One of the prevailing questions in politics today is whether Obama will fight for his liberal agenda. Not whether he is liberal, but whether he is a fighter.
It was the topic of my column for today’s paper and a revealing piece from Joe Klein at Time.com.
To me its more of a question of what will happen for the rest of this year and in preparation for the 2010 elections. I argue that if Obama continues to try to community organize Congress he will fail to enact his goals of global warming fees and a national health system. If he fails in those causes, his already loose control over his own party will be broken and Congress will be further factionalized and even less effective at putitng forward a cogent agenda. If he does suceed, he may lose the support of moderates who are growing skeptical of his big, expensive plans — the catch-22 moment of his young presidency.
But for Klein and other liberals , the question is more fundamental.
One of the books that has shaped the thinking on the Left of late is “The Liberal Hour,” by Calvin MavKenzie and Robert Weisbrot, which argues that the golden moment for progressivism in America was in JFK’s abbreviated term through much of Lyndon Johnson’s tenure. MacKenzie and Weisbrot separate the countercultural and anti-war components of the 1960 from the achievements of the steel desk liberals like Edmund Muskie who helped standardize, enshrine and extend the goals of the New Deal. The book is part of a movement on the Left that sees Barack Obama’s election as the restoration of that era. To them, the intervening years — including the Clinton and Carter presidencies were part of a detour from that liberal pursuit. To liberals, Carter was tepid and ineffectual and Clinton was a sell-out — a Wall Street Democrat who deepened the deregulatory, capitalistic bent from the Reagan era.
When Ted Kennedy and the rest of his clan endorsed Obama in February 2008, it was a passing the mantle taken from RFK on to Obama and a repudiation of the Clintons’ Democratic Leadership Council model.
All of this is mostly just fodder for coffee house conversations and the limited purview of liberal academics and intellectuals.
But that matters because Obama sees himself liberal academic and an intellectual and he certainly sees himself as heir to the progressive era of the early and mid 1960s, not the messy countercultural era. His oeuvre is tidy socialism bestowed on the lowly from the mighty. Obama and his team marinate in this kind of thinking, poring over the idea pieces in the New York Times and debating the strengths and shortcomings of Muskie’s environmental agenda.
That’s why it must sting Obama less to be compared to Bush, who he knows that he is not like, than it is to be compared to Clinton or Carter, who he could end up like.
Pragmatical Obama first got tagged for Clintonite leanings when he was putting his economic team together. And he has tiptoed through his own agenda, Obama and his inner circle have made much of avoiding Clinton’s failure to usher in a second liberal hour.
One could argue that his troubles with health care have stemmed mostly from his adolescent need to do the opposite of Clinton. While Hillarycare may have been heavy handed, it at least recognized how brutal it would be to get even a lopsided Congress to agree on a plan that must involve rationing care and higher taxes.
As liberals like Joe Klein, Paul Krugman and others put the heat on Obama to live up to the liberal goals of the pre-Vietnam era, the President will likely sharpen his resolve to push global warming and health care, if only to preserve his own vision of himself.
As voters get panicky about unemployment and deficits and Obama’s seemingly blithe focus on things like long-term health care savings and global climate treaties, the President will risk utter failure, not just a Clintonite compromise.
After all, the liberal hour came mostly during a period of prosperity and stability, not uncertainty at home and abroad.
