>And the liberal blogger's version is, "If only
>Obama understood all these issues the way I do,
>if only he were smart like me, none of this
>would be happening!" (Arthur Silber via Chris Floyd).
This is a good read and has been pointed to all over the place, from the WSJ to KVH (tweeted to the Nation) to I cite, where I found it:
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/
August 03, 2011
Corey Robin: Left Facebook Discussion
<http://coreyrobin.com/2011/08/01/572/>Here you can find a discussion that unfolded on FB a couple of days ago. (below is just the introduction and the first comment by Doug Henwood. Some of the best comments in the discussion are from Henwood and Adolph Reed.)
Obama: WTF? A Facebook Roundtable of the Left -- Corey Robin
1 Aug This morning, my Facebook page exploded. It all started when I posted this excellent piece by Glenn Greenwald about Obama and the debt-ceiling deal. Greenwald says that those who think Obama is weak and lacks backbone, or that he got suckered by the Republicans or is somehow being held hostage, are full of shit. With a few exceptions, Obama got what he wanted. Greenwald has a lot of evidence to back up his claims, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. So I put the question to my FB friends. Is Obama politically inept or does he want these massive cuts? And if he wants them, is it because of political calculation? Is he a true believer in neoliberal economics? A hostage of Wall Street? To my surprise, lots of people weighed in, many of them leading voices and scholars on the left: Katha Pollitt, Adolph Reed, Josh Cohen, Tom Sugrue, Rick Perlstein, and more. With their permission, I’ve reprinted the discussion, almost verbatim (I had to leave out a few comments from people who didn’t get back to me, and I edited some comments for context and flow).
Corey Robin: What do you guys think of this Greenwald piece? I think it’s excellent, but I’m not convinced. Obama didn’t get the tax cuts he wanted. It’s not clear this will help him electorally (the state of the economy in the fall of 2012 will matter much more than his pose of bipartisanship now; there is zero evidence to suggest this deal will help the economy and lots of reasons to think it will hurt.) Though it’s true that Obama has wanted cuts to entitlement programs for some time, he doesn’t get them in the first phase of the deal, and in the second phase, assuming the trigger mechanism kicks in, Social Security remains off-limits. What’s your sense of why Obama wants these cuts? We know why the GOP wants them. But what are the ideological underpinnings or economic/political interests of Obama’s position? Even within the framework of neoliberalism, I’m not sure I get the motivation. Have the financial markets really been pushing for these cuts? My anecdotal sense was that people like Summers I know, now out of the administration, but I took him to be a fairly good representative of that sector thought this wasn’t the way to go. My assumption is that the reason Obama has taken this route is that he thinks it’s a good way to position himself electorally, and that this is coming less from the money people than the politicos. But I am more than happy to be told otherwise. So what do you guys think: Weak president? Moderate right president? Shrewd negotiator? What? The “he’s weak” line mystifies me.
Doug Henwood: He’s going to position himself as the “reasonable” alternative to extremists, the man who can compromise where they can’t, etc. His partisan selling point will be his bipartisanship, unlike the other guys, who are just rigid ideologues. He’ll have to do this subtly, so he doesn’t sound too partisan.