Day 56

It didn’t take 100 days to reveal that we didn’t get Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or William Jefferson Clinton, or Harry S. Truman, or even Dwight David Eisenhower. Yesterday, Day 56, when the outrage at the A.I.G. mess boiled over, may well go down as the turning point for the Obama Administration – and not in a good way.

This probably won’t show up in his individual poll numbers for awhile. But below that surface, my gut is that the public has crossed a mental line: Many still like him as a person, but collectively the public no longer trusts him to do this job or to protect our interests. In the asphalt jungle of the political playground, we’ve seen that he has neither the skills nor the courage to stand up to the big bad guys. We’ve seen that he blinks.

Starting last September 15, there have always, and obviously, been two dominant political realities to which the next administration would have to be adequate: the public’s fear, and the public’s anger. Fear was dominant at first. And the intended answer to that was the stimulus package. But anger – serious anger, legitimate anger… and also scary anger – was just waiting to coalesce. And the response to that needed to be to address the perception of a widespread failure of leadership.

On the question of fear – that is, with regard to the stimulus package – the right political move was to take the most extravagant proposal and double it. President Obama needed to reassure Americans – and, given how encumbered the rest of the world is in our economy, to reassure people and governments everywhere – that this ship was not going to sink on his watch, no matter what… that while we all might have to tighten our belts, we as individuals and as families would not be ruined while he was president.

He certainly didn’t get an A on that test. At best he got a B-, arguably lower. But he hasn’t used up all his options there. He can still come back for a second package. He’s been dancing around this, but that dance isn’t done yet.

On the question of anger, though, he has simply flunked. He flunked when he named Tim Geithner and Larry Summers – not because of their intellect, knowledge and skills, which are considerable, but because of their biographies.

When it comes to dealing with Wall St., the new administration needed to convey, in no uncertain terms, that it was going to throw the bums out, that a new sheriff was in town and he was one hard-ass sombitch. Obama needed to appoint a Rudy Giuliani type – somebody who everyone perceived as possessing (a) the expertise to understand the deals and the macroeconomics and the whole global system and (b) a long-held itch to ride herd on these types of people. (In Rudy’s case, of course, it was street criminals. In this case, it was Street criminals.)

This isn’t an issue of the immediate economic crisis. In that, as Tom Friedman (correctly, I believe) argues today (h/t Big Tent Democrat), we will need to accept some unfairness in the pursuit of survival. But politically, those two emotions are both important, and both had to be addressed. At the level of sowing basic trust, there needed to be zero ambiguity about whose side the administration’s economic team was on. That doesn’t mean being anti-business… but it does mean being anti-high-finance. It means supporting the needs of production capital and reining in the Wild West of financial capital. It means installing leaders who would go to bed at night and wake up the next morning thinking about how to make the system fair and sustainable, and who wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep in the intervening hours worrying about whether investment bankers lose their shirts.

It means putting in power people who would do for real what Jon Stewart did symbolically in his takedown of Jim Cramer. Did Cramer deserve to be a symbol of the failure of financial journalism – and journalism in general? No. In fact, there is, to me, an appealing self-mocking irony and honesty about Cramer – and more than a soupcon of hypocrisy and smugness about Stewart. But Stewart’s larger point was correct and important, and if Cramer served as a vehicle to etch that point into the general consciousness, then so be it. (By the way, MSNBC and NBC News – a sink of misogyny, journalistic amateurishness, primetime predator prurience and hypocrisy – most certainly did deserve it.)

Anyway, back to my point, about the public's anger at the broad failure of leadership. I feel that our new president has already failed that test, perhaps irrevocably. And the irony of all this is that we're all now going to have to bail him out. People everywhere – in their neighborhoods, in their businesses, in their volunteer work, in their social networking, in how they run their homes and live their lives – are going to have to become active in making sure the ship doesn’t sink. This next couple of years is going to call on the public to rise to the occasion, since our leaders – all of them – seem incapable of doing so. We’ve got to have Barack Obama’s back, because he doesn’t effectively have ours.

Mr. Congeniality - Updated

We need leadership. We're getting a popularity contest. Now, I'm officially scared.

Update: Another log on the fire.

Update 2: It's now a bonfire.

How seriously can we take an Administration that didn't even know about the AIG bonuses -- and that then makes lame excuses about how its hands are tied, until being shamed into action by public outrage? How seriously can we take an Administration that trails behind ordinary citizens in its understanding of the basic political realities of the moment?

