

More recently, there was this: Seymour Hersh, Trump‘s Red Line Welt 06/25/2017. On April 4, the Syrians bombed a facility. On April 6, President Trump launched a Tomahawk missile launch on a Syrian Air Force base in retaliation. The justification was that Syria had used sarin gas in the April 4 attack:

Within hours of the April 4 bombing, the world’s media was saturated with photographs and videos from Khan Sheikhoun. Pictures of dead and dying victims, allegedly suffering from the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning, were uploaded to social media by local activists, including the White Helmets, a first responder group known for its close association with the Syrian opposition.

The provenance of the photos was not clear and no international observers have yet inspected the site, but the immediate popular assumption worldwide was that this was a deliberate use of the nerve agent sarin, authorized by President Bashar Assad of Syria. Trump endorsed that assumption by issuing a statement within hours of the attack, describing Assad’s "heinous actions" as being a consequence of the Obama administration’s "weakness and irresolution" in addressing what he said was Syria’s past use of chemical weapons. [my emphasis]

What Hersh reports, with sourcing to high-level, anonymous American sources, is that the US intelligence community (IC) had a high level of confidence in intelligence provided by the Russians indicating that the target was a meeting of opposition leaders - "radical Islamic terrorists" in the Republicans' conjuring formula. More specifically, "Ahrar al-Sham and the al-Qaida-affiliated group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra." And he reports, "The advance intelligence on the target, as supplied by the Russians, was given the highest possible score inside the American community." Why that advanced intelligence was so important to evaluating the July 4 attack is something Hearst explains in the piece. Short version: the IC believed based on the information they had that the facility bombed had chemicals stored there that would have more plausibly accounted for the damage observed afterward than the assumption of a sarin gas attack.

After the July 4 bombing, Hearst reports, "A Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground."

As Hearst reports it, Trump was persuaded by the reports of a Syrian sarin gas attack, which according to the information Hearst reports, is unlikely in the extreme. He quotes a source he identifies as "a senior adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency" describing Trump's reaction, which sounds pretty impulsive:

Trump, a constant watcher of television news, said, while King Abdullah of Jordan was sitting next to him in the Oval Office, that what had happened was “horrible, horrible” and a “terrible affront to humanity.” Asked if his administration would change its policy toward the Assad government, he said: “You will see.” He gave a hint of the response to come at the subsequent news conference with King Abdullah: “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies – babies, little babies – with a chemical gas that is so lethal ... that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line . ... That attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me. Big impact ... It’s very, very possible ... that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.”

Within hours of viewing the photos, the adviser said, Trump instructed the national defense apparatus to plan for retaliation against Syria. “He did this before he talked to anybody about it. The planners then asked the CIA and DIA if there was any evidence that Syria had sarin stored at a nearby airport or somewhere in the area. Their military had to have it somewhere in the area in order to bomb with it.” “The answer was, ‘We have no evidence that Syria had sarin or used it,’” the adviser said. “The CIA also told them that there was no residual delivery for sarin at Sheyrat [the airfield from which the Syrian SU-24 bombers had taken off on April 4] and Assad had no motive to commit political suicide.” Everyone involved, except perhaps the president, also understood that a highly skilled United Nations team had spent more than a year in the aftermath of an alleged sarin attack in 2013 by Syria, removing what was said to be all chemical weapons from a dozen Syrian chemical weapons depots.

And despite the paucity of evidence for the claim, "it was impossible for the experts to persuade the president of this once he had made up his mind."

After the strike, the rewards were rich in PR:

The next few days were his most successful as president. America rallied around its commander in chief, as it always does in times of war. Trump, who had campaigned as someone who advocated making peace with Assad, was bombing Syria 11 weeks after taking office, and was hailed for doing so by Republicans, Democrats and the media alike. One prominent TV anchorman, Brian Williams of MSNBC, used the word “beautiful” to describe the images of the Tomahawks being launched at sea. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria said: “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States.” A review of the top 100 American newspapers showed that 39 of them published editorials supporting the bombing in its aftermath, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. [emphasis in original]

How does this relate to the Trump-Russia scandal? In several ways.

