Drew Westen's game-changing essay, "What Happened to Obama?," landed in The New York Times' "Sunday Review" section on August 7 like "a rhetorical nuke dropped on ground zero in the liberal heartland," according to the blogger Andrew Sprung in a post titled, none too gently, "A Lover of Fairy Tales Casts Obama as Villain in Chief."
Westen's essay hit two liberal heartlands, and its effect in Obama's Washington was nothing like its impact everywhere else, except for some blocks and media studios in Manhattan and Brooklyn that are attached umbilically to the Beltway.
Elsewhere in America, Westen's broadside was reprinted dozens of times and quoted at length hundreds of times more. A full week after its publication it remained among the top ten most-emailed Times articles. At a reception on Cape Cod on August 14, I met a Boston middle-school secretary whose spirits had soared on reading it and was still enthusing about it with co-workers and friends.
Not so the liberal Beltway operatives, whose Weltanschauung, or world-view, I hereby immortalize as the Beltanschaunng. Never mind that some of them, like Sprung, share Westen's frustrations with Obama; most were desperate to discredit Westen's message, for reasons both understandable and objectionable. These deserve more scrutiny than they've gotten from Obama's defenders themselves.
What's understandable to all liberals is that the President is in peril and that the likely alternatives to him are worse. What's objectionable is that his writerly defenders, truth-tellers by profession, aren't any more candid than he's been about the unsustainable premises and practices they've all ended up defending. So they're rushing to damn Westen for making "the best the enemy of the good," as Fareed Zakaria clichéd this chorus' complaint.
What the U.S. needs now is a Tom Paine to explain why the "good" of the Invisible Hand, liberating though it was when he wrote Common Sense, has morphed into a casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-bamboozling juggernaut that's just as false and destructive as the divine right of kings and mercantilism were when Paine found the courage and clarity to shred them.
Westen, an academic psychologist and political consultant from Emory University and author of The Political Brain, doesn't expect Obama to be a Paine. He does want him to address Americans' hunger for jobs partly by addressing their hunger for political narratives that explain what happened to those jobs and what it will take to create new ones.
On Charlie Rose on August 12, Westen sketched some battle strategies and story lines that are well within what his Beltway detractors laud as "the mainstream." He has as much experience with political trench warfare as they do, in and out of Washington, and a better understanding of what presidential story-telling can do.
Zakaria's collection of neo-liberal truisms about the inexorability and inescapability globalization won't meet Americans' hunger for jobs and clarity. And none of the other musicians in the orchestra of high-minded opinion has interrupted his conducting of its perennial medley, "This is the Best of All Possible Worlds."
I got a bit nasty about this last week here, when Zakaria tried to dodge Westen's arguments and pull rank as a political expert. So let me now simply quote the expert critics and highlight the awful precedents and premises they're leaning on:
1. Westen's lengthy, attention-grabbing Sunday New York Times op-ed is not a strong criticism. It's parody of liberal fantasizing.
I think liberals have a hard time holding on to power and being comfortable with ... the compromises it takes to hold with power. I think it`s something in the liberal psyche.... I am not the psychologist here, but liberals turn against every single Democratic President with regularity. That was what the whole Nader campaign in 2000 was about, this fury that Clinton was a sell out.[Westen's] argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science... The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama's failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.
-- Jonathan Chait, in The New Republic and on Charlie Rose
2. Over the last week liberal politicians and commentators took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to criticize the debt deal that Congress reached. But their ire was directed not at the Tea Party or the Republicans but rather at Barack Obama.... because of his persistent tendency to compromise.
As the New Republic's Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, this criticism stems from a liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry. In this view, writes Chait, "every known impediment to the legislative process--special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion--are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech.This has been a running theme ever since Obama took office. I think that liberals need to grow up.
I'm not going to get into the what-ifs of a professor, you know, who has never run for dogcatcher advising one of the most skilful politicians in the country on how he should have handled this.
-- Fareed Zakaria, on CNN, on Charlie Rose, and again in two blog posts, one of them entitled, "What Liberals Fantasize About."
3. Perhaps most notably, Andrew Sprung scrutinized Westen's piece and discovered that Obama has publicly and repeatedly stressed some of the identical messages Westen wanted to hear from the president. Maybe the professor missed those speeches; maybe he didn't check.-- Steve Benen, The Washington Monthly
4. Obama has been left playing defense, playing to get the least-bad deal... That's what's producing all the 'What happened to Obama?' talk and its silly variants.... It's all nonsense. Obama is smart, decent and tough, with exactly the right instincts about where the country needs to go. He has accomplished a lot more than he's gotten credit for -- with an opposition dedicated to making him fail. But lately he is seriously off his game....-- Tom Friedman, trying to square the circle of his confusion by blaming both Westen and Obama.
5. The substance of Westen's attack boils down to Krugman Krugman Krugman: the stimulus was too small. Westen conflates this original sin with an alleged rhetorical/political sin that begs the question of how, or whether, Obama could have gotten a large stimulus through Congress. The implication is that he could have done so by attacking the villains...."-- Andrew Sprung, xpostfactoid
So why speak German to Anglos?
