I have little really to say about the current president other than whatever faith I may have had in him (however minute) was lost almost from the start with his cabinet appointments of Clinton retreads and it was all downhill from there. He liked to compare himself to Reagan and FDR (and perhaps in personal likeability…he is right to do so) but to me he actually is a lot more like George Bush (the first) in that he is ineffectual, removed, out-of-touch and largely carrying on the same policies of his predecessor. I’ve always seen him tempermentally as a conservative and I kinda pity those who had delusions of him being a “liberal”. One of his big problems is he doesn’t ‘act, but reacts’. That doesn’t really show inspirational leadership skills. It’s like Clinton’s famed “triangulation”. It may keep you in power but it certainly doesn’t make you a great president.
I’m adding an excerpt from Doug Henwood’s blog (Jan 23) because it’s on point about the deeper issues.
…The economy isn’t the only thing suffering from a structural, and not merely cyclical, crisis. Our political system is as well. I quickly got tired of hearing all the liberal anguish over the result of the Senate race in Massachusetts. The Democrats brought the problem on themselves. A year of trying to seduce the Republicans into bipartisanship and giving the conservative wing of the Democratic party everything they want has brought Obama nothing but disrepute. For hardened streetfighters like the GOP, conciliation is a sign of weakness which only makes them bolder.
Of course, the liberal instinct is to blame this urge to compromise on the lack of brains or backbone or some other crucial bodily organ. I think that’s wrong. The fundamental problem of the Democrats is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend for electoral reasons that it’s something else. So they make progressive noises to satisfy the base, but once in power, do the bidding of their funders. Sometimes these contradictory tendencies can be seen in one figure, like Obama himself, and sometimes in the wings of the party (e.g. the Progressive Caucus vs. the Blue Dogs). But in both cases, the more conservative faction, whether of personality or party, almost always prevails. That’s especially the case when there are no popular movements pushing them in a better direction. Those popular movements were partially disarmed by Obama’s victory. Maybe they’ll start coming to their senses now, especially as the Dems move right in response to the Massachusetts outcome.
But that’s not the whole story. Although a lot of liberals, and even more serious leftists, don’t like to admit it, there’s a deeply conservative streak in the American electorate. The “common sense”—the unschooled instincts imparted by upbringing and inherited ideology—of people in this country is individualist and self-reliant. That common sense has become increasingly dysfunctional. The U.S. reminds me in many ways of a startup company that’s grown so big that it needs a serious overhaul but is incapable of the necessary transformation. In the corporate example, you frequently see that the founders don’t want to turn things over to professional managers. They want to keep running the show on instinct and animal spirits. But those aren’t working anymore.
So too the U.S. The dog-eat-dog model of social Darwinism worked well (on its own terms—it was often horribly brutal) while the U.S. was growing rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but ever since growth slowed down in the 1970s, we’ve been in need of a rethink of the old model. But we’re incapable of it. Instead, we’ve tried ever more reckless applications of debt to keep things going. The recent financial crisis looked like the crisis of that approach, but we’re now emerging from the crisis phase without things having changed all that much. Obama’s making some hostile noises about breaking up large banks and putting their speculative activities on a leash, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
The country seems to be rotting from within but the political and ideological systems are incapable of recognizing that fact, much less trying to deal with it. I wish I could detach myself from the consequences and find it all amusing, in the style of H.L. Mencken. But I can’t…it’s hard to get hopeful… I guess this is what it’s like to live in the midst of imperial decline.
