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Obama And Transforming Leadership
Adapted from: Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative President (Chelsea Green Publishers)
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Barack Obama could be the first chief executive since Lyndon Johnson with the potential to be a transformative, progressive president. By that I mean a president who profoundly alters American politics and the role of government in American life -- one who uses his office to change our economy, society, and democracy for the better. That achievement requires a rendezvous of a critical national moment with rare skills of leadership. There have been perhaps three such presidents since Lincoln.
Obama unmistakably possesses unusual gifts of character and leadership. Because of the deepening economic crisis, he will have to move imaginatively and decisively. He will need all of his inspirational and political skills, as well as ones he is still learning.
If Obama is elected, on January 20 the recession that he inherits from George W. Bush will become his. He will need prevent further deterioration in what is already the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The American economy could return to a path of recovery and shared prosperity -- or rapidly spiral downward.
Voters will expect concrete improvements as well as loftier national aspirations. And as a simple matter of politics, if the crisis deepens in 2009 and he fails to deliver relief, his support could well erode and he could lose a working legislative majority mid-way through his first term in the 2010 elections. He, and we, could end up with economic crisis and political deadlock.
Obama will be challenged both by hard economic realities and by the constraints of conventional wisdom. In principle, two core premises about the economy, which have governed the economic thinking of both major parties for three decades, have been demolished by the deepening crisis. The first is that markets could accurately price ever more complex financial inventions, with no need for government involvement. The second is that private outlays were invariably more effective than public ones.
Economic recovery will require the drastic revision of these premises, just as in 1933. Government has already engaged in massive bailouts of financial institutions, seemingly blowing away the idea that markets don't need government. Yet we have a national case of cognitive dissonance, for the same outmoded ideological assumptions linger on. The Bush administration has been adopting emergency policies in practice that it rejects in theory. Obama, like Roosevelt, will need to reinvent a regulated, balanced form of capitalism.
This path will also make Obama a more effective candidate. McCain's charges of elitism -- preposterous when you recall the path that took Obama where he is today -- are one step short of calling Obama "uppity." They play to lingering prejudices that a black man should not rise above his place.
But the reluctance of some white working class voters to pull the lever for Obama are only partly racist. Obama could be offering more to America's economically stressed families than he has done to date. At times he hits all the right notes rhetorically. But at other times he is caught in an undertow of bad advice -- that we mustn't use deficits, even in a serious recession; and that we need to praise the genius of free markets (which will cause taxpayers to eat a trillion dollars of speculative losses before this crisis is over.)
The new president will need to inspire the American people to demand enactment of bolder measures than either the Congress or Obama himself currently think necessary or possible. As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin observes, all of the great presidents used their leadership first to transform the public understanding of national challenges and then to break through impasses made up of Congressional blockage, interest-group power, and conventional wisdom. In different ways, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson found allies, respectively, in the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, as well as the press and the general public. Each president grew immensely in office. Each changed the national mood, then the direction of national policy.
They did not do so by being "post-partisan," or centrist, but by taking huge political risks on behalf of principles that the people came to deeply respect. Often they enlisted some members of the opposition party in their cause, thereby splitting the opposition--but not by splitting the difference. Yet they also functioned as great unifiers.
By appealing to what was most noble in the American spirit, these presidents energized movements for change, and thereby put pressure on themselves and on the Congress to move far beyond what was deemed conceivable. They generated accelerating momentum for drastic reform that proved politically irresistible. The abolition of slavery seemed beyond possibility in 1860, as did the vastly expanded Federal role in the economy in 1932, and the full redemption of civil rights in 1963.
As Goodwin notes, "History suggests that unless a progressive president is able to mobilize widespread support for significant change in the country at large, it's not enough to have a congressional majority. For example, Bill Clinton had a Democratic majority when he failed to get health reform. When you look at the periods of social change, in each instance the president used leadership not only to get the public involved in understanding what the problems were, but to create a fervent desire to address those problems in a meaningful way."
A crisis is an opportunity, but it hardly guarantees a successful presidency. For every Franklin Roosevelt, there is a Herbert Hoover. For every Lyndon Johnson turning the civil rights impasse into moment of national greatness, there is a Jimmy Carter fumbling the energy crisis -- or Johnson himself blundering into Vietnam. And on the conservative side, for every Ronald Reagan bringing working-class voters into the Republican coalition and successfully associating national optimism with far-right policies, there is a George W. Bush.
If Obama does rise to the occasion, he will be elected with a transformative mandate. But if he does not, even if he squeaks into the White House he will face a rough road. In short, Obama must be a great president, or he is likely to be a failed one -- his presidency grounded "in shallows and in miseries."