Is it derision?
Is it a spin-off from Freudian prose?
What?
But, our unhappiness goes much deeper than just watching the president capitulate on matters that were of the utmost importance to us......the public option, ending the wars, stopping the destructive Bush tax cuts and being willing to negotiate on SS & Medicare. These things are the backbone of the democratic party, and once the republicans are given an inch, they will not stop until the social fabric of our nation is in ruins.......something we aren't willing to give up without a fight.
Mr Weston has created a "What We Want to Hear/How to Get Re-Elected" handbook and I wouldn't be surprised if many of his talking points were incorporated into the Obama re-election speeches I won't be listening to.
Job Creation is going to be Obama’s “PowerPoint”. And inversely, it will be the GOP’s and their Presidential Candidates’ Weak Point. I mean, what’s their solution; even more Tax Cuts and Other Advantages for the Wealthy and Big Corporations (so-called Job Creators)?! Sure hasn’t worked at all to date since 2001, has it? In fact, just the opposite, right?
Along the way, I am sure Obama will take advantage of his new Kingship to get more business done that would be to the American People’s advantage; like passing Immigration Reform, Increasing Tax Revenues, etc., etc.
From my limited knowledge of History, this will be an Unprecedented use of the Bully Pulpit!
But it sure’s gonna be a whole lotta New Fun!
All Hail to the soon-to-be-King Obama!!
FandFvd for your sense of balance.
2. The policies failed. Not because they were too small, not because of the tea party, not because the sun got in their eyes. They failed because they were bad policies. They killed jobs, stifled the private sector and were largely wrong headed
Obama has failed as a President. Time to move on.
Thanks for this excellent analysis of the faults & harm of our prognasticators who.... could/should if only they would be a positive for the man we have elected to for our President....he has always said it's not me but WE.....
By the way Jim....I think our family tree may be entwined????
Typical Obama supporter arrogance. If this is what "one of the most skillful politicians in the country" accomplishes, recruit someone who knows nothing of politics.
To know how well Obama is doing, ask the people he serves. Republicans would excoriate him if he gave them all $10,000,000 tax rebates and turned the whole country around, but you won't hear anything good from Independents or most liberals, either.
It's an insult to the people to keep saying we expected him to be the messiah, the miracle man. That's idiotic, an ad hominem attack on people they don't agree with that avoids considering the facts of their argument.
I'm tired of being told I don't understand the difficulty. I do understand a total lack of leadership, the cluelessness of the "leader", that the "leader" gives the farm away with little in return, and that the "leader" reneges on almost everything - without a fight or even a whimper.
Fight for your beliefs, and I will respect, support, and follow you to the end of time. Cave - and I will find someone else to vote for or, failing that, stay home.
The arrogant apologists for Obama who say that we are too stupid to appreciate his super-intelligent strategy are going to find us morons missing from the voting booths come 2012.
And did not FDR say: (para phased of course) "we try it - if it works we keep it if it doesn't we try something else."? Sure it was.
You of course are entitled to your opinion as am I. But if you don't think this next election is for all the marbles I think you may be losing yours. Stay in the fight. Ok please stay in the fight.
However, the difference between back then and 2012 is that I don't see the difference. So what if we elect an acknowledged Republican vs one who serves under a Democratic label, but is more Republican than many Republicans?
I have stayed in the fight, as best I can, locally and will continue to support progressive candidates with votes, contributions, campaigning, and promotion to everyone I know. I also write and call my Congressional reps on major issues. My state's purple state, sadly going red, and my Congresswoman and one senator are close to Tea Party, so it's futile with them. But I do it.
It doesn't matter much if I, one ordinary citizen, remain in the fight when my president doesn't even understand the concept of fighting for what you believe in. He's such a compromising . . . I don't know what noun to use, but you know . . . that I wonder, if Michelle were in trouble, would he go to her rescue . . . or would he go home, create a committee, and have them offer up his daughters for her or something like that.
Accepting his pre-emptive give-aways as compromises only encourages him to do it more. I will not vote for someone I no longer trust and I don't believe a word he says. Sorry, but there you have it.
FandFvd for great counter punching.
http://www.truth-out.org/three-charts-email-your-right-wing-brother-law/1314626142
And they, styling themselves as realists who recognize these terrible, mostly unspoken things, cannot bear the sound of anybody holding other opinions or plans which don't include fealty and resigned acquiescence to their reality. Why will these others not accept what is so plainly true?
Missing, of course, is the idea that elites might be dislodged or at least constrained, that there might be more to politics than currying favor with a powerful few, that the people trapped in an inhuman system might be more valuable than the system itself, that the press itself might do more than shore up the status quo.
And Obama, being very bright himself, having seen the hierarchy of forces arrayed before him, has himself mostly been bent on placation and alliance with power-- about which he becomes testy when reminded-- as do his fellow courtiers of the extra-national corporatist and financial elite.
They wouldn't leave it up to Obama.