But even before that, some premises. I have thought for quite a while now that American politics were essentially broken. Not evil, not criminal, just broken. Here are, in short, the four main reasons for this.
First, television has distorted the political process by making the cost of campaigning so high. The only way to raise the exorbitant sums necessary to pay for the TV ads is to go to concentrations of usually corporate power, which does not "sell" the policy process--that is cynical and literally inaccurate--but sure does rent it. It's not a good thing when members of the staffs of professional business associations actually draft laws for congressional staffers. Money has distorted American politics ever since the Washington Administrations, of course, so this is nothing new. But the scale of it is excessive by any reasonable measure. So busy are politicians raising this money that they rarely even talk to voters anymore. They sit at telephones calling rich people, so we have a greatly diminished national conversation about what matters to us. This is the fault of not controlling television, which has ruined lots of other aspects of American society in the past half century, and from the list I do not exclude baseball (of which more later).
Second, there are the consultants and pollsters who tell the political class not to actually think or explain anything to their constituents. Just preen and look at polls, they say, and look good on TV--again, TV. Joe Klein has covered this problem best; read his stuff.
Third, the quality of press coverage of American politics has tanked. Most Americans depend on electronic media for news these days, and that has been disastrous. Pictures do emotions; print does rational thinking. Electronic media is about entertainment; print media is, or used to be, about thinking and the public welfare. As technology divides our time into every smaller fragments, or bytes, we have imbecilized ourselves as a society, and that has translated into a politics of impressions, of images, of appearances, not of substance or thought. It is something like the "bread and circus" of degenerate Roman times, I think -- although, to be honest, I was not literally present in late classical times and so do not know for sure.
Fourth, for nearly a century American Federalism has become badly imbalanced, away from the design the Founders intended and sharply toward centralized Federal power. One could write a whole book on this alone, and some have. But certainly since the 17th amendment in 1913, a bad idea though it seemed wise at the time, our system of government has become too center-heavy, and it is one of the reasons why we suffer so much today from bureaucratic aging and excessively hierarchical government structures in a world that rewards speed, flexibility, agility and creativity. The U.S. Government today is none of these things, and you cannot implement genuinely new policies with a high-19th century form of government. We need structure and process renovation in the worst way in government, and we need to appreciate the uses of subsidiarity in Federalism much better than we do now. I do hope President Obama understands this. I see no sign yet, however, that he does.
There are other reasons we're "broken", but this is a blog, not a real essay. So enough of this.
Anyway, I have an essentially "on the one hand"-"on-the-other-hand" assessment of Barack Obama. I have tried to be objective, like social science Ph.D.s are presumably equipped to be (that's often a laugh.....but not, folks, in this case). Same goes for how I tried to look at all the other candidates, including John McCain.
Obama impressed me as very smart--the guy in the room who always first got the essential point. He also impressed me as a uniter, by which I mean someone able to synthesize and present a view in a compelling way. His personal story lent empathy to the whole business, and his youth and energy impressed younger people who instinctively knew that the old guys just didn't get it anymore. All fine; and as the campaign season proceeded, it was clear that a whole generation of youthful enthusiasts might be permanently alienated from politics should McCain or someone like him win. I also sized up Obama as a special kind of social conservative, despite his being the most leftist Democrat in the Senate. He came from a broken family, and he made sure his own family was whole. I take him at his word when he stresses the importance of self-discipline, manners, hard work and, above all, education. Those are socially conservative values in this society. It is not an anti-nuclear family "it-takes-a-village" approach to social stability. I am altogether fine with that and, as I said before, as a union-household baby, I had and still have no problem with his basic approach to issues of political economy......insofar as I know what his views are, and there is a lot he has left to our imagination on this score (also of which more later.)
Ah, but. But the man has not accomplished anything in the Senate. He wrote more autobiographies than bills. His ambitions, it seemed to me, exceeded his right to claim them. His campaign consisted, when you went in and read the stuff on offer, of a pastiche of policy fragments that had been out there for years on the Democratic side. He made no effort to specify them. He made no effort to gather them into a coherent policy theme. He made no effort to sort out the contradictions among them. He made no effort to see a budget, to tell us how much all this would cost and how to pay for it. And above all, try as a I may (and I did), I could not find one single new policy idea, not one innovation, not a single novel thought, that was Barack Obama's. This man, I thought, might be smart or he might just be glib to a highly skilled degree. But either way, he's an empty suit, or so it has seemed to me. And I have to confess that nothing I've seen yet convinces me otherwise -- this, and his inexperience in national security issues, is why I could not bring myself to vote for him.
