Grasping at the Brass Ring of Centrism
by David Atkins ("thereisnospoon")
The leaders of the two parties in Washington react to S&P's downgrade:
“It happened on your watch, Mr. President,” Representative Michele Bachmann said, drawing applause at an afternoon rally in Iowa. “You were AWOL. You were missing in action.”
The White House blamed Washington’s polarized political climate for the downgrade. “We must do better to make clear our nation’s will, capacity and commitment to work together to tackle our major fiscal and economic challenges,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said in a statement.
That is simply awful. Bachmann's rhetoric is as emotional, crisp, understandable and clear as it insanely misguided. It is a strong message with a clear point. The Administration's messaging is confusing, lacks all emotional clarity, and is redolent of weakness. Not once in the Administration's response to the S&P downgrade did they mention the word "Republican." There is no fight left in the Administration, no driving narrative, no emotional core on which to hang one's hat except a continued and desperate clutch at the brass ring of "compromise." Whatever that means.
If these are really the messaging positions going into 2012, progressives might as well ignore the presidential election and focus on winning local races instead.
The brilliant Drew Westen can take it from here:
Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production — two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day. He gives a major speech on immigration reform after deporting a million immigrants in two years, breaking up families at a pace George W. Bush could never rival in all his years as president.
The real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit. That a large section of the country views him as a socialist while many in his own party are concluding that he does not share their values speaks volumes — but not the volumes his advisers are selling: that if you make both the right and left mad, you must be doing something right.
As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.
The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems...
A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.
But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise.
Barack Obama would be well advised to hire Mr. Westen as his political consultant. But then, if he were willing to do something so unbecoming of the Great Compromiser, he would have hired Mr. Volcker and Mr. Krugman as his financial advisers, and headed off this catastrophe in the first place.