We endured 18 months of character assassination, starting
in the spring of 2011 with 11 Republican wannabe’s. Remember the
Texan gunslinger Governor Rick “Oops” Perry, the Tea
Party’s shrill heroine Michelle Bachman, the pizza king “nine,
nine, nine” Herman Cain?
They at least provided some comedic moments. This year’s
general election slugfest provided none.
We were assailed by some $6 billion of television
advertising by the presidential and congressional candidates who
told us they “approve this message” of evasions, half-truth, and
lies. For the first time maverick anonymous donors entered the
defamation derby, authorized to torment us by the Supreme
Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United in 2010 that you can’t
have free speech without money, and lots of it.
If I’d had a dime from every American who has inquired how
the Brits manage these things so much more quickly and
economically, I’d have a nice little business that could be
taxed away when we go over the fiscal cliff (of which more in a
moment) in January 2013.
At the end of all the venting and the voting, Americans see
themselves as back where they started, still with a Democratic
president and Senate, and the angry Tea Party Republicans in
control of the House.
In short, it looks like déjà vu all over again. That’s a
quote from the baseball star Yogi Berra. The voters seem to have
listened to him: “If you see a fork in the road,” said Yogi,
“take it.” The electorate did. They refused to reject Obama and
Obama Care but they shied at giving him more than a 3
percent edge in the popular vote – less than 3 million by
contrast with the 10 million against John McCain in 2008. Thirty
states will be governed by Republicans, the most since 2000.
Obama was elected on the votes of minorities, women and
youth, all brilliantly identified in the most technically
sophisticated campaign ever seen. Nationally, only 38 percent of
whites backed him, 5 percent down on 2008. He might have won
endorsement for a bold new bi-partisan prospectus for his next
four years; he didn’t even attempt an Etch-a-Sketch of one. Yet
for a start the president and the lame-duck Congress have not a
day to lose if they are to agree a budget or we’ll all catapult
over the financial cliff on January 2nd, 2013.
“Sequestration” is the word for that phenomenon, an ugly
word for the ugly fact that the only way Republicans would agree
last year to an increase in the debt ceiling necessary to avoid
the U.S. Treasury defaulting was for the Administration to agree
automatic spending cuts as a down-payment on tackling the $16
trillion debt.
Without a budget, there will be an indiscriminate cut of 10
percent on all discretionary spending (including defence but
exempting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid); an end to
the Bush-era tax cuts; and renewal of payroll taxes. The
Republicans rejected the Democrats’ preference for capping
deficits by raising revenue, the new dirty word. The economic
pundits concur that if Congress and president fail to
compromise, the flickering U.S. recovery will die out. Millions
more would join 20 million out of work and the 8 million in
low-paying part-time work. The lights would go out over Europe,
too.
THE GREAT DIVIDE
The picture of America four years after Obama’s euphoric
2008 victory is daunting. The nation facing the fiscal cliff and
the stress it will entail is as divided politically,
demographically and culturally as two Roman provinces, split in
its allegiances and priorities. Ours is a split between the Deep
South and the East and West, between the rural heartland and the
cities, between whites and minorities, men and
women, English-speakers and Spanish, poor and rich, old and
young.
Obama personally is well liked across the great divides. He
has an acute sense of humor, and a million-dollar smile, but
for all his high-flown rhetoric and his winning personality, he
has not shown much of a gift for the day-to-day human
relationships essential to bridging the gulfs. The common
complaint is that he is aloof, shielded within a White House
cocoon, and not just from time wasters but from key economic
figures in Congress and business he’s rebuffed.
The distemper comes through in Bob Woodward’s new book, The
Price of Politics, detailing the 44 days of negotiations in the
summer of 2011 when the president and the Republican Speaker,
baby-face John Boehner, tried to reach a “grand bargain” to cut
entitlement spending (the Republican priority) and increase tax
revenues (the Administration’s). They failed. Boehner described
the president as “moaning, groaning and whining, and demanding.
Threatening. He was pretty desperate”.
The Tea Party hardliners in Congress, who made the Speaker’s
life a misery in the negotiations, are unfazed by Obama’s
triumph. They are doubling down. Fred Barnes spoke for them in
Thursday’s Wall Street Journal: “The Republicans didn’t lose the
White House because Mr. Romney was too conservative”.
A video from the conservative Heritage Act announced the
beginning of a “war”. The American Right talks very much as the
British Left did after each successive defeat by the Tories in
the seventies. The Left’s conviction then was that the party
lost power because it had just not promised the nationalization
the electorate wanted. It was a delusion that provoked the
reforming Labour party leader Hugh Gaitskell to call in Oscar
Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. One of them (nobody’s sure which
one) invented the handy excuse for a theatrical flop: the play
was a great success but the audience was a total failure.