One is that Russia is militarily involved in Syria. And that even under the Obama Administration, there was some level of cooperation between the US and Russia in the area, even though their end goals were different. Protocols were in place to minimize the likelihood of direct clashes between US and Russian forces. What Hersh's article describes is an impulsive President making a military decision with a great potential for risk and little if any positive return in that situation. Hersh says of Trump's missile strike on July 6, "All in all, it was little more than an expensive fireworks display."

Another is that the events and decisions described in Hersh's article don't fit any simple narrative of Trump as being beholden to Russia or reflexively supporting the Russian position. There are various speculations that could fit that situation. But it is notable that the Trump Family Business Administration spun it as a sign of Russia's perfidy:

Five days later [after the missile strike on Syria], the Trump administration gathered the national media for a background briefing on the Syrian operation that was conducted by a senior White House official who was not to be identified. The gist of the briefing was that Russia’s heated and persistent denial of any sarin use in the Khan Sheikhoun bombing was a lie because President Trump had said sarin had been used. That assertion, which was not challenged or disputed by any of the reporters present, became the basis for a series of further criticisms:

-The continued lying by the Trump administration about Syria’s use of sarin led to widespread belief in the American media and public that Russia had chosen to be involved in a corrupt disinformation and cover-up campaign on the part of Syria.

-Russia’s military forces had been co-located with Syria’s at the Shayrat airfield (as they are throughout Syria), raising the possibility that Russia had advance notice of Syria’s determination to use sarin at Khan Sheikhoun and did nothing to stop it.

-Syria’s use of sarin and Russia’s defense of that use strongly suggested that Syria withheld stocks of the nerve agent from the UN disarmament team that spent much of 2014 inspecting and removing all declared chemical warfare agents from 12 Syrian chemical weapons depots, pursuant to the agreement worked out by the Obama administration and Russia after Syria’s alleged, but still unproven, use of sarin the year before against a rebel redoubt in a suburb of Damascus.

The apparently false information given by the Administration to justify the Tomahawk strikes is also very relevant to the Trump-Russia story. Governments lie. And it's seriously discouraging to see that many leading Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, along with many of our star pundits and commentators, endorsed this strike and its justifications,without serious questioning. For the Trump-Russia investigation, that emphasizes yet again how important it is to have a credible investigation with relevant facts explained clearly to the public. If the IC is right in claiming that the Russians hacked US computers illegally - and I assume at this point that the basic story is correct - the public needs to know that the national government is doing something effective to protect critical election infrastructure from hacking attacks. And we need to know the real story behind the dealings of the Trump campaign with dubious Russian actors, including the kind of business ties he has with Russian companies through which he could receive emoluments. But, of course, if the information was falsified by the IC, that's something the public should know, too!

And just as the Hersh article contains material that troubles a simple Trump-is-acting-on-behalf-of-Putin construction, the WaPo piece also contains a kind of "poison pill" for the Democrats, as well. If the evidence was as clear to the IC as the report claims, they Obama's restrained handling of the information priority to the election looks all too much like more dysfunctional Bipartisanship on his part.

Trump himself is using the information to "gaslight" the Democrats, perhaps without fully realizing the extent to which he is conceding that there was serious Russian interference in the 2016 election:

Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016 Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action? Focus on them, not T!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2017

The "T" presumably meaning Trump.

Obama Administration official said they "choked" when it came to acting on Russian meddling of election. They didn't want to hurt Hillary?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2017

The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

...and did not want to "rock the boat." He didn't "choke," he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

The real story is that President Obama did NOTHING after being informed in August about Russian meddling. With 4 months looking at Russia...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

..under a magnifying glass, they have zero "tapes" of T people colluding. There is no collusion & no obstruction. I should be given apology!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

Democratic "Bipartisanship" is becoming a bit of a personal White Whale for me. But in thinking through ways that direct meddling with the voter counts can be countered, it seems obvious that some sort of required paper trail with follow-up audits would remove a lot of the potential for vote-manipulation through computer hacking. Like paper ballots that are counted by optical scan. Also, some standard national procedure for preventing hinky voter purges. The kind of stuff that would also put the kibosh on a lot of the segregationist voter-suppression mischief that the Republicans made part of their standard operating procedure years ago.

