Snap out of it, Obama!
Another bad week for Obama. What's missing is a compelling, aspirational story about what he's done, and where he's taking America. Instead of FDR, we get Jimmy Carter.
Skillful politicians, it is often said, make their own luck. They have – or develop – the instincts to act, speak, or hold their tongues at the right moment. The best of the best use language and symbols to connect over and over again with their constituents, or at least with most of them.
Politics is many things: policy, determination, intelligence, and timing, including being able to read the other side and know how and when to push back from the clinch and land an effective counter punch. Politics is handling adversity, taking a punch and bouncing back. Politics is also performance, and performance is the ability to convey a story that connects both intellectually and emotionally.
Last week was the week when, I suspect, Barack Obama went from a presumptive favorite to be re-elected in November to, at best, an even bet. To say that the Obama campaign has a bad week is to say the Queen had a nice little party recently. It remains to be seen whether it was the defining week of this campaign that seems to last forever.
Obama’s no good, horrible, very bad week began with jobless numbers that showed a modest increase in unemployment and ended with the president, looking more petulant that presidential, making one of the worst rhetorical stumbles he’s made since the 2008 campaign. In between those two black Fridays came news that Republicans substantially outperformed Democrats in fundraising in the most recent reporting period.
If a gaffe in politics is defined as a politician awkwardly speaking the truth, then Mitt Romney’s “I like firing people” and Obama’s “the private sector is doing fine” probably are gaffes. I’m guessing both men meant exactly what they said. Romney’s private equity experience, by its very nature, involved a lot of layoffs and Obama, in real danger of losing re-election due to a struggling economy, must be chafing when he sees that corporate profits are screaming along and the wealthiest among us truly are “doing fine.”
The Romney camp is no doubt rejoicing that Obama’s well-oiled political machine seems to be seizing up. The president’s mighty oratorical skills don’t seem to have quite the magic they once did. And unforced errors, the bane of soccer players and politicians, seem to descend on the Obama campaign like a host of locusts.
Strip away all the obvious political problems the president is dealing wit: the persistently sluggish economy, congressional Republicans who refuse to deal with dramatically serious issues like the coming fiscal cliff of autopilot budget cuts and tax increases and a euro crisis that seems to worsen by the day. All of those problems, serious as they are, might be minimized, particularly in a race against a lackluster campaigner like Romney, if Obama could begin to tell a coherent story about his first term and what a second term might look like. So far he hasn’t and as a result a stumble like the private sector is doing “just fine” sucks the air out of his efforts.
The two presidential campaigns that most resemble 2012 were Franklin Roosevelt’s race in 1936 during the Great Depression – unemployment was more than 16 percent on Election Day – and Jimmy Carter’s contest with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Carter’s campaign stumbled under the weight of the Arab oil boycott, high inflation, and the kidnapping of U.S. hostages by Iranian militants.
Roosevelt won despite his economic challenges. Carter didn’t. The reason, I think, was Roosevelt’s ability (and Carter’s inability) to weave a coherent story about what the country had been through and what could happen in the future. Roosevelt also understood the importance in politics of selecting your enemy. In 1936, FDR defined his real opponents as the conservative, big business leaders of the country who resisted his New Deal reforms. He called them “economic royalists.”
If you wonder whether history has a tendency to repeat itself, read the words Roosevelt used when he accepted his party’s nomination for a second term in 1936:
“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt said. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”
Talk about class warfare! Roosevelt defined his opponents as opponents of freedom and the Constitution and as “over-privileged.” Obama, on the other hand, has been unable to shake the accusation that he is attempting to fundamentally alter the American system. Roosevelt was fundamentally reshaping that system and he made the effort the centerpiece of his campaign for re-election.
Near the end of his acceptance speech in 1936, Roosevelt uttered some of the most riveting words you could hope to hear from the podium of a political convention. “Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes,” he said, “but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
Roosevelt went on to win 46 of the then-48 states, even as millions of Americans remained out of work. He won, in small part, because of a lackluster opponent – Kansas Gov. Alfred Landon – but more so because he summoned a hurting nation to join him in realizing a bright, new day. The current incumbent in the White House has dealt with many of the same issues Roosevelt confronted in the 1930′s. If he is to be re-elected he’ll need to tap into the mysterious cycle of human events and call forth for Americans a new meeting with destiny.
