In his column today, Paul Krugman succinctly summarizes liberal disillusionment with President Obama. The president, Krugman claims, keeps "looking for love in all the wrong places." The Administration goes "out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred" for Obama and his policies. Like other liberals, Krugman acknowledges the president's accomplishments, particularly health care reform, but, in a series of rhetorical questions, indicts his willingness to appease opponents, even when there is no perceptible need to do so. This has occurred, Krugman argues, on issues from torture to Afghanistan to offshore drilling to a wide variety of appointments, the most recent example of which is a seeming reluctance to make Elizabeth Warren the first head of the new consumer financial protection agency. In frustration, Krugman cries, "The point is that Mr. Obama's attempts to avoid confrontation have been counterproductive. His opponents remain filled with passionate intensity, while his supporters, having received no respect, lack all conviction."
On one level, it's easy to point to the hyperbole here. It's hard for Krugman to point out on the one hand the fury directed at this president and then claim on the other that he has avoided confrontation. Mr. Obama could easily--easily--have walked away from, for example, health care reform, the bailout of GM and Chrysler, and/or his continuing attack on Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He did not. It's also hard to credit the claim his supporters have received "no respect." I'd gently suggest to the usually "reality-based" columnist that he is conflating the personal and the political. And he does seem to have some conviction, as does a large community of noisy liberal bloggers.
On another level, however, Krugman has a point. The Obama Administration, I think, is operating under a different set of premises from many liberals. The president's rhetoric suggests that three comments are worth making.
First, to invoke an old saying popular with a southern friend of mine, you knew it was a snake when you picked it up--not that the president is a snake, I hasten to add. But he was always forthcoming in his determination to unite the nation, reach across party lines, and make every effort to achieve bipartisan goals. Heck, read his 2004 DNC speech again. As he said then and many times since: "E pluribus unum: Out of many, one." Remember? "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America---there is the United States of America."
Equally important, I strongly suspect that this is not only a political strategy for Obama. It is a moral imperative. He is deeply read in the civil rights movement and, like King, believes in the power of love, in the ways in which agape can transform one's enemies. In a speech to women at Spelman College (quoted in Jonathan Reider, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me, p. 33), Reverend King anticipated (prosopopoeia--the impersonation of the voice of another) Paul Krugman's objections: "What do you mean about this love thing? You are talking about people who oppose you, loving people who try to misuse you. . .That is impossible!" Later, King confessed, "I am very happy [Jesus] did not say like your enemies, because it is very hard to like some people." Yet, he paradoxically claimed, one must love them, an imitation of "the love of God operating in the human heart." Agape is "understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men [sic]. It is spontaneous love which seeks nothing in return. . . .You love men {sic] not because you like them, not because their ways appeal to you, not because they have any particular meaning to you at the moment, but you love them because God loves them." Even Sarah Palin, I occasionally remind myself. I imagine the president does as well. As King put it on another occasion, "Now we say in this nonviolent movement that you got to love this white man. And God knows he needs our love."
Second, there is a political strategy here, but it's a long game, just as King's was. It is not easily suited to biweekly columns, and there's no guarantee that it will work. If Obama can restore some sense of ideological unity, a basic framework for the 21st century American experiment, or even just an agreement on some grounds of disagreement (as opposed to everything), that will likely help his cause and that of liberalism. As Krugman and others have repeatedly pointed out, the facts are useful to many of liberalism's most cherished goals, from more stimulus to global warming to DADT to a variety of other issues. If the grounds of political argument change from ideological crusade to reasoned debate, this is a very good thing for the nation as a whole and, frankly, for liberals in particular. If we believe we're right on the facts, then make the debate about that and not about hatred for the other. Obama is trying to do so.
Third, that is unlikely to happen unless there is a show of strength as well. That's what Krugman does understand clearly, what Obama seemed to understand during the campaign, and what King understood. The latter put 250,000 people into the streets of DC in 1963. He built a movement, grew its membership, and finally enlisted presidents into his cause. He created, to borrow from James Madison and John Kenneth Galbraith, power to balance power, a countervailing force to those that ruled the roost. There was, as Reider understood, "a hard-boiled realism" in King's talk of love. As odd as it may be to say, it's often necessary to convince some people that they cannot destroy you before they're willing to talk with you.
Obama has made mistakes of the head--the stimulus was too small--and mistakes of the heart--it's easier to endorse executive secrecy once you are the president--but he's not the credulous fool Krugman implicitly creates in this column. The president has a plan. It's based on fact and value. But success is obviously not guaranteed.
Thanks for this post. I think insights into the plusses and minuses of King's movement cross-apply as well. You have to put up with a lot of ugliness from opponents to do it that way, and it's not for the faint of heart. I also echo the ambivalence you close with, I don't know if it will work coming from a president.
Posted by: Bethany | July 30, 2010 at 02:55 PM
Great to have you writing again !
Posted by: JQ | July 30, 2010 at 05:53 PM