So if the Democrats, including the last Democratic President, had raised a lot more holy hell the last 10 years over segregationist voter suppression, there's some good chance that our national electoral system would be considerably safer against direct hacking from Russians or segregationists or crooked voting machine companies. But being rude like that might have disturbed the quest for ... Bipartisanship! Because the Republicans would have said the Mean Libruls weren't being nice to them. Republicans definitely need some manners lessons. But Democrats need some Malvina Reynolds lessons, provided here by Delila Paz.

Marcy Wheeler's commentary on the Trump-Russia revelations are always worth attention: The Compartments in WaPo's Russian Hack Magnum Opus Emptywheel 06/23/2017; Obama Worried Trump Would Warn the Russians About Their Compounds ... Did They? 06/26/2017

Conservatives celebrate together in Berlin?

Barack Obama showed up in Berlin for a joint appearance with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Obama receives rock star welcome in Germany as he appears alongside Merkel and says 'we can't hide behind a wall' Daily Mail AP/Daily Mail 05/25/2017.

Supposedly, the timing of the event being just before Merkel is scheduled to meet with Bush in Brussels was entirely coincidental. Barack Obama tells Berlin audience: ‘We can’t hide behind a wall’ Guardian 05/25/2017

Barack Obama joins Angela Merkel in Berlin Guardian Wires 05/25/2017:

National elections are coming in Germany on September 24. That's four months away, so this isn't exactly like Obama joining Merkel on the campaign trail. But almost. Of course, we know it's only those wicked Russians who interfere in other countries' election.

I recall that Obama shortly after his election as President commented that in the European context he would be considered a conservative. I thought of that when I read the news about his meeting with Merkel.

Angela Merkel seems to have a very good image in the United States. Her Compassionate Pastor's Daughter posturing seems to have convinced much of the American media. But the hallmark of her tenure has been to respond to the euro crisis in the wake of the economic crisis that began in 2007-8 with Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning econmic policies that severely damaged countries like Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain and Portugal. She has recast the European Union as being a German-dominated political bloc suffering from a severe "democratic deficit."

Her welcoming of large numbers of refugees into Germany in 2015 looked very good to liberal-minded people. And her praise for that is well deserved.

But the refugee inflow was at crisis levels already in 2011, and Merkel handled it with her signature extend-and-pretend style, which lead to the acute phase that made it a worldwide scandal in 2015. The problem is far from over. And she has basically outsourced it to Turkey and Greece. And the conditions in the refugee camps in both countries has been downright nightmarish for many.

The refugee crisis is back in extend-and-pretend mode. It's not going away. And it constantly generates humanitarian horrors: Dozens on sinking dinghy lost at sea, rescued migrants tell UNHCR AFP/Japan Times 05/24/2017 (this week); Refugee crisis: Dozens feared dead in new boat sinking off Libyan coast The Independent 05/26/2016 (almost exactly a year ago); UNICEF: Number of unaccompanied refugee children soars Aljazeera 05/18/2016; Giorgos Christides, Unaccompanied Migrant Boys in Greece Turn to Prostitution Spiegel International 05/19/2017.

Obama and Merkel are both major examples of liberal-minded proponents of TINA (There Is No Alternative) neoliberal economic policies and the suspicion of popular democratic participation. Obama's initial stimulus package was a significant departure from the neoliberal playbook. And it was enough to push the economy back to recovery and made the US recovery from the Great Recession a healthier one than the eurozone experienced. But he spent the rest of his term advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare and hopelessly trying to work out bipartisan budget deals that resulted in things like the sequester that achieved far more Republican than Democratic goals. Obama's health care plan was a big improvement and also added a stimulative effect to the economy. But it didn't even get the United State as far down the road as Germany in the health care system.

Obama was the head of the American center-left party. And he left office with his party at historic lows in office-holding strength. Merkel is the head of the center-right party in Germany (CDU), with the center-left SPD as her junior coalition partner. The results for the German center-left party looks to be about the same as for the American Democrats. The SPD had been doing well in the polls earlier in the year. But their prospects aren't looking so good lately. (Umfrage sieht Mehrheit für Schwarz-Gelb im Bund FAZ 23.05.2017)

Obama's There Is No Alternative bipartsan illusion

James Santel, a speechwriter in the Obama White House, has some important observations in his review of a collection of Barack Obnama's speeches, Orator-in-Chief The American Scholar 04/28/2017.

