The Roosevelt/Obama Analogy

I saw a piece by Robert Reich on Salon, "What can I do to help Obama?", that is probably fairly typical of one viewpoint about President Obama. Reich, who is usually a pretty perceptive voice, at least on economic issues, divides attitudes on the left toward Obama into two camps, the trusters and the cynics. He suggests that both are wrong, quoting FDR's famous response to a questioner to the effect that he agreed entirely with the person's demands, but that the people must make him do it.

Well, this is all well and good, and it was to a certain extent an effective tactic in the thirties. But things were very different then. For one thing, Roosevelt's guys were in charge of the Congress, which was not so dependent upon the contributions of the then discredited moneyed class, but was actually scared to death of bloody revolution or worse, being voted out of office, a thought that greatly concentrates the mind of most politicians.

For another thing, Roosevelt was able to define the agenda through the skillful use of his own personality and prestige, and also through bringing new people into government, people who had real ideas. Take a look at the Obama braintrust right now and you will see a bunch of guys who were apparatchiks in the Clinton administration, or worse, as in the case of Defense and the military, under Bush.

So, count me as a cynic in this division. The point here is that the Obama team, for all the high hopes it generated during the campaign, has almost nothing to offer in the way of a coherent agenda that really matters to people. From these guys, chosen to satisfy some incoherent urge not to be thought of as a radical, or whatever, expect nothing.

All of the issues continue to be framed in the same way they were going back to the days of Jimmy Carter. For example, the desire to enact any sort of social legislation must be weighed against the stern measure of whether we can afford it. Under Roosevelt and the New Dealers, even going forward to LBJ, at least we talked about rights.

Similarly, the idea that we might even consider dipping into a military budget that is literally ten times greater than any other country's is completely off limits. As is the idea that we might want to withdraw from a series of costly, stupid, immoral, and unsuccessful wars sooner rather than later. Ditto the idea that we might want to think twice about getting in deeper or fighting similar future wars.

I suppose, like myself, the majority of my readers consistently receive e-mails from the Obama team associated with Organizing for America. The gist of these action alerts is to get behind the “grassroots” movement they have defined, to contribute money to support a legislative agenda that is largely toothless and irrelevant. How is this to be done? Why, of course, by contributing money so that the group can continue to send out appeals for additional funds. This is the state to which politics in America has been reduced. And many of the alternative progressive groups are reduced to the same lame tactic.

But the problem here is still the problem the Democrats have had for years. People will not go to the barricades or take to the streets, literally or figuratively, for incremental and ameliorative reforms. They want a tribune, not a mediator.