President Obama and Progressive Criticism

Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew was really driving the shiv for the President yesterday, as he has been wont to do of late.

First,

I sure understand why people feel powerless and angry about the vast forces that control our lives and over which we seem to have only fitful control – big government and big business. But it seems to me vital to keep our heads and remain focused on what substantively can be done to address real problems, and judge Obama on those terms. When you do, you realize that the left’s “disgruntleist” faction needs to take a chill pill.

And then,

This is amazing to me. If Obama did not get the money from BP, he’d be a useless Carter. Now that he has, he’s a commie. And this is also part of his core political skill. He drives his opponents mad, and in the end, their total incoherence and malice will hurt them. In the end, because he won’t take the Modo bait, the destruction of the populist ideological right will be more effective and profound because it will be self-destruction. Yes, this means that you have to endure these loonies posturing and making shit loads of money from it for the foreseeable future. But that merely requires steel and patience. Maybe some Democrats, liberal cable hosts and bloggers could do with a little more of both.

Look, Barack Obama is not a bad president. But he is, as Andrew himself notes, an incrementalist president. Contra wide-eyed dreaminess during the 2008 election and the continued assertions of the magical realist right, a modest and moderate president is precisely who the country elected and has gotten.

And it is for that reason that progressive/lefty/angry/fringe/whatever we’re calling them these days bloggers should do the exact opposite of Andrew’s advice and press their case even more forcefully.

Andrew and folks like Jonathan Chait keep trumpeting how this administration is “racking up” legislative victories. And, you know, fair enough. It is true that the President and his fellow Democrats have “gotten shit done”. But that doesn’t invalidate the criticisms that progressives keep sending their way.

I’ve gone through the “glorious victory” argument in some detail both over at True/Slant and for the Washington Examiner, so I won’t reproduce the arguments here. If you’re interested, check out the linked pieces.

But to take the latest victory argument that Andrew proposes on: is the $20B escrow account a win? Yes. Should all frustrations about how the administration has chosen to deal with the spill — frustrations that not only liberal cable show hosts and bloggers feel — thereby be erased? No, not at all.

It is better than not that the President was able to get BP to put the money aside to — maybe — deal with the country’s worst environmental disaster, for which BP is responsible. But, frankly, that’s just what we should expect from BP. You spill it, you clean it up. Or, at least, you pay to clean it up.

This is business, there are risks. When your negligence causes those risks to become a reality, you’re on the hook for dealing with the consequences. Just in the same way that when you go about your business in such a way as to manage those risks in a competent manner and your work pays off in big profits, you reap those rewards.

This is just a fundamental principle of business.

That Obama got BP to live up to their end of the bargain on that principle just doesn’t strike me as remarkable. In short, the escrow account is an outcome of BP doing what they should be doing. That people like Andrew are inclined to take the news as some big achievement says more about the depressingly sad state of our expectations on this front than it does about the President’s negotiating skills or effectiveness.

When the “glorious victory” line of argumentation runs its course, the common secondary position is to note that the President really doesn’t have all that much power when it comes to domestic affairs. Again, fair enough, this is an accurate point.

But is it so much for progressives to ask that the President and his administration don’t work directly against many of their goals? Whether we’re talking about an utter lack of real effort (to Rahm Emanuel’s outright hostility) in regards to the pubic option and backroom deals with the pharmaceutical industry on health care or striking a populist tone in speeches about financial reform while working behind the scenes to claw back all of the toughest measures, the President, regardless of his constitutional power on domestic issues, has actively worked to undermine progressives most valued goals.

Is it really unfair, then, that Obama become fair game for criticism in this regard? This hardly strikes me as either surprising or controversial.

But the real point here is that the criticism progressives keep hurling at the President and many of their fellow Democrats is a feature of American politics, not a bug. And it is a terribly valuable feature at that.

