Pragmatism doesn't preclude dramatic change

An article by the progressive author and media critic Norman Solomon, "The Ideology of No Ideology" (http://www.truthout.org/112608R), notes that many pundits' characterization of President-elect Obama's appointments as reflecting "pragmatism" rather than ideology can't really be accurate, since the people selected certainly have ideas. Then he goes on to shed doubt about the past ideas of some appointees, claiming that Treasury nominee Timothy Geithner and economic advisor Lawrence Summers favored the deregulation of corporate power that brought on the present financial meltdown. In these remarks, Solomon joins many on the left who have begun to measure the ideological inseam of Obama's appointees and question their suitability for service to Obama -- as if Obama were not the best judge of that.

The fact of the matter is that Barack Obama's appointments have -- every one of them so far -- been relentlessly technocratic. He has chosen people who know how the present system works, before assembling a full team with whom he says he wants to change it. If he recruited people who did not know how to restructure the nation's financial system, which is necessarily dependent on private capital formation and private employment, American economic power would go right down the drain -- and nothing progressive would be done for the rest of Obama's time in office, because there would be no public resources to draw upon. The nation is having an unprecedented financial crisis. When you're in a ship and a storm comes up, you want a crew around the captain who've been through storms before. Noam Chomsky is not going to be able to advise Obama about how to revive the nation's mortgage credit system.

But if technocratic appointments are a form of pragmatism in the midst of crisis, it does not follow that knowledgeable pragmatists will merely acquiesce to the prevailing arrangements of economic power or any other dimension of the existing system. That might be the tendency in calm seas, but getting a ship to shore when it otherwise might sink can make pragmatic sailors take extraordinary measures.

To imply that a pragmatic imperative cannot override a decision-maker's favorite ideas or that a true pragmatist may be empty of useful ideas -- both of which Solomon argues -- overlooks the political reasons for Obama's explicit preference for technical intelligence above partisan or ideological attachments in choosing people to help him cope not only with the present economic crisis, but also with the crisis in international confidence in American policy-making, and the decline that has become visible in the nation's scientific, educational and physical infrastructure. The recent election produced a leader who many Americans still regard as startling and largely unfamiliar. Obama knows that better than anyone. In order to enlarge and consolidate his perceived mandate to govern and expand the popular acceptance of the changes that he says he wants to make, it makes perfect sense to enlarge the strategic and tactical capacities of the group he's assembling to govern and thus boost the public's confidence in his government.

Less than a quarter of Americans according to the exit polls on November 4 said they were "liberal", much less progressive. That was markedly less than those who said they are conservative, even though the majority leans toward specific policies that anyone would recognize as progressive (e.g. for public investment in infrastructure and human resources, against involvement in foreign wars unless homeland security is at stake). Obama has said he wants to transcend if not historically subvert the entire mainstream-media discourse about liberal and conservative, left and right -- in order to assemble a new, enduring majority for policies that his most fervent supporters believe are more progressive than they are centrist, much less conservative. One way to do that, until serious change is underway, is to embrace pragmatism -- the determination to "get 'er done" -- which has not only strong roots in popular discourse but also in American political philosophy (and constitutional jurisprudence, with which Obama is not unacquainted). In this context, the larger economic crisis, while painful and fraught with risk to the nation, is a historic opportunity.

Bearing in mind this context, let's examine the political basis of the selections of Joe Biden as vice president, Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Secretary of State, and Rahm Emmanuel as White House Chief of Staff, each of whom has been roundly criticized from the left as being too likely to favor the use of military power in a foreign crisis. Going in reverse order: Rahm Emmanuel is not known primarily for foreign policy expertise. He started out as a fund raiser for Illinois political candidates, became an inside campaign operative, and then decided to run for Congress himself. Lots of people in politics start out as a "process" person, and about lots of them it can charitably be said that they are reliable party line followers, vote so as to please their constituency, or tack toward interests that fund their campaigns. Their votes in Congress tend not to enforce deeply held principles. Rahm Emmanuel has been accused of sympathizing with Israeli hawks. But as an American politician first and foremost, he is extremely unlikely to be a peddler of military intervention for its own sake inside the Obama White House; he's only likely to point out the political consequences of option A vs. option B. That he will be Obama's chief of staff should tell us that Obama does not want substantive foreign policy direction from his chief of staff.

