It was a speech that basically admitted impotence, more or less. Obama chastised Republicans in a way that didn't sound whiny, but I'm not sure a whole lot more than that. That said, I was a lot more interested by what happened two days later at the house GOP retreat. When I first saw this, I got really excited. Obama just simply seemed masterful, taking Republican questions turning them back on the house GOP, and making them look silly and obstructionist. However, following that euphoria, I find myself considerably less hopeful. For one thing, the problem Obama faced never was in the House. (Come mid-term elections this year that might change). But for the last year and a half, Pelosi has consistently passed Obama's legislatively agenda, while the Senate has become the place where good legislation goes to die. But the other thing I noticed during the Q&A was how much faith Obama put in "experts" and establishmentarians like Howard Baker as a way of defining the political Center. He referred to his healthcare bill as a "pretty centrist" piece of legislation--which it is--and was promptly laughed at. He then defended this claim by stating that it was basically the same thing as what Howard Baker, Bob Dole and Tom Daschle put forward at the beginning of the year and what Republicans put on the table during Clinton's first term. The more I think about Obama, both from his SOTU speech, and from this recent Q&A with Republicans, the more I find myself thinking that the guy is a Wannabe Centrist.
Consider the following: Obama's political roots are liberal to the core. He began as a community organizer. His closest political associates--David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett--both have strong liberal tendencies. Yet coming into the White House, who does he hire as his closest advisor? Rahm Emanuel, a solidly Establishment centrist, a corporate "pragmatist" of the highest order. Or take the economic policies that have come out of his White House. The excise tax wasn't an idea that came out of Obama's administration--he originally proposed paying for healthcare by capping tax exemption limits on itemized deductions (which would mostly be paid by the wealthiest Americans). Furthermore, the president supported the public option and defended it publicly numerous times. The problem was as Rick Perlstein puts it, in this excellent exchange between him and Mark Schmitt, when the time came to draw lines in the sand Obama didn't do that. As Perlstein writes:
what I worry "being like Barack" truly means is that the knockout never comes. That the patience and the building of trust is, in fact, the end in itself. "Our Barack doesn't do mean," means, "Our Barack doesn't make the strategic choice to defeat a reactionary adversary even when that opportunity manifestly presents itself to him."
And that's really the point, watching the Q&A. Obama is most comfortable when he can orient himself in close proximity to the Establishment center. In this particular forum it was successful, it wouldn't have made sense for him to go into the house GOP retreat and tell them that they believed in failed ideas. But, in general, this is exactly what he needed to say, over and over and over, until the public came to see the current Republican platform and its rhetoric as fundamentally toxic. And he didn't. His instincts lead him in a pretty consistently liberal direction. But it's almost as though Obama envisions himself moving to the center before he actually does, that something would be wrong if that wasn't the end result of the legislative process. He's not triangulating, which I'm grateful for. He also, at least according to Richard Wolfe, sees himself as many progressives wish to see him: as a Reagan of the left. But for Obama to be Reagan he needs to draw new lines. And however successfully he might have invoked the Establishment center at the GOP House retreat as a way of painting the GOP as obstructionist, I ultimately see this as a failure of imagination rather than a success. He's not drawing new lines. He's taking the old lines and trying to use them against a reactionary party. The problem is that the old lines have been formed under the past 30 years of conservative political dominance in this country. The center is not the center. And Obama, trying to make that center hold, keeps stumbling out alone into the void where it used to be.
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