End of Part I. Tomorrow, Part II: The Hope of Audacity
Robert Kuttner's new book is Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. (Chelsea Green Publishers. www.obamaschallenge.com.) He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. He'll be covering the election, convention, and the economic situation on at www.obamaschallenge.com.
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Robert Kuttner, and his ilk are exactly what is going to win the presidency for McCain. "Reinvent a regulated and balanced form of capitalism"? Does that mean a return to wage and price controls?
"a president who profoundly alters American politics and the role of government in American life -- one who uses his office to change our economy, society, and democracy for the better". Which translates into hold on to your wallet because us folks in the middle class are suddenly going to find we have become the "rich".
"The new president will need to inspire the American people to demand enactment of bolder measures than either the Congress or Obama himself currently think necessary or possible." Yeh, buddy. That is really what we need. I can see it now; universal health care, weaken the military, more entitlement programs, redistribution of wealth, increased taxes, and of course the savior of all saviors affirmative action all run amuck.
Yeh, Kuttner and Obama want to change America all right; like punishing ambition, initiative, and hard work, in order to give to those who are lazy, non-productive, contribute little or nothing to the tax base, and suck off the public teat from womb to the tomb.
Get ready folks. If B.O. is elected you will be pushed down the road of socialsim so fast you won't know what hit you. You will get exactly what you deserve.
I hope that all of the Conservative turkeys out there who support McCain get their wish and he gets elected. I would rather see him saddled with the mess that Bush has left us with. That way when he falls flat on his face, and the Republicans are shown to be the incompetent failures that they really are, then and only then will we be rid of you for good and all. Spoken by an Independent voter.
Mr Artos you better pray that McCain gets elected, because Obama will screw this country up so
bad it will take years to straighten it out. Of course you may want to live in a socialist country so
you will love Obama programs. I personally think America is a nice place to live, and I can not
figure out what kind of mess Mr Bush has left us with. The housing mess was caused by greedy
banks, and high gas prices by Mr Clinton when he vetoed the drilling bill 10 yrs ago.
Thank you, that will make not 4 more years but 16 more years of Republican Rule. McCain 8 years, Palin 8 years, then wait? Arnold for the next 8. There you go. But you can rund another one of your Left Wing liberals against them every 4 years and lose. as you do, each and ever time. You had Hilary and a chance and screwed it up once again. Go Dems, we Republicans thank you.
A President can only be as good as the people he leads and he certainly can't get anything done if Congress doesn't want him to. The only reason Bush was able to get things done is because he loaded Congress and the Supreme Court with Republicans. He also had his henchmen in the Justice Department to help give his lies an aura of legality. In addition he was opposed by a wimpy group of Democrats, some of whom {Blue Dogs} were probably secretly working for him.
I would put less emphasis on what Obama should do then on what McCain can't do. I recall something said in the Movie "Armageddon" by the NASA scientist to the air force General when the general questioned his qualifications and instead touted the Presidents Scientific advisor. He said, " When it comes to this meteor you should listen to me, because you surely don't want to be taking the advice of a man who got a C in astrophysics." McCain is the Presidents Science Advisor. He has only one thing going for him and that is that he was a Vietnam era P.O.W., other than that he has nothing. If he wants to be an expert on something let him be an expert on something he knows about, crashing planes and being a P.O.W..
MourningDude :
I believe the Obamabots refuse to see that Obama has done NOTHING to make him a leader in anything. You are so right. These that are so crazy about him, should talk to some people in IL, especially Chicago. They will tell them what Obama has NOT DONE. But, they are so entranced with those smiles and words, that mean nothing, they cannot see the forest for the trees, as the saying goes. I only wish that there is someone, somewhere that can make them see just WHO this man really is, before it is too late, for all of us.
You are so right SMAGGIE, the Obama gang is so snowed by his BS that they don't realize
how much damage he would do to our great country. They want change, but the changes he
would make they really don't want. A lot of young people think he is so great because of his
speeches, and they don't realize that he will ruin their future.Most of the young just want to
party, and they don't take time to check out what Obama stands for.
Barack Obama is a good candidate for symbolic reasons. Leader? That really remains to be seen. Thus far he has NOT shown leadership (on the important issues) in the way that he has run his campaign;
1) Opting out of campaign finance
2) Going back on his word on FISA - biggest disappointment was his inability to make the case for his opposition to this piece of legislation.
If he believes that running to the middle is going to ensure his victory then he will NOT be a transformative leader because he doesn't understand how to make change happen.
Ronald Reagan was a transformative leader (although I profoundly disagreed with him on just about everything) He was able to converse with the American public in a way that motivated them to support his ideology.