Hillary Clinton has policy interests and great intelligence, sufficient to supply her with a substantive philosophy. Does she have one? Over the years her discourse has been all over the map, having taken political positions that have either given her prominence at the moment or that situated herself in a well-protected spot in the public debate. But because she was excoriated by the right-wing throughout her husband's presidency as being an extreme liberal, she began her service in the Senate wanting to wrap the national-security cloak around herself in order to counteract that charge and, and more importantly, develop the reputation of being tough enough to be president, because she would be the first serious woman presidential candidate in history. If there was going to be a way for her to back a military intervention at about the time of the Iraq war, it's possible that her opportunism would have driven her to it. Does that make her likely to favor war in all circumstances? No. Unlike Joe Lieberman, she never spent time smooching up the neo-cons or writing bellicose op-eds in The Wall Street Journal. If Obama picks her for the State Department, it will be because he thinks her global recognizability and kerosene-and-pitchfork personality will help sober up any ornery dictators or state sponsors of terrorism who he sends her to deal with. She'll make Condoleeza Rice look like a drum majorette. But to become a heroine as Secretary of State will require enormous diplomatic strides, even a major peace agreement. To make history from Foggy Bottom, you can't defer too quickly to wars planned across the river.

Joe Biden is more knowledgeable about foreign policy than Clinton, but also more embedded in the weeds of it to such an extent that his rationales for particular positions and programs often begin to sound incoherent. He knows too much and says too much and can't sell much of it to anybody. He was picked as Obama's running mate for other reasons: (1) Other possible nominees that Obama reportedly liked more would have been pounded by the media as inexperienced on the national stage (Sebelius, Kaine) or too conservative and dull (Bayh); and (2) Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and would therefore be Exhibit A against the expected McCain charge that Obama wasn't ready to be in the White House. Also Obama liked his personal narrative and commitment to family (very big things for Obama). How Biden stood on the war in Iraq or even the overall vector of his views on foreign policy did not seem to factor at all into Obama's choice of him. Biden will be in the room when major foreign policy decisions are influenced or made, but he will not have his thumb on the scale.

Could Obama have chosen people for these positions who would be more progressive on key issues and still have delivered equivalent political advantages? That's far from clear. But what is crystal clear is that as progressives think about opportunities to make their case against any problematic nominees or against particular suggested courses of action by the new president, they should make sure their views are seen as a reasoned and serious analysis, rather than as pique about a loss of ideological purity. Analysis based on criticizing Obama's embrace of pragmatism at a time of national crisis is self-marginalizing. If progressives want to help the inner progressive in Obama to emerge more readily, they should not start their relationship with him by denouncing him for doing things that he may have other, extremely good political reasons for doing and which will not inhibit or preclude an eventual progressive direction from the preponderance of what he does.

Thus far, not only is Obama getting good "process knowledge" in his earliest appointees, he's also scoring so highly with the mainstream media and policy community, that his ability to summon and sustain political force, so as to work his will with Congress, Wall Street and "main street" will be unprecedented for a new president since Lyndon Johnson in January 1965. He is not trying to build such a formidable position of power in order to do timid, incremental things or to do the bidding of those who created the present crisis and did nothing to get him elected. Marxist blogs are alive with charges that Obama is a caged pigeon of capitalists, but Marxist blogs are written in Fantasyland.

Barack Obama wants to consolidate his electoral mandate and govern from strength -- in an age when a fickle media can pound the living daylights out of the public's perception of a president. Remember how George W. Bush went from Hero of the War on Terror, to Incompetent Buffoon, in two years flat? He was neither -- he simply refused to pay attention to reality, jammed his way forward on the basis of an arrogant ideology, and in the process did historic damage to the nation's economy and world position, which finally not even the mainstream media could ignore. That's one way that ideology can most definitely matter, but perhaps not in the way that Norman Solomon would recommend.