He does a good job of relating Obama's chronic appeals for bipartisanship, which he often presented as an end in itself, with the larger ideology of neoliberalism, one of whose key concepts is TINA (There Is No Alternative), the idea that all the major ideological questions prior to the fall of the Soviet Union have been solved. The basics of liberal democracy and economic liberalism, i.e., the "free market" economics of deregulation, privatization, low wages, labor "flexibility" (loss of job protections and unions), and the continuing reduction of the welfare state, have triumphed in the world. The only real questions now remaining, or legitimately remaining, are technical issues of how to implement the policies to make life and business more agreeable for corporations and the super-rich.

The most famous ideological formation of these ideas are those associated with the "end of history":

Even more exciting was what Obama’s candidacy seemed to promise about the future of politics in the United States: that it would disappear, a kind of domestic unfolding of what Francis Fukuyama predicted in The End of History and the Last Man. Again, this interpretation was encouraged by Obama’s version of American history. As he told it, the moments emblematic of the American character – the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments; the women’s rights and civil rights movements; the New Deal and the Great Society – were instances in which Americans came together to expand the meaning of liberty and justice. His speeches cast these actions not as the triumph of liberal politics, as the victory of one viewpoint over the other, but as the result of our shared values, never mind how deeply or even violently we have disagreed over the meaning of those values throughout history. Obama’s rhetoric suggested that if we simply followed our instincts and stayed true to our principles, liberalism would reign triumphant, and all Americans would recognize this development as a blessing. [my emphasis]

Politics is about conflict. So the idea of the "end of history," and its direct predecessor of an earlier decade, the "end of ideology," didn't actually assume that all conflict in politics and government would end. Only that any fundamental question that called into question the legitimacy of capitalism, or even opposed a welfare-state concept to the neoliberal one, was unacceptable and had to fade away.

But the corporate interests and the radical right were not willing to pretend that history had completely ended. What the End of History meant substantively was the collapse of the center-left parties as defenders of the welfare state. We saw that with the Democratic Party in the US, with the social-democratic parties in most of Europe. The process occurred as well, at a more accelerated pace, in much of Latin America. When it came to fundamental economic issues, and to political measures associated with the welfare state, in practice it was a one-sided surrender.

Santel describes how Obama's conception of bipartsanship played directly into the Republicans' plans to further rig the system to the benefit of the One Percent:

Even Obama in his more combative moods – during his 2011 speech on economic inequality at Osawatomie, Kansas, for instance – hardly drew lines in the sand, lest he disprove his own argument that we can move beyond partisanship. The first task of his speeches was always to convince Americans that they were in basic agreement on the ends of government, long after the GOP’s actions had made clear that this simply was not true. Obama often talked of politics as requiring compromise. “The point is, you need allies in a democracy,” he told graduates at Howard University’s commencement last year.

But what happens when those you would court as your allies cast themselves as your enemies? What happens when your opponents not only disagree with you, but harbor a completely different understanding of America’s founding principles? What happens when they not only challenge you, but question your legitimacy? What happens when they flock to a leader who calls into question the very pillars of democracy itself: a free press, the rule of law, and an educated citizenry?

Late in his Presidency, Santel observes, Obama made at least rhetorical admissions about the failure of his bipartisan vision:

His final speeches sounded notes of uncharacteristic somberness. In his final State of the Union (not included in this collection), Obama called increasing partisan rancor “one of the few regrets of my presidency.” At the memorial service for five Dallas police officers killed last summer, he said, “I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been.”

And Santel calls the following passage from Obama's last address to the United Nations "a meditation on history as a tragic cycle, rather than an arc, steadily bending toward justice," the latter being a phrase of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s that Obama often evoked, in Obama's case as a soothing reassurance that history always progressed in a favorable way:

Let me conclude by saying that I recognize history tells a different story than the one that I’ve talked about here today. There’s a much darker and more cynical view of history that we can adopt. Human beings are too often motivated by greed and by power. Big countries for most of history have pushed smaller ones around. Tribes and ethnic groups and nation states have very often found it most convenient to define themselves by what they hate and not just those ideas that bind them together. ... Perhaps that’s our fate.

But even in that passage, it's notable that Obama called that alternative to his bipartisan notion of politics without ideological conflict "a much darker and more cynical view of history that we can adopt." Even in that moment of seeming insight in the flaw of making Bipartisanship itself a goal of one party when the other party had a more traditional idea of politics as conflict, Obama treats it with a postmodern flourish as an optional narrative. Not a recognition that the end of history and the end of ideology is a long way from having arrived.