Obama has been very vague about his so- called "Change". If he is truly a "Change" candidate- one who can be transformative in a progressive way - then my one question to him would be,
"What are you going to do to dismantle the Reagan Revolution?" If he cannot answer this question quickly, then he hasn't seriously thought about transforming American politics.
Transforming American politics goes WAY beyond getting Republicans to agree with you on a few policy issues. It goes to the heart of how we view ourselves as Americans in our civic life and the values that uphold that civic life.
You talk about BHO as a "leader" but I can't think of any issue he has ever led on.
He tried to be a leader on campaign finance reform, but we all know how that turned out.
He tried to be a leader on getting out of Iraq, and now he wants to leave 50,000-80,000 troops there for an indeterminate length of time AFTER his so-called "phased redeployment", so he gets a big zero there.
He tried to be a leader on restoring our Constitutional rights, and then we got FISA.
He tried to be a leader on accepting and embracing the black community, and black expressions of faith, and then he denounced and disowned his own pastor and church.
So can someone please tell me on which issues he has led?
Kuttner,
Much the same kind of predictions were made about Bill Clinton in late 1992.
He's the first baby boom president, the first post Cold War president. He's free of the constraints of the past, etc., etc.
What's he best known for now? Policy-wise, it's NAFTA and welfare reform. And in the hearts and minds most of your readers it's a whole bunch of other stuff.
President 0bama will probably turn out to be closer to WJC than LBJ.
WJC came to office saying that he would raise taxes and put every new dollar into deficit reduction. And although he ran up $1.6 trillion in new debt over his 8 years, he finally did balance the budget at the end.
I still believe that we squandered those 8 straight years of peace and prosperity, and that we need to actually pay down some DEBT during the good times instead of just running up less debt, but I still recognize that WJC was the first to balance the budget in a long time.
BHO has no intention of balancing the budget, ever. If you look at his website, the words "balanced budget" don't even show up. Sure he wants to raise taxes like WJC did, but he plans to spend and overspend that money several times over on new boondoggles. So, if it takes 8 years of focused effort to balance the budget, we have absolutely no chance to do so under a BHO administration.
If WJC was up again for re-election, I might even vote for him today. But BHO? Not in a bajillion years.
"Yet we have a national case of cognitive dissonance, for the same outmoded ideological assumptions linger on...Obama, like Roosevelt, will need to reinvent a regulated, balanced form of capitalism."
In other words he'll have to first get us back to something Adam Smith would recognize. The "ideological assumption" that our currently popular extreme form of laissez faire is in fact "main stream" is going to be hard to crawl back from after the impending debacle (many don't think we've seen the worst of the financial meltdown yet). We need to begin calling the extremists on their extremism. No classical definition of capitalism abnegates any and all role for government. No classical capitalist smiles upon market commanding dominance by only a few entities. Why, whenever anyone now suggests any role for regulation whatsoever are they castigated as fools ushering the economy into perdition? It's the laissez faire guys who are the radicals and extremists. And the worse they make things the more they blame it on our not being extreme enough! This mentality is to capitalism what the Bush administration is to the Republican party - an extreme and destructive perversion. Maybe Obama could reverse the trend but first we're going to have to recognize how far from mainstream we've gotten or every attempt at correction will be seen as a radical innovation.
While there are certainly problems in the economy that need to be addressed, your call for more government involvement (a euphemism for big government) is not the answer; in fact, much empirical evidence suggest that government involvement either started or exacerbated most of the problems we are currently experiencing--case in point, the mortgage "crisis." This problem has its origins in the government coercing financial institutions into making mortgages available to groups that previously were considered unqualified. These individuals generally where those with low incomes, low net worth, little or bad credit history, or no history of steady employment...in other words, high-risk borrowers. As it were, this group happened to be disproportionately black which led to unsubstantiated accusations of discrimination by the federal government. To avoid the appearance of racism and potential lawsuits, financial institutions devised a way to service these high-risk borrowers--thus was born the sub-prime mortgage market and the loose credit terms it encouraged, i.e., adjustable rate mortgages, interest only mortgages etc. Loose credit terms made it easier for more people to "qualify" for mortgages which beget more people chasing limited housing, which beget a surge in home prices and home construction. When those mortgage payments adjusted...surprise, surprise...the high-risk borrowers defaulted--who would've guessed! Now you suggest we need the government to fix the problem it created in the first place--pure genius, or more accurately, the audacity of dopes.
Absolutely right. And banks thought they were getting a free ride on loans, since all they had to so was sell the loans to borrowers, take their cut, then turn around and hand it off to Fannie or Freddie.
Instead of being accountable for their own loans, then started thinking they were just salesmen and middlemen who had no accountability for defaults.