In short, Obama needs to tell a compelling, aspirational story about the future and why the country will be better off with him in charge. If he can’t , he’s looking more like Carter than FDR. Re-elections are always a referendum on the incumbent – what he’s done and what he says he will do. That was certainly the case in 1936 and 1980.
If the president continues to run his 2012 re-election campaign based on getting the better of Romney with an ever-changing soundbite of the day, rather than explaining from where he has brought the country and where he plans to take it, he’ll lose in November.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jun 14, 12:57 a.m. Inappropriate
I agree with Marc Johnson that President Obama needs to be a better job of telling a compelling story about why he should be re-elected. But here's a much more damning quote from Mitt Romney that Obama and that media should focus on:
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/big-government/
In fact, Mr. Romney summed up the divide rather well last week, when he said “[The president] wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
Posted Thu, Jun 14, 7:50 a.m. Inappropriate
OBAMA IS NOT RUNNING TO WIN, he doesn't want to get re-elected. He wants to go on the Bill Clinton inspired "celebrity" tour with complete secret service protection, a government pension, lots of opportunities for books, talk shows, and the like. And Like jimmy Carter he can become a noted humanitarian. Obama wants out and so you can expect more "gaffes" and divisive comments and political stands between now and election time.
Posted Thu, Jun 14, 8:26 a.m. Inappropriate
In politics, timing matters. Marc Johnson's advice was worth taking the day after voters delivered a historic drubbing to the Democrats in the 2010 mid-terms -- A drubbing that didn't happen to the Democrats during FDR's first term. Now it is too late. The reason we're getting "Jimmy Carter instead of FDR" in this campaign is simple: The administration has delivered Jimmy Carter results. He inherited a bad situation and made it worse. Next step: blame it all on Bush. It won't work (blaming your predecessor never does) and it makes President Obama look weak.
Posted Thu, Jun 14, 8:37 a.m. Inappropriate
Obama promised hope. He promised post-partisanship. He promised to be a uniter not a divider. But it's hard to have hope when you're told that the whole world conspires against you. The economy isn't stalled because a president who has no understanding of economics or business insists on fiddling with it on an almost daily basis, like FDR before him. The economy is stalled because of EEvil Wall Street, a car driven into a ditch, and a German Chancellor who refuses to take the president's dubious advice.
It's hard to be post-partisan if the president's style of post-partisanship is to invite congressional leaders into the Oval Office to be lectured on how "I won the election" (forgetting that they all did, too) and it's "my way or the highway."
And it's certainly hard to feel united rather than divided with a president who picks fights with so many perceived enemies that he seems to be doing battle with everyone everywhere. Fox News. Corporations. European leaders. Republicans. The weather. The middle class. The Illuminati. Trolls under bridges. The "unity" this president seeks, like FDR before him, is that of a dictatorship. FDR's opponents "hid behind the Constitution." So do Obama's, when they aren't clinging to guns and religion. At least this time, the Constitution seems to have the Supreme Court on its side, with Obama's own appointees frequently voting against him in 9-0 decisions. FDR bent that Constitution almost to the breaking point to achieve his "warm hearted" goals. Obama seeks to amass even greater arbitrary power in the executive branch. Personally, I'm throwing my lot with the Constitution. The excesses of aspirational, warm hearted presidents can be ameliorated in time. The Constitution, once abandoned, will be gone forever.
Posted Thu, Jun 14, 8:50 a.m. Inappropriate
"He inherited a bad situation and made it worse."
Only to a ideologue blinded by Obama-derangement syndrome would 1). decreased unemployment rate 2.) increasing value of the stock market 3.)the saving of the US auto industry 4.)the leveling-off (yes, that's true) of govenment spending 5.)elimination of US's public enemy #1, Osama bin Laden 6.)etc. would that look worse.
Posted Thu, Jun 14, 9:41 a.m. Inappropriate
Once we understand the new paradigm of U.S. governance -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us -- we also understand the role of the Democrats as facilitators of Republican victory.
That's the only possible strategy underlying Obama the Orator's self-transformation into Barack the Betrayer.