Leadership means being out in front of major problems, not scrambling to assume the right stance after the fact. Leadership means taking those problems seriously enough to be fielding a complete team, with a really strong game plan. (Many major positions at Treasury are unfilled? Say what? Would it be tolerated to send our troops into battle without a fully-staffed command operation??) Leadership means having the political skill to understand and address the public's fear and its outrage -- including a recognition of the kind of political dynamite that all these bailouts represent.

Not ready on Day One, not ready at 3 a.m., not ready, period.

D-Doornail-Dead

As I've been saying, the Republican Party doesn't exist as a functioning institution. And as a friend of mine puts it, with enemies like this, who needs friends?

Okay, now it's official

The Obama Administration is not ready for primetime. Individual members (cough cough State Dept. cough cough) are fully up to their jobs. And the whole Administration, along with its captain, may find its sea legs -- who knows? maybe even by Day 100. But the first leg of its maiden voyage has by now matched the rockiness of Bill Clinton's start, at least.

What Krugman Said - Updated

Our Nobel Prize-winning Cassandra keeps up the drumbeat of truth. Please please please, Mr. President, listen to him.

Update: The "center" holds, and still the blood-dimmed tide is loosed.

As an aside, I am increasingly impressed with the historically extraordinary role Paul Krugman is playing. In a media and blogospheric landscape covered by pygmies, he towers. He has a lifetime's expertise and the authority of his Nobel Prize -- and, in making such powerful use of his bully pulpit, he is bringing both to bear in the most thoughtful, deeply serious way imaginable.

What FDR Means

I want to add one more meta-item to my prior post's list of what’s substantive – and, by extension, the failure of our new president, so far, to rise to his moment in history.

I’m talking about the meta-historical meaning of FDR, what he most fundamentally signified – not just for economics or American politics, but for the human spirit. Yes, he coalesced the idea and the form of the modern welfare state. Yes, he created the model for leadership in the age of mass communications. Yes, he defined the normative political consensus for a generation. And yes, he was correct, in the judgment of history, on the two vast challenges with which the country was confronted in his time.

But deeper than that, FDR represented the capacity of human beings to tackle problems on a societal scale, in an age when “societal” meant huge, diverse, complex (in the complex-adaptive-systems sense), global. He was the modern world’s chief historical embodiment of hope – not just rhetorical hope, but functional hope. Whether you agreed with his place on the left-right spectrum or not, whether you saw him defending your interests or goring your ox, there was no gainsaying that he showed America and the world how to act. Not for action’s sake, but for posterity’s. He was an institution-builder. He acted at a scale that was adequate to the realities of life on Planet Earth in the 20^th Century – not in the superficial, stage-set, literally fascistic way of Mussolini in “making the trains run on time,” but in a way that had legs in a democratizing, emergent reality.

A basic understanding of and reaction to that is what made people elect him four times. That’s what made my grandfather and my parents adore him. That’s what cemented his place in history. That’s what makes his accomplishment continue to resonate today – why it is still the model to emulate for any President of the United States.

FDR made it clear that the world had not become too vast and complex for human beings to handle. He understood that this engine the Founding Fathers had built had extra gears in it, that it could run safely at highway speeds. He saw an America and a world that others didn’t yet see – one that was just coming into its prime. And he actually built it – not only through his clear, tight and inspiring words and conceptual frames, but in actual forms and institutions that operationalized it for everyone. He saved capitalism and world-power-level democracy by imagining into existence a fuller, more grown-up America.

That’s what conservatives distrust, at a deep level – this remarkable confidence in the capacity of oneself and one’s fellow humans to get their arms around great big problems and make things better. It’s also what many on the Left distrust – and why they therefore hang onto archaic Marxist frames, with their teleological absolutism. FDR was the real exemplar of the audacity of hope. And that’s what Barack Obama is failing to live up to, so far.

The roadblocks have been cleared away. He’s got a mandate – a consensus (not just in the U.S., but truly global) on the need for massive change. His political opposition is a shadow of its former self, the disembodied spirit of the dying Saruman, hovering above the ground and about to be borne away by a passing breeze. The sheer size and direness of the present emergency clarifies the direction we must go, the nature of the actions we must take.

All that remains is the self-knowledge and the boldness to act. And yet, our new president quails before the prospect of such action. Instead, he dithers around with this silly post-partisan kabuki, instead of stepping up to the plate.

It's the substance, stupid.