Plea to the chattering class...

The estimable Arianna Huffington has a new post on her blog in which she claims that the rumored nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has had "an enormous effect" on Barack Obama's "brand." She then speculates about what famous novelists of the past might have done with this gripping drama. Excuse me: I think everyone with access to a blog would do well to set aside the "brands", "memes", and "narratives" which they believe define the identity and opportunities of our elected leaders. Barack Obama defined reality on November 4 when he won a popular-vote victory larger than any previous presidential nominee who was not an incumbent. Teeth-gnashing about Hillary Clinton, caterwauling from National Review editors in love with Sarah Palin, post-election tantrums about media coverage from Time magazine's Mark Halperin, and all the rest of the psycho-drama from the chattering political class will have a shelf-life of maybe two hours, if we'd all just start focusing on the concrete realities of what is happening to the American economy and what the newly elected president is going to do about it. The nation has borrowed the price of its future from Chinese banks, the outgoing president is a laughing-stock, and the meter is still running on two wars where Americans are dying on dusty roads. Can we please, then, stop speculating about who leaked what to whom about Hillary -- and stop paying attention to those who do?

Obama's "post-partisan" style helps him, not Republicans

From a Comment on Hullabaloo, digby's blog, 11/24/08, "Crisis Management":

digby is right to reassure us that Obama's pragmatism will not affirm the irrational fears of our friends on the left that he'll govern from the "center right", since pragmatism dictates boldness in clearing away the misguided policies from the right that have created the present crises. But she shouldn't be worried either about Obama's feints to exhibit bipartisanship -- for that is what they are. Commander of the bully pulpit already, he will govern with decisive majorities in both houses of Congress and a probable sky-high approval rating as he takes office. Because he doesn't need to be bipartisan in function or reality, being bipartisan in tone and gesture will make any Republicans who haven't been Palinized grateful to share any photo-ops with him -- because, wanting to be re-elected themselves, they know they will not have any coherent strategy for substantive opposition, in the middle of national crises, for the foreseeable future. They are peering over the edge into a political abyss. To be pulled back by the new president himself will put them in his pocket. It is cost-free for Obama to embrace bipartisanship -- or really, to be post-partisan -- at a time when he dominates the stage, because he can dictate its terms.

The cynicism of Bush's press secretary

From PoliticalWire.com, 11/24/08:

Quote of the Day

"I'll give you eight months." -- White House press secretary Dana Perino, quoted by the Washington Post, on how long the "glowing press" will continue for President-elect Obama.

Comment by Tribunus Plebis:

There is as much cynicism and arrogance as ignorance in this remark by Dana Perino, for these reasons. First, she clearly believes that negative media coverage received by a president is at some point automatic, rather than based on a president's performance. To the extent it's automatic, that means her boss, W., got negative media through no fault of his own. (She'd obviously like to believe that, since her daily veneration of her boss seems to be coming from an alternate universe in which he has not in fact botched most aspects of his presidency.) Second, it's presumptuous if not arrogant for her to assume that Obama's ability to govern in a way that doesn't trigger the usual inside-the-Beltway attacks is no greater than any other politician -- she is essentially devaluing his ability to do better than the norm. Third, given the multiple crises facing the nation, and the consequent greater unpredictability of events, she has utterly no idea what might condition media coverage of Obama (other than his own performance) in eight months' time. So her remark, like most everything else from the Bush White House in the past eight years, was simultaneously glib, dismissive and simply wrong.

Enough About the "Team of Rivals"

The pundits and mainstream media have overworked the "Team of Rivals" meme -- that President-elect Obama might like to copy Lincoln's inclusion in his Cabinet of his former political rivals. This idea comes from Doris Kearns Goodwin's book of that name, which Obama reportedly liked, although the book is not a reason to copy the idea -- it was overwritten, repetitious, and chock full of irrelevant details (e.g. about Mary Todd Lincoln's shopping sprees and the soirees of Salmon Chase's daughter). Moreover, the book's theme -- that Lincoln recruited his former opponents as his advisors -- was first noticed when he did it 148 years ago; it's not some blinding new historical insight.

