The Obama Administration, Valerie Jarrett and the Owl of Minerva

When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in.

- G. W. F. Hegel, "Preface," Philosophy of Right

Just dropped out of the blue, that comment sounds obscure. But what he meant was that major turning points in history cannot be fully recognized or understood until after they've happened. Some of Hegel's successors were more confident in their ability to recognize historical turning points in real time or even predict them in advance. Hegel himself didn't completely escape the dilemma of whether correctly understanding the past allows one to reasonably predict the future. In any case, he was talking about major historical turning points, like the transition from the Roman Empire to the European medieval feudal system.

What has reminded me of his famous saying lately is my own observation that President Obama with a series of bad decisions culminating in the debt-ceiling deal at the end of July has severely crippled his own Presidency and probably fatally wounded his own re-election prospects.

But I'm not staking a lot on whether I'm correctly understanding some grand turning point. I'll leave that to the Owl of Minerva. But it is clear to me that what we understand as the progressive movement in the United States right now, including what Paul Wellstone called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," is now faced with a Democratic President actively hostile to its goals, including in particular Social Security and Medicare. Whatever window there was in 2009-10 for democratic reforms and progressive legislation has been enormously reduced. There will be no New Deal 2.0 with Barack Obama as President.

In the wake of the debt-ceiling debacle, we're seeing a spate of articles and blog posts making an effort to understand the magnitude and significance of the crushing defeat the Democratic Party and progressive politics has just suffered. It's also clear that Obama is what we would call a conservative if the Tea Party loonies weren't defining what "conservative" means in the US political vocabulary.

Adam Serwer in Is Obama Toast? The American Prospect 08/02/2011 describes the substantial pessimistic indicators for Obama's re-election in 2012 are. But he does remind us that prediction is very tricky, especially when it's about the future:

Grim forecasts aside, Obama has two important advantages: He retains levels of base approval higher than presidents facing bad economies usually do, and many Americans still blame Bush for the recession. Come election time, though, voters may simply decide that even if the recession isn't Obama’s fault, he still failed to get us out of it. The presidency is not graded on a curve. Even assuming Republican intransigence and obstruction have given Obama the most challenging political landscape ever for a Democratic president, what matters is whether voters feel like he did what he was elected to do: Bring the American economy back from the brink.

And he notes ruefully, "Luck, unfortunately, isn’t much of a plan."

Bob Burnett takes stock of the factually marginalized position of progressives/liberals in Obama: It Became Necessary to Destroy the Economy to Save It Huffington Post 08/05/2011:

We've now seen at least five examples where Obama had an opportunity to make a real difference and lost it by being overly accommodating: the amount of the original stimulus, whether or not to break up "too-big-to-fail" banks, health care, the federal budget crisis, and the debt crisis. (It's probably true that the president caved to the military on Afghanistan, but we don't know as much about that negotiation.) In the debt crisis negotiation, Republicans got what they wanted because the president was soft. ...

The fifth and final lesson is that the economy continues to be in bad shape and -- despite the Pollyannaish assurances of the Obama Administration -- we're likely to find ourselves in the dreaded "double dip" recession. The United States of America is adrift, heading for a sea of icebergs, without effective leadership. ...

The bottom line for Liberals: we're on our own. It's naïve to expect help from President Obama. The economy will continue to spiral downward and Liberals will have to figure out how to save it. [my emphasis]

The cast-adrift imagery is an appropriate one for the state of the left of the Democratic Party at the moment - with "left" now including anyone who seriously supports Social Security and Medicare!

And if you really want to feel depressed about the state of the Democratic Party, you can turn to Valerie Jarrett, Obama's domestic advisor, who is the living image of a bland Party apparatchik and who explains to us Why I'm Proud to Be Part of President Obama's Team Huffington Post 08/05/2011. Valerie Jarrett is to inspiration for Democratic activists what a lecture on hydrogen molecules would be to a high school pep rally: "Today, President Obama is managing our nation's challenges with the courage, wisdom, and compassion that I've seen time and time again over our two decades of friendship." With Party leaders like Valerie Jarrett, we are doomed. Check this out:

He knows that true leaders never let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

And the Emancipation Proclamation was mainly about compromise with slaveowners.

Every day, he receives letters and emails from Americans who are doing everything in their power to solve the tremendous challenges they face. As long as President Obama is in the White House, he will listen to those Americans, and they will have a voice here in Washington.

And if you put a baby tooth under your pillow, the Tooth Fairy will exchange it for money during the night!

None of these fights has been politically easy, but President Obama has taken them on. That's what leaders do.

Come 2013, Jarrett has a fine career ahead of her as a TV pundit.

President Obama is determined to change the tone in our nation's capital.

What, he's determined to wipe out the last traces of anything that sounds like a distinctively Democratic message?

He will listen to those with whom he disagrees, because that ability "to disagree without being disagreeable" has always been a central element of our democracy's success.

And those you supposedly agree with him, i.e., his own Party's base voters, he will brag about making them angry by dumping on them again and again. I think his speechwriters are working on a paraphrase of a famous passage from Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 "Rendezvous With Destiny" speech for his 2012 campaign: "The liberals are united in their hate for me, and I.Welcome.Their.Hatred!"