It's also the only possible purpose behind the Democrats (deliberate) loss of the Wisconsin recall-- see "True Wisconsin: How and Why the Democrats (Deliberately) Lost," http://tinyurl.com/83ma9vr . Likewise note the landslide losses the Democrats suffered in the 2010 Congressional election, the direct result of an embittered electorate awakening to the ugly truth "change we can believe in" was a Big Lie from the beginning.
And all this makes perfect sense when we recognize We the People have been totally disenfranchised -- that, exactly as Bill Moyers says -- U.S. "democracy" has become nothing more than a charade, for which see http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html .
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the two parties collaborate to impose the tyrannical will of the One Percent: note the unanimous or nearly unanimous Congressional votes that have downsized our paychecks (e.g., GATT, NAFTA) and abolished our constitutional rights (Patriot Act, NDAA, etc. ad nauseum.
What far too few of us realize is that Republican victory in November will mean the ultimate triumph of fascism the One Percent has sought ever since Wall Street and Berlin collaborated via the 1934 Bankers Plot (Google) to turn the United States into a member of the Axis.
And fascist victory means those of us no who are longer exploitable for profit -- seniors, disabled people, others who are chronically impoverished -- will be targeted by a "final solution" of deliberate genocide. Not in death camps -- that would be too embarrassing -- but by termination of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment compensation and any similar life-sustaining socioeconomic program.
Exactly as some Teabaggers have already publicly acknowledged, that's the real purpose -- extermination of those of us adjudged to be "dead weight" -- behind the definitively murderous Ryan Budget -- the budget President-to-Be Romney has already enthusiastically endorsed.
Posted Sat, Jun 16, 12:41 p.m. Inappropriate
Loren's narrative is strikingly similar to that of "The Merchants of Despair" that I am truth needle/fact-checking my way through now. The latter account begins in 1800s Europe and is filled with charted statistics—an invitation to purgers of innumeracy and puzzle lovers. I have yet to seek the help of John Allen Paulos there, mostly what I am accumulating are errors of omission in the rhetoric that reasons because humans have outwitted the finite, that success is infinite, and if not other planets are ripe for mining.
That said, it is a very good thing we have people like Loren, Richard Hofstadter, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and now Robert Zurrin who comb the past for the history that has not won out.
Posted Thu, Jun 14, 9:51 a.m. Inappropriate
I really, really wish Obama was Jimmy Carter. Carter actually cares about things like human rights and civil liberty... quite a contrast to Obama, whose policies include extrajudicial execution, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition (outsourced torture), secret tribunals, imprisonment of whistleblowers, slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, warrantless surveillance, prosecution of child soldiers, stepped-up raids on medical marijuana (because it's important to make sure the terminally ill are suffering as much as possible), etc.
Carter was far from perfect, but he was (and is) a progressive at heart. Obama is a right-wing charlatan; no one in our time has done more harm to the cause of human freedom.
Posted Thu, Jun 14, 1:25 p.m. Inappropriate
I'm afraid, Alally, that facts are stubborn things and easy to check: Unemployment was 7.7% when President Obama assumed office. It is now 8.2% -- and has been over 8% for three years running. Government discretionary spending did indeed level off -- AFTER the President's party suffered a huge repudiation at the polls in 2010 and the Republicans took over. Until they did, spending was locked into ever-higher levels with the misbegotten stimulus program that was supposed to bring unemployment down to 5.7% this month. Ain't happenin'
This president has yet to preside over a budget deficit less than a trillion dollars.
I'll give him props for how he's fought the war on terror. He got there by esentially embracing the Bush-Cheney agenda, including a renewal of all aspects of the Patriot Act, keeping Gitmo open, military trials for suspected terrorists and adopting the Bush timeline on Iraq -- all of which he opposed as Senator.
Finally, the president did not "save" General Motors. He bailed out the United Auto Workers with $23 billion in taxpayer money that wouldn't have been spent had GM restructured under Bankruptcy law and renegotiated its union contracts.
Posted Thu, Jun 14, 4:41 p.m. Inappropriate
This was good advice for mid-2009, when the Tea Party, financed by the same people who financed the John Birch Society 50 years ago, decided to disrupt congressional district meetings while the health care legislation was being debated.
It's too late for Obama to grow a pair now. It'll be a close election, with the outcome (as always) determined by the direction of the unemployment rate.
Posted Fri, Jun 15, 6:32 p.m. Inappropriate
Superb analysis. Thanks Crosscut for delivering the goods.
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