The reality is that there are huge differences between 1860 and 2008 that limit the relevance of this analogy. First, in 1860, the political class (Governors, Senators, nationally experienced politicians) was far smaller than it is today. The professional talent pool available to Lincoln (a man of towering intelligence, who wanted to be challenged by his colleagues) was by today's standards very modest -- and half of it had just seceded to form the confederacy. Lincoln would have been foolish to overlook his rivals if they were talented, as was clearly the case with Seward. But today enormously talented potential Cabinet secretaries are ten times more numerous.

Second, the U.S. was plunging into a nation-rending internal conflict of unknown duration in 1860: Lincoln had to show that he was doing everything to unite diverse points of view within the remaining Union, if he expected to prevail in that conflict. Today our problems are severe but they are not similarly existential. Given the diverse, direct and instantaneous ways that a president can communicate with the nation, beyond having his statements and actions reported in newspapers (as was the case in 1860), a president doesn't need to use the composition of his Cabinet to show us that we can't allow our divisions to obstruct the effort to solve our problems.

Third, as ambitious politicians, Lincoln's Cabinet secretaries' rivalry with each other was as intense as their previous rivalry with him. Except within the precincts of his own heart, and occasionally with intimates, Lincoln was a man of preternatural serenity, unconcerned about back-stairs criticism from subordinates or their dislike of one another. He simply overlooked his Cabinet's animosities, so long as he could milk from them individually the kind of intelligence and productivity that managing a government in the middle of a civil war required. But today we live in a media-saturated age in which politicians have vast retinues of followers and flunkies who happily feed internal back-biting to an army of reporters and commentators. If Lincoln and his Cabinet had been subjected to this kind of scrutiny, their internal rivalries would have distracted the Union and possibly torn apart his administration's effectiveness.

In addition, because political rivals are politicians, that means they are generalists, usually without great specific expertise. Today the complexity of financial, industrial, environmental and international-security challenges require reservoirs of knowledge that elected politicians simply do not have time to acquire. The Cabinet room should have that knowledge inside the room, not sitting in offices back in the departments.

If one of President-elect Obama's former rivals for the presidential nomination is a superb choice on the merits to head a particular Cabinet department, he or she should be appointed. But not because assembling a "team of rivals" is good for its own sake.

The nation's real calling

Read the core of Vice President Dick Cheney's video endorsement today of John McCain:

"John is a man who understands the danger facing America. He's a man who has looked into the face of evil and not flinched. He's a man who's comfortable with responsibility and has been since he joined the armed forces at the age of 17....the time is now to make him commander-in-chief."

There is little rationale offered for electing McCain other than his supposed experience of looking "into the face of evil." Cheney is declaring that McCain shares his view, that bellicose confrontation with unnamed enemies is the chief role of the president. It is in fact a worldview which, when implemented with continuous use of military force, becomes self-fulfilling. Today the United States has more enemies in the world than at any time in its history, and Mr. Cheney -- through his decisive influence on George W. Bush -- bears much of the responsibility.

It may be helpful at this moment to remember some words from the Christian tradition, which is usually invoked by fearful conservatives to justify belligerent American actions in the world. In Chronicles, God does not urge his people to look into the face of evil, he says "seek my face, and turn from your wicked ways, then...I will heal your land." [emphasis added] St. Paul insisted: "Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good...See that no one renders evil for evil, but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men."

There is also this cautionary passage in Ecclesiastes: "There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, the sort of error which proceeds from the ruler. Folly is set in great dignity...He who digs a pit may fall into it; and whoever breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake." Indeed, throughout the entire Bible, most references to evil have nothing to do with battling or warring against it, but are injunctions to avoid practicing it yourself, promising that those who do justice, will receive justice.

Isaiah is the prophet who coined this memorable line: "Refuse the evil, and choose the good." Let me apply that to November 4: Let us refuse those who talk constantly of evil while ignoring the failures of their own actions. Let's choose those who say we can do better, who know that good will come to us only as we do the good work -- here and abroad -- that is our true calling as a people.