At a time when a troubling coarseness pervades our national debate, it is easy to be discouraged. But recently, I was reminded of why hope more is powerful than fear.

If at this point in her spiel, you don't have a strong urge to break down weeping, you probably aren't a real Democrat at all.

In our current debate over debt and deficits, Americans once again urged their leaders to choose compromise and common ground over partisanship and dysfunction.

They also urged their leaders to reject cuts in Social Security and Medicare. That didn't play out so well. (Yes, that link is to Republican talking points whose screaming hypocrisy will not stop them from being used over and over again from now until Election Day 2012.)

These stories of ordinary Americans standing up for their beliefs inspire the president. They motivate him to continue speaking out on behalf of those who would otherwise go unheard.

To quote Linda Blair being tormented by an evil spirit in The Exorcist, "Make it stop! Make it stop!"

Years from now, when we look back on these tumultuous times, we may be surprised by the pettiness of our debate, and by the cynicism of some of those in Washington.

[deep sobs and a wail or two]

Our president is truly the kind of leader these times demand. I could not be prouder to be a part of his team.

Are those the wings of the Owl of Minerva I hear? Or the approaching sounds of a Michele Bachmann Administration?

Tags: obama administration, valerie jarrett

The unbearable Valerie Jarrett and the Obama Administration

White House staffers are not known for their great humility. But even by those standards, Obama's chief domestic policy advisor Valerie Jarrett stands out for her bland, glib smugness, as in her Meet the Press appearance of 12/26/2010.

The woman always sounds like she's reciting a memorized press release. It's hard to imagine anyone who would have more of the combined effect of not sounding convincing to opponents, of sounding clueless to labor and generally unappealling to base Democrats or independent voters. I haven't seen any polls focused on Jarrett's effectiveness. So maybe there's some hard core of Jarrett fans; a gathering of such a group would have to be insomnia-producing in the extreme.

It's worth noting what Elizabeth Drew says about Obama's circle of advisers in In the Bitter New Washington New York Review of Books 11/22/2010 (12/23/2010 issue). I always put a heavy discount on complaints that Presidents have too insular a group of advisers. Because an important part of executive skill is to maintain effective filters on the information they receive; some do it better than others. But the fact that Jarrett, who seems to be incapable of a thought not expressed in terms of the current White House press releases of the moment, is disturbing:

Once they got to the White House, Obama and his campaign team (virtually all of his top assistants) seemed to live in a hermetically sealed box—cut off from and not interested in what was going on outside, or what experienced people who tried to help them had to say. No one could dispute the fact that Obama was a good family man who dined with his wife and children each night and then turned to his briefing papers. To the extent that the Obamas went out in Washington, it was on their "date night," or, so far as is known, to the Georgetown apartment of their close friend Valerie Jarrett, who also works at the White House. True, the Beltway isn't the country, but there are people here who could have helped the Obama team navigate its shark-filled waters. [my emphasis]

Tags: barack obama, obama administration, valerie jarrett

Netroots Nation Day Three

This year's Netroots Nation conference was a great event. I learned a lot, gained some new perspectives and got a chance to meet and talk with a number of pleasant and interesting people. The parties were fun, too!

And one event was really sobering.

Barack Obama's Senior Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement Valerie Jarrett was interviewed as the first event on the third and last day of Netroots Nation 2009 by comedian (!) Baratunde Thurston.

The next three paragraphs are slightly adapted versions of what I posted at the Netroots Nation Facebook page just after the presentation, assuming that the people immediately reading them would have seen the presentation. I was surprised to see that my grumpy comments about the Jarrett appearance were some of the few put up at the NN Facebook page. But that's okay, I don't mind their being visible there. Thurston's questions were total softballs. About the only challenging question she got was when someone shouted from the audience about why did we still have Blackwater contracts. Her answer was a complete dodge. She didn't engage his question directly at all. Either then or just after, a few people hissed at one of her answers. So, here was my immediate reaction.

That Valerie Jarrett presentation was just awful. The moderator was even worse. He spent the first half hour with absolute fluff questions. David Gregory on Meet the Press asks better questions, the moderator was that bad! When he said, "Hissing's just not cool", that was the absolute dumbest moment I saw at NN 09. That's normal crowd reaction from an engaged audience. What, did he expect us to show awed deference to the King's Regent? Any administration member who's too important to hear crowd disapproval should not go out and speak in public. Nobody was trying to hoot her down. If she can't take that kind of mild feedback, she should stay in her office where I'm sure there are plenty of sycophants who will always tell her how wonderful her every word is.

Hey, I know part of the game was to show the administration taking heat on C-SPAN from those scary liberal bloggers. But it's pitiful when such a senior Presidential adviser appears before Netroots Nation and the moderator spends the first half or so of her time asking her questions that would be embarrassingly easy softballs even in People magazine. And his policy questions were equally poor, i.e., gee, do you think green jobs are a good idea? That presentation by both the moderator and by Jarrett was downright insulting to the audience.

