[Peace-discuss] Good critique of NYT op-ed

[C. G. Estabrook]

"[Westen] refuses to take seriously what Obama himself has said in the course of 
the deficit talks: that he supports massive cuts in entitlement programs, 
including Social Security, and that he supports the most modest of tax increases 
on the wealthy in order to provide a patina of 'fairness' and 'shared 
sacrifice,' without materially affecting the super-rich. In attempting to 
explain why Obama made the decisions he did, however, Westen reduces great 
historical questions to the small change of personality and temperament, citing 
'lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so 
debilitating at some other time in history.'”


Once again: Why Obama won’t—and can’t—be Roosevelt
By Patrick Martin
13 August 2011

A lengthy commentary published August 7 in the Sunday Review section of the /New 
York Times/ makes many criticisms of the policies of President Barack Obama, but 
collapses in the face of the most vital and compelling issue: which class 
interests the Obama administration serves.

Under the headline, “What Happened to Obama?” Drew Westen, a professor of 
psychology at Emory University, expresses the disillusionment of many liberal 
supporters of Obama, who believed that the election of the first 
African-American president represented a watershed and an opportunity to revive 
the liberal reform policies associated with Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Great 
Society measures of the 1960s.

While couched in the language of post-modernism—Westen complains about Obama’s 
failure to “tell a story” or provide a compelling “counternarrative” to the 
Republican ultra-right—the criticisms are sharper than anything that has 
appeared recently in the /Times/, especially after the departure of two of the 
newspaper’s more liberal columnists, Bob Herbert and Frank Rich.

Westen focuses his critique especially on Obama’s refusal to denounce those 
responsible for the 2008 financial collapse—the bankers and billionaire 
speculators—and to promote an aggressively liberal alternative to the bank 
bailout initiated in the final months of the Bush administration and then 
expanded after the Democratic administration took over.

Pinning the blame for the crisis on the financial elite “would have made clear 
that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the 
presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the 
Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be 
a power-sharing arrangement,” he argues.

“It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or 
the deficit--a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 
trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 
trillion in two wars. And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, 
compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem 
is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the 
fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they 
can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying 
less of their fair share for it.”

Westen contrasts Obama’s failure to the actions and words of President Franklin 
D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal policies used government resources to “put 
Americans directly to work,” and who made a regular display of hostility to the 
big bankers, and vice versa. He cites the famous speech in 1936 at Madison 
Square Garden, when Roosevelt declared, “Never before in all our history have 
these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are 
unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.”

While Roosevelt was himself just as committed to the capitalist system as his 
Wall Street foes, he clearly understood that in order to save capitalism, it was 
necessary to chastise the capitalists publicly, to appease popular anger, and to 
place some constraints on their operations in order to prevent a recurrence of 
the financial manipulations that produced the 1929 stock market crash.

Westen bemoans Obama’s refusal to follow this example. He writes: “In contrast, 
when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic 
inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the 
Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his 
gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he 
put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public—a 
failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it.”

This criticism assumes, of course, that Obama could have provided a credible 
explanation for his decision to put the lunatics in charge of the capitalist 
asylum—including, most obviously, his selection of Timothy Geithner, head of the 
New York Federal Reserve during the 2008 crash and one of three principal 
organizers of the bank bailout, as his secretary of the treasury. Likewise, he 
chose to renominate Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, another key 
architect of the bailout, for a new four-year term.

More importantly, Obama chose to continue the bailout of the banks begun by 
Geithner, Bernanke and Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and then to 
greatly expand it. Every aspect of the new administration’s financial and 
economic policy was driven by the determination to restore solvency to the 
investment banks, stock traders and hedge funds, at the expense of the working 
class.

Obama proposed an economic stimulus policy tailored to boosting corporate 
profitability, not jobs, and rejected any direct job creation by the federal 
government. After blocking efforts to limit executive pay at the bailed-out 
banks, the president demanded a 50 percent wage cut for newly hired auto workers 
as the price of bailing out General Motors and Chrysler. And his health care 
“reform” was driven by cost-cutting, not the extension of coverage to the uninsured.

Westen admits that these policies led to widespread confusion and then 
disillusionment among those voters who had expected a progressive alternative 
from Obama, and opened the way for the ultra-right Tea Party movement to divert 
popular discontent and gain influence. But he attributes this to Obama’s failure 
to motivate his policies, not to the objective content of the policies 
themselves. Thus he writes that no administration official would “explain why 
saving the banks was such a priority, when saving the homes the banks were 
foreclosing didn’t seem to be.”

Such a formulation suggests that such an explanation was possible; in other 
words, that Obama was pursuing a policy that was ultimately in the interests of 
working people, but failed to communicate it properly. The truth is far 
different: Obama’s policies were determined solely by the interests of the banks 
and corporations, and it proved impossible for him to disguise this fact from 
the working class. The Madison Avenue techniques and rhetoric of “hope” and 
“change” employed during the 2008 presidential campaign proved inadequate for 
gulling the masses indefinitely in the face of continued double-digit 
unemployment and declining living standards.

Westen concludes by effectively throwing up his hands over the recent 
confrontation between the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the 
Obama administration over raising the federal debt ceiling and cutting the 
federal deficit. He describes the deficit debate as divorced from the real 
concerns of the American people about jobs and the ongoing economic slump, but 
expresses bewilderment about Obama’s role.

“Like most Americans, at this point,” he concludes, “I have no idea what Barack 
Obama—and by extension the party he leads—believes on virtually any issue.” This 
is only because he refuses to take seriously what Obama himself has said in the 
course of the deficit talks: that he supports massive cuts in entitlement 
programs, including Social Security, and that he supports the most modest of tax 
increases on the wealthy in order to provide a patina of “fairness” and “shared 
sacrifice,” without materially affecting the super-rich.

In attempting to explain why Obama made the decisions he did, however, Westen 
reduces great historical questions to the small change of personality and 
temperament, citing “lack of experience and a character defect that might not 
have been so debilitating at some other time in history.”

He writes: “Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign 
trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had 
accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a 
business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law 
professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other 
than an autobiography…”

These aspects of Obama’s biography are significant, but only in demonstrating 
that his elevation to the presidency was not the result of his personal 
achievements, but rather a decision by powerful sections of the ruling elite 
that a change in image and personnel was needed, along with some adjustments in 
foreign policy after the disasters of the Bush years, and a young 
African-American Democrat with conservative and solidly pro-capitalist loyalties 
would fit the bill.

While Westen faults Obama for his failure to indict the Wall Street criminals 
for causing the 2008 crash, it was precisely his behavior during those critical 
weeks that reassured the ruling elite that he could be entrusted with the 
presidency. While Republican John McCain improvised wildly—suspending his 
campaign, attempting to cancel the first debate, then reversing himself—and 
congressional Republicans precipitated a stock market collapse by initially 
voting down the bailout bill, Obama lined up 100 percent behind the Bush 
administration and the Federal Reserve in mobilizing every possible federal 
resource to save the banks and speculators.

September 2008 was Obama’s final audition for the White House, and he passed 
with flying colors. Why should anyone expect anything different from his presidency?

Westen ends his lament with a litany of complaints about the growing economic 
inequality in America, where

“400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow 
Americans… the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the 
last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise 
astronomically… we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so 
hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates.”

Obama’s failure to challenge this social reality is not a personal one, or the 
result of individual policy choices. It rather is an objectively determined 
expression of very different circumstances from those that prevailed when 
Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House. The major difference is the long-term 
historical decline of American capitalism.

When Roosevelt took office, the economic conditions were even more dire than 
those confronting Obama in January 2009, but even in the depths of the Great 
Depression the United States was still the most powerful capitalist nation, with 
enormous economic reserves and industrial might. Today, however, the United 
States is a declining power, with a national debt approaching $17 trillion, an 
enormous negative balance of trade, and a shrinking industrial base.

Obama’s failure to offer a New Deal or echo the reformist rhetoric of FDR is not 
merely the product of his failure of imagination. It is an expression of the 
un-viability of such a policy today and the lack of support for it in the 
American ruling elite.

In the 1930s, fearful of the recent example of the Russian Revolution, facing 
immense upheavals from the American working class, the US capitalist class could 
afford to part with a relatively small portion of its vast wealth to stave off 
social and political disaster. Today it can neither afford nor envision such a 
policy...


http://wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/obam-a13.shtml