Substance

Although I sporadically find myself humming “Who’s Sorry Now?” when thinking of Obamabots going through Kool-Aid withdrawal, I have, by and large, lost interest in recriminations, richly deserved though they may be. Schadenfreud has been replaced by worry. I worry that our new president is going to fuck it up. And my worry resides in his persistent preoccupation with style -- and style of a particular type -- over substance.

As Big Tent Democrat says today – and as Paul Krugman has been arguing all along – that really needs to stop now. To cite President Obama’s own Biblical citation (which, I guess, makes this a recitation), it’s time to put away childish things.

Let me offer a few principles for what is substantive, circa February 2009:

The Republican Party isn’t just irrelevant; it’s dead – for a generation, anyway. The Southern Strategy worked. It’s now a Southern party, period. Look at all the vital signs – the ability to raise money, to field candidates (rather than host retirement parties for ex-officeholders), to frame an agenda and publicize same, to marshal an army of workers, etc. Zippo. The GOP can’t do any of those. And yet, our Post-Partisan President insists on propping up this corpse in hopes of shaking hands with it in a photo op. It’s like Weekend at Bernie's or The Trouble With Harry. Forget it. Zombies don’t exist, and there’s no need to pretend they’re real by continuing to push living humans out the door (i.e., under the bus) as unburnt offerings to them. This is not a trade-off of politics, the art of the possible, for principle. It’s dumb – really, incomprehensible – politically, too.

Tax cuts are bad now. They have flunked. Laffer Curves were always laughable curveballs. Supply side economics was always voodoo. That isn’t to say, of course, that tax hikes per se are the answer, either. It’s to say that a religious reliance on tax policy, one way or the other, is just one of the blind men feeling around the elephant. The Grover Norquist cult that took over the Republican Party (before the other cults moved in – the faith-based cult, the neocon cult, the anti-Constitutional cult – to form the Perfect Storm of Cults that was the W Administration) was always science fiction. (That is, it wasn’t even serious fiction.) And if it never made sense when we were in a boom, it makes even less sense when we’re in a bust.

Government has a vital role to play. Again, this isn’t an assertion of government as the only or dominant player in the game. We know how that works out (see, “The 20^th Century: 100 Years of Mishagas” in the Encyclopedia Wackadingia). A serious understanding of the complex adaptive system that is life on Planet Earth requires that one acknowledge the many different forces and perspectives that make up that natural-cum-societal ecosystem, this product of the co-evolution of genes and memes. Its complexity and innovation are integral with its diversity. But obviously, to anyone who isn’t lost in one of the archaic cults described above (i.e., to anyone who isn’t one of the 276 remaining Republicans), it’s evident that serious government action is required now. We may not have an FDR, but we need someone who at least recognizes that basic reality.

Infrastructure investment is good now. And it should be forward-looking rather than backward-looking: fewer potholes and more broadband; more healthcare IT than re-pointing walls. In other words, it should be based on where technology and a globally integrating economy (not to mention a globally warming planet) are headed, rather than simply propping up the dying hulk of industrial capitalism (seeing as how we no longer live in industrial capitalism – sorry, Karl). And all of that argues that both providing lots and lots and lots and lots of jobs immediately and building an infrastructure capable of sustaining the planet and the global economy of the 21^st century dictate doubling down on intelligent infrastructure in stimulus packages – in America and around the world.

History matters. Heading toward the future with a decent compass from the past means we sensibly understand (a) the nature and severity of the current crisis, and (b) the right lessons from the past 100 years of American and world economics, science and history. Those include: John Maynard Keynes, good; Milton Friedman, bad… FDR, good; Ronald Reagan, bad… saving capitalism from itself, good; letting power imbalances take us all down, bad. And obscure as it may seem: complexity physics and emergence, good; Newtonian physics, bad. Because a complex-systems understanding of reality is ultimately crucial to making sensible judgments in the here-and-now.

In light of all that substance – and there’s obviously plenty more… libraries full of it… but just to stick with these few principles for the nonce – and of the present emergency… it’s scary that our mandate-stuffed president is post-partisaning around while Rome burns. People keep saying, “Just wait, it’s early.” They say, “Look at those executive orders – see, he signed Lily Ledbetter. He’s gonna be great. He just has to do this political dance now. His political instincts are unmatched. Give him credit for playing chess brilliantly.” Stuff like that.

Well, we’ll see. To me, it looks – so far, yes, just so far – bad on politics and unformed on substance. And to me, the reality doesn’t seem to allow for delay, either for self-education or chess moves.

But that’s just, to paraphrase BTD, me.