Pivoting off of a post I wrote for the Examiner yesterday on Keith Olberman’s departure from the Daily Kos,

Politics is supposed to be vicious, no matter what side you happen to be on. It is the ferocity of American politics that make it such a standard bearer. Ideas and courses of action are exposed to an unrelenting torrent of critical analysis. And sometimes the most challenging criticism is that which comes forth from one’s own camp.

American politics is a full-contact sport and, granted, sometimes people get hurt. But on the whole, the consistent pursuit of testing ideas in the public square winds up being a boon to the country. Indeed, such activity underwrites the very heritage and history of the country.

But when those deliberations become merely a matter of one side versus another, something vital is lost. The whole process becomes a wholly predictable pantomime, a daily parade of sound and fury. The substance behind what is being done gives way to simple theatrics, smoke and mirrors, and a burgeoning sense that none of it really matters much anymore.

This seems to be a point that Andrew has either forgotten or is incapable of acknowledging over his personal predilection towards the President.

One of the hallmark features of a representative democracy is that those with different viewpoints be given the opportunity to argue for their ideas in a vigorous and, at times, vicious fashion. And the benefit of having a ostensibly centrist and incrementally inclined president is that those who do not fall under the mantle of “moderates” can, on occasion, make their arguments forcefully enough to move the president in their direction.

There are instances where this isn’t just desirable, it is vital. A look at financial reform is instructive in this fashion.

The President spent much of the lead up to the Senate’s vote on financial reform sounding populist alarms about the evils of Wall Street and the need for substantive change. And yet, as James Kwak of Baseline Scenario pointed out, a quote from John Heilman’s New York magazine piece on the process demonstrates that the administration was working behind the scenes to blunt the most sweeping changes that were being proposed,

Geithner’s team spent much of its time during the debate over the Senate bill helping Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd kill off or modify amendments being offered by more-progressive Democrats. A good example was Bernie Sanders’s measure to audit the Fed, which the administration played a key role in getting the senator from Vermont to tone down. Another was the Brown-Kaufman Amendment, which became a cause célèbre among lefty reformers such as former IMF economist Simon Johnson. ‘If enacted, Brown-Kaufman would have broken up the six biggest banks in America,’ says the senior Treasury official. ‘If we’d been for it, it probably would have happened. But we weren’t, so it didn’t.

I mean, come on. That is pretty glaring. And so if financial reform is allowed to emerge from conference the stronger beast that it became through the process of its debate, it will not be because of the efforts of the President and his administration. Rather, that victory will be because progressive Democrats bucked the wishes of their President and administration to do what they thought was in the best interests of the country by proposing amendments to pass the strongest financial reform possible.

Had those same progressives taken Andrew’s advice and just “chilled” or acted with “steel and patience” that the Obama administration was merely waiting to outlast its adversaries and enact stronger legislation — the very argument that was made in regards to health care that Ezra Klein notes today likely won’t come to pass — those possibilities would never have seen the light of day.

Such alignment isn’t always the case. There are times where the ideas and goals of progressives don’t represent what is either possible or even sometimes preferable. But telling them to shut up and get in line ensures that when the opportunities do come along, they will be missed.

And following that course doesn’t just result in missed opportunities. As I mentioned, it takes something vital from the political process. Instead of robust and valuable discourse and debate, it promotes, instead, fealty and obedience — a passive and disengaged population that fecklessly acquiesces to a sham, dressed up as democracy.

Andrew Sullivan is a fan of President Barack Obama. That’s fine. Andrew has a right to his opinion and has some relatively persuasive reasoning behind that opinion. No one begrudges Andrew that perspective.

But rather than treating those of us with a more critical analysis to condescending throw away lines suggesting we just don’t get it, perhaps Andrew wouldn’t mind stopping to consider that we have, you know, a point. Even if it’s a point with which he disagrees.

Tagged as: Andrew Sullivan, barack obama, BP, criticism, escrow account, Financial Reform, Health Care Reform, progressives