How to govern a bowl of jello? Obama manifestly believes it can be done by rationality, small ‘p’ politics (and its hobbled cousin, expediency), and when convenient, various elements of the progressive canon. He knowingly does so facing a semi-literate, largely irrational and a-technological demos via decayed/ing intermediary political institutions at the federal, state and local levels.
Mixed in with the goo, he must stir trillions in bailouts, funds which we don’t have now or any foreseeable means of acquiring. Pragmatism demands it. A domestic counter-revolution was closer than many comprehend. And the trillions may even add to the flavor along the way, or so he believes.
The malignant Movement conversely believes jello demands to be treated like jello. In fact, will only respect those who treat it as such. In this, the Movement is not too far apart from some of the Left who also seek to impose their heightened sensibilities on the quivering mass and can’t fathom Obama’s refusal to slam the jello into their preferred kitty-shaped molds. (But these molds are the ones with little stars in the corners!).
What’s really fascinating is that Obama really doesn’t have a natural constituency. He’s got a patch quilt of quiescent (or heretofore quiescent) globular interests, coagulating into lumpen cysts in the mix. Wall Street? Throw money at them. Manufacturing? Throw a lot less. Rule of Law naive types? Just a few c notes. It’s all so complicated. Even the talking heads can’t be bothered to learn the talking points. Besides, everyone still hates lawyers more than Cheney. Oh, and do something on credit cards.
The larger, more important ‘infrastructure’ work to be done – rebuilding American liberal democracy doesn’t have a PAC. No Bill Donohue screaming on television that the Catholic Church has always been pro science. Is there a constituency that believes in small ‘r’ republicanism? That believes restoring intermediary political and social bodies between the citizen and the State are essential for small ‘l’ and small ‘d’ liberal democracy? None that we can find. What’s a zip code for the targeted mailing?
It’s not as if Obama isn’t trying to cajole the ooze to seep in another direction. At Notre Dame’s commencement he said:
Too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism; in which the world is necessarily a zero-sum game. The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice.
Nice words. But little real action so far. Obama will stand or fall on how he gratifies the goo’s materialism by 2011. Recall that Reagan was very down in the polls when 1983 started. But by 2012, he must come up with the equivalent of new SUVs in the driveways once more (with some sort of green sticker in the window), summers on the Hamptons again, some rickety scheme that can be called ‘health care’ reform that will grossly engorge AARP’s coffers (which bought off AARP on the Warlord’s plan), a jobless rate below 8% and a Dow (yes, we know, an irrelevant barometer but a potent political totem) around 8,800-9,000. The red, white and blue goo will rise up as one gelatinous mass and crown him once more. USA ! USA!
All transitory. All based on artificial fiscal stimulus. Axlerod et al. know that no one ever fed a family on green slogans with enthusiasm for dessert. New Homo Americanus can be and will be a fickle infant indeed.
Newt, Cheney and the brighter Wing Nuts mock Obama’s conceit that he can converse with goo. They learned and still believe that one can scare goo, bash goo, mislead goo, yell at goo, tread on goo, but never ever forget it is just goo. The internal ‘Republican’ (note not Movement) polls show the catastrophic state of the Republican Party in every conceivable demographic. Now Newt et al. do read polls. But there’s a cold calculation behind dismissing the calls for ‘change’, ‘moderation’, etc. They also know that goo is lead, prodded, pushed, shoved and shoveled. But it’s a fool’s errand to chase goo. A 20% something highly energized base is far more valuable to them now.
The Movement also knows that if a lie is repeated loudly and long enough the goo will absorb it as true. For example, waterboarding by all historical, legal, moral and operational precedent is torture. That’s a debate they’ve done fairly well in clouding. Moreover, in short time this will be Obama’s recession. Obama’s bankruptcy. Obama’s foreign policy retreat. A goo fleeing back to pre-literate visual and symbolic infotainment above all lacks capacity for conceptual manipulation and memory reconstruction. In this sense, the Movement’s flailing about does itself little *medium term* harm. 2010 is probably too early for reconstitution in any event. It’s not an unwise strategy to stoke the goo’s darker impulses and hope for a George H.W. Bush 1992 recession/recovery replay for 2011/2012.
Ceteris paribus as the economists say, we prefer to be governed by someone attempting to engage the American demos with cognitive discourse. We enjoy coherent logic that demands attention. But can discourse really effect *qualitative* change in goo? Obama apparently thinks so. His unequaled visibility in micro infotainment channels such as The Tonight Show, etc. are calculated to take his discourse strategy to, well, where the goo is. And the Stiftung is actually encouraged by his apparent success to date.
But let’s not mistake things for what they are. Obama’s re-election hinges not on words but things on the ground: (a) the unemployment rate; and (b) satiating the goo’s material impulses. Gitmo and all that are in the end ephemera, Turley and Olbermann’s stomping of feet and gnashing of teeth aside. Discourse will not get shoppers stampeding into Walmart for $19.95 DVD players.
Any grander political science project to restore America to even a shade of her liberal democratic past — even if begun now — will last well beyond his potential eight years. Truly a neat trick, that. And let’s not forget that Obama himself emerged from the goo and is partly informed by it.
Alex says
Obama – such a good communicator – managed to make GM’s bankruptcy sounds kinda exciting today.
It is exciting; we’re living in a J.G. Ballard novel!
Comment says
Obama – such a good communicator – managed to make GM’s bankruptcy sounds kinda exciting today.
Ha – we hear Pat call Sotomayor a lightweight – So much for the glory of Cardinal Spellman and all the Catholic High Schools Pat has extolled over the years.
What do you have to do, in Pat’s world, to graduate at the top of your class at Spellman and not be a lightweight? Be white?