The riposte of the “moaning, groaning” Obama to Boehner’s
put-down in the debt talks was to crown his final victory on
Tuesday by scooping up the 18 electoral votes to win Boehner’s
own state of Ohio.
The two men spoke by phone on Wednesday, but you need an
expert reader of tea leaves to discern how far Boehner is
prepared to compromise. He’s already claimed he and his caucus
have a mandate to stand firm against higher tax rates. He says
that to raise them only on the top payers, as the Democrats
propose, would mean “going part of the way over the fiscal
cliff”. It does sound an uncomfortable place to be, but what’s
reported as his “olive branch” doesn’t sound much to cling to
either. Basically, it’s the same formula of the defeated Romney:
if only the Administration will lower tax rates for all, the
money will come from an economy stimulated to grow.
A PLACE IN HISTORY
Clearly, if America is again to enjoy a Reagan-like Morning
in America recovery, epiphanies are required all round. The
initiative is with Obama. According to a group of presidential
biographers he summoned to a private dinner, he now has his eyes
on a more glittering prize than surviving this looming financial
crisis or getting a few pieces of legislation through Congress.
The historians who’ve talked to the New York Times have no
doubt he aspires to enter the histories as one of the all-time
greats. The story fits with an inadvertent boast he made in a 60
Minutes interview in December 2011. He had it excised from the
television transmission but the script had him saying: “I’d put
our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first
four years against any president – with the possible exceptions
of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln – just in terms of what we’ve gotten
done in modern history.”
That’s a stretch. In a Newsweek presidential special issue
just out, 10 leading historians identify the 10 best presidents
of the 19 from Theodore Roosevelt (1901) to Obama. The rankings
in order are Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon
Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Bill
Clinton, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and, at No. 10 there is
Barack Obama.
All the great presidents have found their own distinctive
ways of reconciling America’s mythic idea of itself. A Romney
style of entrepreneur claims the freedom of the independent
frontiersman. Romney blundered in condemning Obama’s bailout of
the now thriving auto industry – Let Detroit Go Bankrupt – but
he wasn’t to know that in the last days of the campaign
superstorm Sandy would also make his purported philosophy of
self-reliance look both heartless and ridiculous.
In the primary debates, he’d declared that for the federal
government to engage in emergency disaster relief was “immoral”.
All should be left to the states and private enterprise.
When the storm wreaked havoc in New Jersey, Obama went down
to the shoreline where the gutsy Republican Governor Chris
Christie eagerly embraced the community organizer from the White
House. Obama was the epitome of the wagon-train boss helping the
settlers survive a crossing of the Great Plains by circling the
wagons when the Indians had other ideas.
The argument reverberating in the campaign and into our
present predicament is how much government can or should do
without impinging on freedom. It’s as old as the Republic.
Ronald Reagan is regarded as articulating it on his
inauguration: “In this crisis, government is not the solution to
our problems, government is the problem.”
He’s often quoted without the “in this crisis”
qualification, which is important since he was elected after the
years of malaise under Jimmy Carter, but the concept is not just
Republican boilerplate. It is rooted in pioneer individualism
and the Social Darwinism nourished in America by two English
immigrants, the engineer and philosopher Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903) and his Yale disciple William Graham Sumner
(1840-1910), son of a self-educated English laborer.
Indeed, a two-term Democratic president, Grover Cleveland,
pre-empted Reagan. In 1887, when Congress voted $10,000 of seed
for drought-stricken Texan farmers, Cleveland vetoed it. “The
lesson should constantly be enforced that though the people
support the Government, Government should not support the
people.”
Cleveland was not a cruel man. Calvin Coolidge and Herbert
Hoover had much the same laissez-faire attitude to relief for
the unemployed in the thirties.
The significance of 2012 may be that Obama’s re-election has
moved the needle back to the concept of government as benign,
with a responsibility for all and a duty of undiluted tolerance
for minorities. But can Obama rise to the occasion? At his
front, he is confronted by a chastened but still obdurate Right,
at his back an expectant Left ready to cry “betrayal”. Perhaps
there is something in the whisper that he will offer Romney a
job.
The challenge Obama faces now gives him a route to the
rarefied league of great presidents. To ascend he will have to
negotiate the historic grand bargain that eluded him on the debt
crisis and also shed his innate antipathy to the business of
business so as to liberate the animal spirits of this innovative
society. These would be historic achievements, but they
will require the magnanimity of Theodore Roosevelt, the
flexibility of Franklin, the negotiating resilience of Johnson,
the charm and openness of Bill Clinton – and the luck Obama has
enjoyed.
(Editing by Will Waterman)