One last thing on the Valerie Jarrett fluff presentation. I'm sure Obama really is brilliant and absorbs a tremendous amount of information. But that's the same thing business publications say about every CEO when their stock is high and they haven't yet bankrupted and/or looted the company. It was pure fluff. Unless they are going to be asked substantive questions, there's really no point to have an administration official there to say we want you to support us but, golly, Obama's not going to pressure Blue Dogs trying to kill health care reform. But don't anyone hiss from the audience, geepers, that's not polite. That was a really sad event.

The comment that someone left there under the name "Netroots Nation" was telling:

I'm sorry you feel that way Bruce, but she didn't have to come here and answer questions and she covered quite a wide range of topics. You might not have liked the answers but she answered a lot of questions. And with respect to hissing, we at NN always treat our speakers with respect while they are on stage. This isn't some townhall where you just get to shout down people.

In words, just like the late Timmy Russert or today's David Gregory of Meet the Press, we need to avoid hard questions to preserve that precious "access".

It was plainly obvious that no one was trying to shout her down. Not even remotely. Baratunde Thurston's remark was an excess of prissiness. The contrast between that and the way Bill Clinton engaged the person who shouted out a question Thursday night was pretty dramatic. The questions asked of Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak Friday were notably better than the softballs he tossed to Valerie Jarrett.

And, by the way, I wasn't one of the people hissing. Though I did grumble to the people at the table with me a few times.

Jarrett really came off sounding like she didn't give a rip what people in that audience thought. I've been thinking and hoping that Obama was actually expecting the Democratic base to create pressure for reform and give him political cover for embracing such reforms. Jarrett's speech left me thinking instead that it's seriously possible that Obama and his administration really think the Democratic base is just a pain in the rear. It was sobering, I would say. I doubt anyone came out of hearing that speech feeling energized or encouraged by her presentation. She said a few times that we could really help spread the word on this or that. But it was more like she was issuing directives to a bunch of Party operatives rather than trying to convince us that Obama was really on the side of serious reform.

I want to be more specific on the issues she did address. Unfortunately, once we got passed the People magazine half, Thurston's questions were so broad that all she needed to do was recite her talking points. The idea was that he had accumulated questions submitted online. But this was a good illustration of how online participation can be transmuted into pseudo-participation by the filter (Thurston) cherry-picking the questions and presenting them in a vague or pandering manner.

Jarrett did talk about why health care was important and reiterated that Obama supports the public option. But when Thurston asked a question about whether Obama would pressure the Blue Dogs to support his plan, Jarrett said no, he wouldn't. In this case, Thurston presented the question as whether Obama would tell specific Blue Dogs they wouldn't get their favorite projects approved if they didn't support the Democratic position on health care reform. That made the question into a softball in that she could say no, Obama wouldn't do that. But Thurston didn't follow it up by asking what kind of pressure Obama would be bringing. The distinct impression Jarrett left was that Obama wouldn't be doing a blinking thing to try to get the Blue Dogs to support the public plan in health care reform.

One question was about releasing the suppressed torture photos that had been scheduled to be released in May. Jarrett repeated the Obama line which, sad to say, is the same as the Bush line, which is that it would endanger The Troops. It looks to me that the only thing suppressing those photos is intended to do is to prevent them from being used to to bring more domestic and international pressure to prosecute the torture perpetrators for known crimes. Do I even need to mention that Thurston didn't bother to ask her about prosecuting the torturers?

When Baratunde asked her if Obama responded to pressure from base activists like those represented at Netroots Nation, Jarrett responded that Obama responds to pressure from everywhere! That's what worries a lot of Democrats right now. That was one of the responses that communicated to me that she didn't much care what that particular group thought.

Baratunde did ask her about foreign policies. She told us that things in Darfur are bad. And that we care about hunger in Africa.

If the words "Iraq" or "Afghanistan" were uttered during that interview, I failed to catch them. Since Baratunde spent half the interview asked her dopey question about does it fell cool to be working in the White House and so on, that's pretty pitiful.

Sad to see. But important for people to understand. If we want the right kind of reforms to happen, the people who want those reforms will have to create the pressure to force it to happen. In the case of health care reform, it means supporting the Progressive Caucus in their stated determination to stand firm on the public option.

But Valerie Jarrett is supposedly Obama's most trusted advisor. And what is she most likely to tell him about the reaction to her presentation at the Netroots Nation convention? My guess would be that she'll tell him that the crowd was polite except for a few naughty people who dared hiss to indicate they disagreed with something she said. Otherwise, that didn't seem to be too worried about Iraq or Afghanistan or torture or that concerned about pressuring the Blue Dogs on health care reform. And that she told everyone the message she expected us to deliver to blog readers.

One last thing on Baratunde's prissy comment about the hissing. One of the things that the Tea Partiers have been saying is that the Democrats are trying to suppress their freedom of speech. It sure sounded to me like he was telling that convention of progressive bloggers who generally pride themselves on being critical thinkers and not being passively reverent like the Republicans generally were with Bush that it was shocking that they should dare express their disapproval to a senior member of the administration. I can only imagine what some veteran of the Freedom Rides or the antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s would say if they heard that.

Tags: netroots nation 2009, valerie jarrett