Meanwhile, Obama has gone from the Presidency to offering end-of-ideology speech to Wall Street audiences at $400,000 a pop. For the few leaders that can steer left-of-center parties into corporate-friendly positions, there can be big paydays. Even when they leave their own party is a drastically damaged condition, as we have with the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2016 elections. Or maybe we should say, especially when they leave the left-of-center party in such a state.

Free riders on the Trump wagon

Cenk Uygur reports on a Trump voter now having second thoughts in Trump Voters Now Regretting That Decision The Young Turks 03/20/2017

There has been a lot of commentary lately on how the Mean Libruls are thinking mean thoughts about Trump voters and saying mean things about them. One of the strangest I've seen is this interview with Van Jones, conducted by saac Chotiner, Don’t Become the Thing You’re Fighting Slate 03/16/2017. He does pretty much a straight-up liberal concern-troll schtick there.

Conor Lynch weighs in taking much the same tack in The smug style in American liberalism: It’s not helping, folks — but there’s a better way Salon 03/20/2017. And while he does make at least a vague pitch for more prolabor policies and positions from the Democratic Party, he rolls out this trope that old enough that it's seriously getting long in the tooth, "It is smug, however, to disparage people for 'voting against their interests' when in reality both parties have failed to adequately address the real problems facing poor and working-class communities across America today."

I'm sure there are some very rare exceptions, but every party and every candidate in every election tries to convince potential swing voters that voting for my side is in your interest more than voting for the other side. And twentysomething Republican zealots will be more than happy to explain to you why it's in your interest to dump Social Security and just save for retirement on your own, instead. Zeal for this position does seem to diminish with age, though.

What the case of the woman in the video report brings to mind for me is the kind of free rider problem we see in protest voting. There's not much actual information from the woman in the report about the various factors that may have shaped her voting behavior. But someone who's dependent on the ACA/Obamacare for access to health insurance, or on Meals on Wheels like the woman on which Cenk's report focuses, was voting against an important interest of their own in supporting Donald Trump and the Republicans, all of whom made it clear that doing away with the ACA was a top priority for them.

But hindsight is 20-20, as they say. Trump did say he would "repeal and replace" Obamacare. And the replacement would be HUUUGELY better. And there may have been other considerations that would have made many voters go for Trump even if they new they were going to be personally disadvantaged.

Here's one way the Democrats need to make a major change in their approach and more directly defend the value of government. Lots of people probably don't realize the large role federal assistance plays in programs like Meals on Wheels or Planned Parenthood. Obama and the Democrats sold the ACA largely as an improvement to private insurance market. Which it was. But the Democrats don't do the best job of defending their own signature programs.

It was not only bad policy but serious political malpractice, for example, for Obama to push repeatedly for cuts to Social Security and Medicare as part of his concept of a Grand Bargain. His continued push for "fiscal responsibility," i.e., obsessing over the budget deficit when the economy was recovering from the crash of 2008, is also a major problem for the Democrats to continue to stress. Republicans clearly don't actually care about the deficit. So they will be happy to press for massive tax cuts for the wealthiest and an "infrastructure" program designed to be a bonanza for financial speculators. And they will turn around a demand more cuts to education and basic civilian government because the deficit explodes.

The Democrats should stop, just stop helping the Republicans play this game by promoting the idea that the deficit is something to worry about.

Obama's legacy at the dawn of the Trump Family Business Presidency

Just as the Obama Presidency is in its last hours, Democracy presents William Galston's helpful look at Obama’s Uncertain Legacy 01/17/2017.

Galston emphasizes that the stimulus package of 2009, the auto bailout and the stabilization of the US banking system were substantial and very important accomplishments. They allowed the US economy to come back from the 2007-8 crash more strongly than the eurozone was able to under Angela Merkel's Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economic policies.

Galston also notes the critical fact that Obama and the Democratic Party were unable to turn Obama's popularity into a similar popularity and success for the Democratic Party:

If President Obama’s policy legacy is in doubt, his political legacy is not. The coalition that elected him twice turned out to be as much personal as structural. Despite his strenuous efforts, he was unable to transfer enough of the support he enjoyed from minorities, young adults, and even the white working class outside the South to elect his chosen successor.