The present mortgage crisis was government inspired with artificially low rates and Democrat supported NIJA (no income, job or assets) loans. FreddieMac and FannyMae are Democrat creations that exist in the free market with government strings attached to the Democrat bureaucracy. Health care is in crisis because in 1964 Medicare began to reward health care providers for operational inefficiencies inflating the cost of health care 30-40 percent. When it attempted to fix the problem with price controls government started rewarding health care providers for preventable medical errors and today a patient has a 2 to 4 times greater chance of dying from a preventable medical error in a hospital than a soldier has dying in the Iraq war zone. Government perverted the medical insurance market by forcing discounts on health care providers that treated Medicare and Medicaid patients and then allowed providers to transfer these discounts to charges paid by commercial insurance premiums inflation health care premiums 12-20 percent. The Democrats have restricted access to oil in the US and building nuclear power plants which has significantly contributed to gas prices, global warming and electricity costs. Government involvement in the mortgage market, health care and energy has brought this country to its knees and the solution....more government!!!! Stupid is as stupid does and the Democrats are professionals at doing stupid.
Well said 1stThron, if only the Obama lovers could see through their fog and realize that BHO
will make things much worse for America.
I'm glad Mr. Kuttner mentioned LBJ because that may be the key to everything. I know it's only speculation, but I can't help believing that President Kennedy, for all his charisma and idealism, would never have effected the kind of change he clearly wanted. Only an LBJ twisting arms and calling in favors could have achieved so great a transformation of American society. Unfortunately, while we have in Senator Obama a Kennedy-esque larger than life figure, we have noone even remotely equal to LBJ in stature or behind-the-scenes concensus building. If there were such a person in Congress (which there isn't), then that should absolutely be Obama's VP choice. Ironically, it's because the Democrats in Congress have taken no stands that Obama has to look elsewhere for a running mate. The Democrats, to put it bluntly, have all but insured that even if Obama wins the presidency, he will accomplish almost nothing. A little spine really does go a long way.
Obama, if he is elected, and that is a huge if, will not only be fighting off years of Republican mismanagement, he will also be fighting off at least two mega economic trends of negative consequence. With consumer spending being the biggest driver of the economy, and with the huge baby boomer generation having passed its peak spending years, an unfavorable demographic cycle alone is enough to sink the economy into a 1930’s style decade or more of depression. Moreover, the tremendous advantage America held relative to other countries coming out of WWII (an American manufacturing and technological bubble that peaked in the mid 70’s) as it continues to erode is crushing the middle class, driving millions from high paying manufacturing jobs into low wage service jobs. Then, of course, there is the public and private debt the US is piling up, as Americans desperately try to maintain our glory days life style; it being the primary factor that is washing out our financial networks. Gee, I almost forgot about energy, war, terror, and the environment. Sure glad I’m not running for president.
A president Obama is going to have to convince the voters that they have a personal stake in turning this country around starting with enenrgy independence built on freeing our economy from fossil fuels. We will need the equivalent of the Appollo Program AND the Marshal plan aimed at providing the technological and economic foudation to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Every American will have to cut back on driving, turn down the thermostat, switch to florescent lights, recycle, buy fewer things on credit, start saving money, escew elephantine houses, take public transit whenever possible, eat more meals at home, walk to neighborhood destinations (or dust off the bicycle in the basement and ride) and make do with only one family car. It wouldn't hurt it they turned off the TV, read a book and took up a non-fossil fueled hobby either.
"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."
– Norman Thomas, American socialist
We are already saddled with the liberalsocialism contributions of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ.
American liberal democracy nightmare.....Obama, Reid, Pelosi, activist judges, more government control/intervention in the economy.
Good night, comrades.
No problem with capitalism. Bush has spend 8 years lining the pockets of his corporate cronies with trillions of dollars worth of tax payer bucks. So sleep tight, socialism doesn't have a prayer.
The American people will never knowingly adopt feudalism, but under the name of "conservatism" they will adopt every fragment of the feudalist program until one day America will be a feudal nation without ever knowing how it happened.
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” (attributed to Sinclair Lewis)
Wrap yourself up before you go to bed, my friend.
He will either be a great President or he will be a failure. In the opposite extreme, he must be as daring as George W Bush was reckless. He must strike while the iron is hot. No matter how small his win, he must look at it as a mandate for change. He must totally discard the present status quo. His challenge will be to get a milquetoast Congress to go along. That will be his greatest challenge. He will have to use the bully pulpit like no other President in history in order to sway the people, and the Congress, to his side. He should spend the time from November to January 20th deciding his course and his agenda. He cannot shy away from conflict or criticism. He must wear it like a badge of honor.
Kentuck you must be talking about McCain.
"he must be as daring as George W Bush was reckless."
I guess the definition of daring and reckless depends on which side of the political fence you are on.
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