I can already hear the complaint, the standard complaint: "Oh", it will be intoned, "but he has advisers, and good advisers can see to all of that."
People who say that, whether about domestic affairs or foreign policy, are surely well meaning. But they have also surely never been in government at any sort of higher level. Yes, there are advisers, lot of them. And on any issue of significance, anything difficult and open-ended (which nearly all decisions that reach the President's desk are), advisers will disagree. Sometimes their bureaucratic position will define their views, sometimes not. But I have never seen and never heard of any hard call being made because all the President's advisers were unanimous, or even close to unanimous, as to what he should do and how. Never. Don't believe me? Get into government at a high level yourself -- say somewhere near the 7th floor of the State Department -- and you'll see.
Obama also called for change, but he voted for the farm bill--the mother of all corporate welfare outrages in Washington. He said he would accept public campaign financing and then changed his mine when he saw the money wagons lining up. Obama's campaign got more very large donations--defined as over $25K per pop--than did McCain's: so much for the MoveOn.com strategy of political financing. He has hired a bunch of Clinton retreads to run his Administration, too. This comforts some people, that the man in not a wild and reckless type. Fine, but......where's the change? We have an opportunity with this deep, deep economic crisis to skip a generation of technology--in infrastructure, energy, military procurement, in all sorts of things--and Obama sounds like he just wants to rebuild "this old house", as David Brooks put it. The Clinton Administration, in my view, wasted a huge opportunity for genuine zero-based innovation in foreign policy and national security affairs at a molten, malleable time; I fear that this new Administration, in an equally malleable time in domestic policy, will do the same.
And the mainstream press? It is pointing all this out, yes? No. It is in full frontal fawning posture right now. There are hundreds of examples. My favorite is the supposed news story about the inaugural address, which informed readers that the speech was not just a bunch of sound bytes pasted together, but was mean to be appreciated from start to finish as a whole. Well, having worked as a speechwriter for two Secretaries of State, and having known several White House speechwriters, I think I am safe in saying that all speeches strive to be integral products, and most manage to be that, more or less skillfully so. People are reading into some of Obama's remarks hopeful and supposedly profound meanings that simply are not there. This is very entertaining, watching an otherwise deeply cynical liberal media embrace a hero. They are positively gushing, and Obama is wise to keep pointing out in the face of all this that "this is not about me." We'll see how long all this lasts. Maybe a real long time.
As I have said, I did not vote for the man, but I certainly wish him well. I think every true patriot does. Just the fact that he got elected has dumbfounded much of the world; despite our troubles, we still inhabit the imagination of much of the world just because we seem to be able to do what they can't: change. Just the fact that he got elected shows that, whatever the President does or doesn't mean by "change", the American people have shown once again that they have a knack for reinvention, and that is very, very good, so long as they--er, we--don't throw out the Founders' formula for success in a burst of excessive haste or confidence. That, too, we will see about. As for what this means in practice, well, observers, foreign and domestic, exaggerated the decline of American power under George W. Bush because they didn't like Bush and wanted to blame him for it. Now the same observers exaggerate the rebirth of American power, for the same self-interested reason -- as if American power can really change that much that quickly. How silly.
Aside from power there is principle, and here an interesting phenomenon is also at play. With a single exception (I'll tell you what I think it is later), I don't think Barack Obama has any core beliefs about political life or philosophy. He doesn't have any new ideas of his own, as far as I can tell, as I have already said, and it follows that a lack of core principles is responsible at least in part for a lack of new ideas. But that also describes Franklin Roosevelt, a man who came to the White House in hard times not really knowing his own mind on many things. But because he was not tied to some dogma he could be flexible and, though he made lots of mistakes between 1933 and 1937, say, things worked out not all that badly. He was a great President. Events made the man, not the other away around. The same thing, more or less, might happen again. I sure hope it does, except I hope it doesn't take a world war to prove the point.
And I might point out the obvious -- something so obvious that no one seems to mention it: World recessions and depressions and acute discombobulations like the one we're in do tend to cause or at least contribute a great deal to wars, large ones like World Wars I and II. This is worth pondering, no?
More next time on the crazy "name game" -- all about what Barack and Hussein and Rahm really mean, in Arabic and Hebrew. You'll love it. You'll be amazed. Don't miss it.
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