Hillary Clinton’s narrow loss exposed a basic reality — the pervasive weakening of the Democratic Party during the eight Obama years, in part because the party machinery stepped away from its party-building mission. Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have disappeared and seem unlikely to return until at least 2020. Republicans have seized control of governorships and state legislatures across the country. Numerically, the party is at its lowest ebb since the 1920s.[my emphasis]

Al Jazeera's Empire program also presents a look at Obama's outgoing Presidency, The Reckoning: From Obama to Trump 01/19/2017:

Obama's legacy: Ukraine and Syria

Obama’s failure to stand up to this neocon/liberal-hawk foreign-policy elite over Syria and Ukraine may well define his historical legacy. He allowed the Syrian conflict to escalate with shipments of U.S. weapons to rebels both directly and indirectly adding to the country’s carnage. Obama also acquiesced to the provocative overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president on Russia’s border and allowed the crisis to escalate into a risky stand-off with nuclear-armed Russia.

So writes Robert Perry in Trump’s Need to Trust Americans Consortium News 12/21/2016.

If the title seems like an impossible wish, it's because it is. But Perry is using the stock technique of giving advice in a disinterested tone to an incoming President. Even though in this case the chance of the advice being followed is somewhat smaller than that of the proverbial snowball in Hell.

But in a later piece, The Good That Trump Could Do 12/23/2016, he spins a really optimistic scenario in which Trump challenges "the neocon/liberal-hawk establishment that rules the roost of Washington’s foreign policy."

I don't see any clear signs that Trump's crew is going to be fulfilling such optimistic hopes.

"The Stream" on Obama's Legacy

There is already a lot of coverage of Obama's legacy, which will presumably intensify over the next month until the new President takes office.

Al Jazeera English's The Stream take a 25 minute look at Barack Obama's legacy 12/21/2016 with six different writers, including Sarah Jaffe, Mychal Denzel Smith, Michael Days, Trevor Thrall, Karen Attiah and Vijay Prashad:

Sarah Jaffe is one of my favorite political writers. But just after 10:15, she sends me into fingers-on-the-blackboard mode with, "the environment that Hitler rose out of was a massive, massive inflation crisis."

This is a zombie idea very popular with Americans. The infamous hyperinflation in Germany was mainly in in 1923-4, resolved in early 1924. Karl Schleunes' article on that period in the "Germany" entry of the trusty Britannica 2015 observes, "Although the inflation was rooted in the huge debt that Germany had amassed in financing its war effort, the hyperinflation of 1923 was triggered by the French-Belgian military occupation in January 1923 of the German industrial district in the Ruhr valley." It was directly related to the popular cause in Germany of opposing the occupation of the industrial German Ruhr district by France that began in 1923.

The political facts in this table from Peter Gay in his The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952), p. 209, have yet to put this zombie idea to rest. The Nazis (National Socialists in this table) pulled 0.9 million votes in 1924, a smaller vote of 0.8 million in 1928, then jumped to 6.4 million in 1930 and to 13.7 million in July of 1932, then down to 11.7 million in November 1932.

There was one more semi-free election in Germany in early 1933 after Hitler became Chancellor, but there was considerable political repression already in motion and that vote total isn't so meaningful, which is presumably the reason it wasn't shown on Gay's chart.

So, there was a very dramatic hyperinflation in 1923-4. It was stabilized and did not recur. Then, six years later in 1930, the Nazi vote shot up 800% from 1928 - because people suddenly got really upset about the 1923-4 hyperinflation? Or could the onset of the Great Depression, massive unemployment and deflation, and the Merkel-like austerity policies of Chacnellor Heinrich Brüning have had some affect on that voting outcome?

I'm certainly tempted to think so.

BTW, that decline in the NSDAP (Nazi) vote from July to November of 1932 was 15%.

Al Jazeera English calls the program the first in a series. (And it really is about Obama, not about prewar German politics.)

It's obvious that the fact of who and what his successor is will weigh heavily on our evaluations of Obama's Presidency, now and in the future.

Today's PBS Newshour 12/21/2016 has an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, How Obama’s unique background shaped his outlook on race. It's informative, though the video segment strikes me as a bit on the hagiographic side: