One of The American Prospect‘s blessings and curses is that we’re sometimes ahead of the curve, and in November 2008, in focusing an issue on the structural and institutional obstacles to progressive governance prior to the presidential election, we were way ahead of the curve. Recently, a [[I’D CUT SPORADIC, IT SEEMS WEIRD TO HAVE A SPORADIC SERIES. . . sporadic series]] of arguments have broken out over whether the failures of Barack Obama‘s presidency are due to him being a sellout, a weak president, or simply both.
[[BIG NOTE: I’D CONSIDER MOVING THESE FOLLOWING TWO PARAGRAPHS TO THE END, AND MOVING THE MORE CURRENT STUFF UP. MAYBE EVEN STARTING WITH ALTERMAN’S PIECE AND STRUCTURING IT THIS WAY “HE SAID THIS IN THE NATION — THIS IS THE LATEST IN A SERIES OF ARGUMENTS ABOUT PRESIDENTIAL POWER AND WHETHER IT’S OBAMA’S FAULT — BUT IF EVERYONE HAD PAID ATTENTION TO THE REMARKABLY PRESCIENT TAP ISSUE FROM TWO YEARS AGO, THEY WOULD KNOW THAT THIS IS A DEEP STRUCTURAL PROBLEM.” OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT.]]
I went back and read that issue, which was pretty prescient at the time–from Brad DeLong‘s take on Ben Bernanke‘s unilateral power to affect the economy, to Tara McElvey‘s piece on the influence of the counterinsurgency crowd, and to Ezra Klein‘s accurate prediction that a vital choke point in health care reform would be Max Baucus‘ Senate Finance Committee. But Ezra’s most important observation was this one:
And, in a way, it was our failure as well. So long as the public understanding of American politics is so resolutely focused on the president, change will be a heavy lift, because the public will continually apply pressure to only that one point in the system — and often, it won’t be the chokepoint.
Presidential success, Ezra wrote, was dependent on “the executive’s failure to master the independent institutions and external forces,” because the kind of sweeping changes liberals wanted to see couldn’t simply be done by fiat.
[[IS THIS A NEW ARGUMENT, OR AN OLD ONE FROM THE ISSUE? WE NEED A TRANSITION TO TELL US: SOMETHING LIKE, “IF PUNDITS HAD PAID ATTENTION TO THOSE EARLIER PIECES, THEN THEY WOULDN’T BE HAVING THE CURRENT ARGUMENT]] On the matter of the Obama administration’s failures, Jonathan Bernstein offered the structural take, arguing that while the president is individually powerful, the office has less power to influence the legislative process than people generally understand. I agreed with Bernstein’s take on domestic policy, but disagreed greatly on matters of foreign affairs and national security, and argued that while certainly Obama faced bureaucratic and institutional challenges to his promises to roll back the Bush-era security state, it’s clear Obama made a decision to prioritize other matters. Liberals wanted, and Obama promised, a return to the rule of law, not more competent implementation of late Bush-era national security policies with a new rhetorical framework. I think it’s hard to make a sweeping argument one way or another. There are times when the administration has failed to exert influence it had, times when he simply chose not to fight, and times when the administration has used its leverage and lost.]]
[[AN OPPOSITION, RIGHT? PLACE THESE IN TIME IN SOME WAY]] The opposition to Bernstein was offered by Glenn Greenwald, who posited that the structural argument is simply the “newly minted Obama apologist meme that has been created and is being disseminated by Obama-defending pundits far and wide.” Certainly there are some people that are retroactively using structural arguments to excuse Obama from failures his administration bears the lion’s share of responsibility for, but this argument–offered in a more extensive form in Eric Alterman‘s new piece in The Nation, has been around for a long time, and if liberals had paid more attention to it, they might have gotten more of the change they wanted over the past two years. If anything, the recent attention given to the New Black Panther Party case, essentially a battle over the role of the Civil Rights Division, shows that conservatives have an acute understanding of the importance of institutions in implementing their agenda. Oddly enough it’s often the anti-government right that seems to recognize the importance of institutions (e.g. the Supreme Court), and the left that waits for a Great Leader to implement their agenda.
Liberals remember the Bush-era as a time where conservatives got everything they wanted, but that’s not really accurate. The Bush administration’s tenure saw unprecedented politicization of executive agencies, but anyone who’s ever worked a service job can tell you how much easier it is to mess something up than it is to fix it. The Bush presidency was a disaster of conservative governance, but it was also hardly an era of unprecedented legislative success: Bush got his two wars because of the national mood after the 9/11 attacks, but he failed at just about everything not national security related post-No Child Left Behind. There was no constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, no immigration reform, no privatization of social security. [[IF YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT NCLB, YOU NEED TO MOVE THIS SENTENCE UP SO THAT IT’S RIGHT AFTER THAT SENTENCE, AND MAKE IT CLEAR YOU’RE REFERRING TO THAT Bush’s biggest domestic legislative accomplishment had Ted Kennedy‘s name on it.]] Oh and he got TARP. And that’s when he had a party that was actually willing to work with him on something, rather than a Senate with a permanent filibuster.
Political science is not really my strong point, but I personally lie somewhere between Greenwald and Bernstein on the matter of the president’s influence. I think there are cases where Obama has had influence and failed to use it, deployed leverage and still come up short, and situations where he’s simply failed to fight. But there’s an irony in that those unequivocally labelling Obama a sell-out subscribe to the same great man theory of the presidency as the starry-eyed 2008 Obama voters they hold in contempt.
That said, I think Greenwald and those who share his views should recognize that this structural argument predates the Obama presidency, and the people defending Obama on those grounds aren’t the same as people who quibble about the definition of torture when Americans do it. [[IF THE TORTURE OBJECTION ANALOGY IS ONE HE USED, I’D MAKE THAT CLEARER.]]
