July 29, 2010

published in Commentary >> The Soapbox

Bad government not a reflection on Obama

by: Allen Hines

1/21/10

A year into his presidency, tearing into Barack Obama about his failures to promote government transparency and his watered-down shot at healthcare reform puts food on the table for hordes of media pundits.

It's easy.

“Against overwhelming public opposition, the only things keeping ObamaCare alive at this point are power politics and the misguided corporate cease-fire that Democrats have either coerced or bought―or is homegrown at companies like Pfizer that are deeply invested in more government control of the economy,” wrote the Wall Street Journal.

And Ruben Navarrette Jr. of CNN.com recently questioned Obama's leadership on standing up to blatant racism – most recently in the form of Sen. Harry Reid's comments on Obama's electability.

It's easy to criticize Obama because the United States has been failing for so long, and he is the latest manifestation of that failure.

As The Economist put it, “Americans have not suddenly fallen in love with Republicans, who seem keener to obstruct Mr Obama than to offer a coherent alternative. Rather, they are fed up with the recession and government in general. Since Mr Obama is the public face of power, he gets the blame.”

For sure, he deserves the blame as much as anyone. He inherited two failed wars and is now accelerating the conflict in Afghanistan while doing nothing to withdraw from Iraq. For this, he deserves the frustrated ire of military families whose lives are caught in the quagmires.

But bad governance started long before Obama. Twenty plus years of scaling back the government's role in watching over the economy blew up into the worst economic crisis in three generations. The administration's sweetheart deal with the banks drew still more criticism, this time from everyone but the CEO class.

Amidst all the criticism we find the Tea Partiers, boiling angry about the government but tragically blind to history. They don't much care about financial deregulation, only that the end result was a government bailout. They contend that the banks should have failed, no matter how disastrous such economic collapse would have been, particularly for low- and middle-income families.

They fear socialism, personified, so they say, by President Obama. From socialized medicine to “czars” in the White House, they claim to be defending our “freedom” from “commies” and “the anti-Christ” Obama

The Tea Partiers, obviously, are very confused people. Part of the reason is the simplistic demonization of government involvement espoused by Tea Party doctrinaires. Glenn Beck, for one, took the moral position that the banks should have been left to fail last year because they took risks with investor's money. On the surface, this is a very logical position.

But it's not so logical if we consider that the Great Depression served as proof that banks and other industries simply sought profit, often ignoring risks – proof enough that the government began the arduous task of regulating the economy. The Securities and Exchange Commission was born.

Then, under President Ronald Reagan, it was gutted in the name of the free market. Financial deregulation in the 1980s was part of an attempt to remove most government involvement in the economy and let capitalism do what it does. And it led to the current crisis.

The overarching theme of President Obama's first year in office was political pushback. Pushback from the Tea Partiers painted many of his center-left policies as dangerous communist decrees. Pushback in Congress idled any progress on major parts of the president's plan, even when his party held an unstoppable majority.

Such pushback has shifted the political environment toward a deeper conservatism in both parties. But conservatism is the wrong response following economic crisis. Hands-off, free-market dogma is the cornerstone of conservatism, and it failed us.

So, let's pause a moment from criticizing President Obama and take a broader look at the United States and its problems. We are not out of work because Obama fired us. We are not homeless because he foreclosed on our houses. We are not victims of racism, sexism or homophobia because he promotes it. He does none of this.

The problems are broader than President Obama or any individual. That's what makes fixing them so challenging. But as long as we spin our wheels, flinging mud at President Obama, hoping the next president will be better, we will not find our way out of this mess.

Through the next year, at least, we can expect to see even less progress on the president's agenda now that the Democrats have lost their super-majority in Congress. We cannot afford to let political wrangling limit our potential. We must advocate for a more socially just society and stand firm against the politics of doing nothing. Otherwise, criticism will lead only to frustration.
 

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