Comment says
re Hedgehog – That word has become a signpost for pseuds all over the bookish metropolitan enclaves – ever since Stoppard’s recent play about Isiah Berlin
Alex says
This is a key trope in the Movement; our moral clarity is unsullied by compromise or complexity, which come with knowledge and experience. It’s easier to bullshit about Big Generalities than about detail. Andrew Sullivan, before his late conversion, used to talk about Bush being like Tolstoy’s hedgehog – knows one big thing.
Compare the difference between the neocon Napoleonic visions of redrawing the Middle East and the counterinsurgents’ obsession with the hyperlocal. Whose family beef will the new road change? If it inflames it, would that be a good thing because it creates an opportunity for us to mediate it? Compare the fever dreams of reinstating the Hashemites, etc. It is probably very good news that the strategic culture is being influenced – the shift from any given Kagan to David Kilcullen – by a generation of people conditioned to focus on detail and operate in ambiguity – if nothing else, complexity should make you sceptical and conservative (in a good way). That at least is an example of goo leaving the system.
Comment says
Kagan on Iran – we have tried carrots – now we need to talk about sticks.
neocon tough guy.
Comment says
Ok – so Bob Kagan is speaking now at Brookings (why does the ‘liberal’ Brookings promote a right wing warmonger like Kagan? hmmm)
He is the only one on the panel who has never visited Iran – does not speak the language – and is very much unfamiliar with the area.
yet – he is the only one who speaks as if he knows what is going on Iran – the others, all experienced – sound hedged and unsure.
Comment says
We think Rosen miscalculated – and the “even the New Republic” trick has been diluted – Now Rosen is claiming, with typical TNR disingenuousness, to be a supporter of Sotomayor and that right wingers took him out of context.
The fact is – TNR has been playing this game for a long time – passive aggressive politics, very often coded and disingenuous – Weekly Standard in hiding. Basically a neocon mag in liberal drag.
People saw what they did with the war on terror garbage and the DC establishment approved –
But since Sottomayor will win – Rosen will lose, because he aimed to kill the nomination and he failed.
Rosen is now appalled to be linked up with the sweating right wingers screaming about garbanzo beans, but hey.
Comment says
Even the liberal New Republic finds Sotomayor to be a hot tamale and a saucy fiery communist agitator with a low score on the Bell Curve.
Even The New Republics’s Jeffrey Rosen – that consumate man of the left – a man of emmeninent respectablity and good driving skills – worries that this particular Judge Sotomayor — supposedly (according to sources) is a cross between J-LO and Hector Macho Camacho in drag – may not be the Oliver Wendell Holmes of the post Yoo respectbale left-center.
Comment says
“I’ve never read a piece of work by Robert Kagan that hasn’t challenged my brain”
~Marty Peretz 2-28-09
Comment says
We see Pat had a column “Did Bibi Box Barack In” – Of course, in Pat’s neocon-centric worldview, this makes sense. But on planet earth, it looked like Bibi was the uncomfortable one and Barack looked like he always does – cool and pleased.
Ultimately Obama will do what he wants – mixed with political considerations.
Bibi – it seems – is boxed in. He knows that Obama will mouth all the right words about the massive threat Iran poses to the peace of the world, and then not attack them and even work with them in Afganistan.
So Bibi has to figure out how to jumble the politics – All he can hope for is a bad US economy to turn against Obama or some bad thing to happen on Obama’s watch.
Obama is lucky Tzipi did not win – Bibi is no longer a fresh face on the world scene — His time is passed. His visible anger is an impediment to his dream of glory.
Comment says
Just to note – Normally it would not be a bad thing if younger people did not understand the cultural references that an op-ed columnist makes – But Dowd is not like Safire or Buckley or etc – she traffics in ephemera, things with a limited shelf-life. Sort of like fashion.
We think of our great-grandmother – whose picture we look at now. We see her wearing this ludicrous-seeming turn of the cent outfit at a dinner party at Luchow’s in NY – an old restaurant that was replaced by The Palladium, then an NYU dorm. The menu is absurdly rich German food. Everything is the fashion of the times and the people had no idea they were doing transitory things – It all seemed organic to them. Dowd is like on of the people in the pictures – a pre flapper.
Comment says
Btw – how about that Brent Bozell? We have never seen him look like a happy man. He looks like he has lots and lots of anger inside – That’s our psycho insight for the day.
Comment says
We see the Times still regards Dowd as a valuable property – Hoyt says, in his opinion, she did not plagerise – But of course, she did – That’s why Marshall gave his ‘lets move on’ comment.
Dowd, imo, is a bit of a wasting asset for the paper of record. She was very much plugged into the cross-currents of boomer culture where an irish cafeteria catholic crosses with the decline of the traditional order of elites and the rise of the meritocracy.
But that whole she-bang is old news.
She does not ‘get’ the new order — She had trouble writing about Obama without Twwety-type scripting, but she is even more clueless about younger America.
Younger people have no idea what she is talking about with her nods to dated material stretching from Camelot to Sex and the city etc.
Comment says
“Rich people have an uncanny ability to oppose aid for everybody but themselves.”
~Jeffrey Sachs
(HuffPo blogger and savior of Russia)
Comment says
Goo of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your readily available commercial emulsifiers!
Comment says
re Bill Donahue – That guy is a piece of work, eh == Can you imagine what kind of stuff he has said behind closed doors? When the enemy wasn’t listening? Ha.
nadezhda says
No snark from me. You nailed it this time. My “hope” in November was a shriveled, beaten, nearly dead thing, fashioned out of sheer desperation from contemplating the alternative. My “hope” now is still cynical but at least alive. And even though he himself “emerged from the goo and is partly informed by it,” he’s also preternaturally self-aware. It’s been an astonishing performance so far. But as you say, his fate and ours are in the hands of the global economy gods.