Rumblings of Discontent

As the Obama cabinet and staff picks roll in, you can almost hear the gnashing of teeth from the left. Nobody expected a White House full of dyed-in-the-wool socialists, but as progressives and the so-called "netroots" invested so much hope and faith in Candidate Obama, to say nothing of time, money, phone calls, and door-to-door evangelism, they were hoping at least for a few appointments reflecting their ideological values. So far, so little. We've got Melody Barnes at the Domestic Policy Council, and... uh.... that's about it. Obama's economics and foreign policy and national security teams seem drawn exclusively from center-right Clinton Administration insiders. To recap briefly:

On the economic front, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers are both protegées of Robert Rubin, a Clinton-era Treasury Secretary (Summers also served in the same post under Clinton), who closely allied himself with Alan Greenspan in opposition to regulation of derivatives - precisely one of the frequently named culprits in today's financial crisis. Rubin and Summers together pushed then-President Clinton to sign off on Phil Gramm's enormous gift to the banking industry - the Financial Services Modernization Act - which paved the way for the merger of Citibank and Travelers Group into the behemoth Citigroup, under Rubin's own directorship. Unless you've been living in a cave, you are now aware that Citigroup has toppled from its own careless gambling, and the government's Citigroup bailout was orchestrated by - wait for it - Rubin, Geithner, and current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. I am no expert on economics, and it may well be that Geithner and Summers are the geniuses which the mainstream media keeps telling me that they are, but it's hard not to wonder why we are rewarding people who wholeheartedly embraced the policies of deregulation and free market absolutism which got us into the very mess we're now asking them to fix. Yet those who raise these concerns are frequently mocked as Chicken Little pessimists and fringe pinkos who are only happy when they're whining.

Similarly, on the foreign policy and national security front, Obama stands ready to announce Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State on Monday. Part of the zealous progressive rallying around Obama and against Clinton during the primaries was based on their differing histories on the Iraq war. But it is not just Clinton's one-time support for the war in Iraq which makes her a dubious choice at State. It would, after all, be hard to find many viable Democratic candidates for the position if opposition to that war from day one was a requirement, considering how many Democrats gladly joined in beating the war drums in 2003. What is more troubling was Clinton's repeated refusal to acknowledge her support was mistaken. And what's even more troubling still is her apparent hawkishness regarding Iran, given her vote for Kyl-Lieberman, which Obama himself claimed to oppose. But Clinton is simply the tip of the iceberg - for Obama seems disinclined to include a single voice of dissent from the left on his foreign policy or national security teams. He is, reportedly, going to keep Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense and name Retired General Jim Jones as National Security Advisor, along with Janet Napolitano already named as Homeland Security Secretary, thus surrounding himself entirely with "centrists" and "pragmatists" who herald no significant change of foreign policy vision in the new Administration.

Chris Bowers expresses his frustration:

I know everyone is obsessed with the "team of rivals" idea right now, but I feel incredibly frustrated. Even after two landslide elections in a row, are our only governing options as a nation either all right-wing Republicans, or a centrist mixture of Democrats and Republicans? Isn't there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration? Also, why isn't there a single member of Obama's cabinet who will be advising him from the left? It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely.

And it's true - whenever progressives complain about Obama's picks so far, the response is that we have to be realistic, we have to understand that Obama needs a broad array of voices around him, that he has to make good on his promises of unity and post-ideological governance. Which is an interesting way of justifying a White House team that includes virtually no progressives whatsoever. An even more troubling but frequent rebuke to progressive gadflies is the allegation that we ought to trust Obama because, hey, he's really smart, and because his choices are serious adults and highly competent - in other words, skilled managers and bureaucrats rather than men of particular political commitments. Thus, witness some of the comments on David Sirota's article at Salon about progressive disappointment with Obama's picks thus far:

It was a tough battle, and our guy won, and every damn body was thrilled to have him there, and now we think he should be listening to each and every one of us as to how to accomplish this vision of a changed Republic? Why aren't one of us President then? Because we wanted someone smarter than us! And that's what we got.

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Jeez. It's a good thing that Obama is smarter than a lot of his supporters. If you actually listened to any of those silver-tongued speeches, you would have already understood that by 'change,' he never promised a radical progressive agenda. He merely promised to listen to people he doesn't agree with, bring competence and a sense of responsibility back to government, and end the polarizing, backbiting rhetoric of the political discourse. Which he IS DOING.

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We are thrilled to death to get an intelligent man in office for the first time in a long time and here you are crying because Obama isn't doing YOUR bidding.

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Maybe, after eight years, we've forgotten what competence looks like, but we're living through one of the most impressive transitions in memory, and I, for one, intend to enjoy it. Surely, no one expected Mr. Obama to be "ready on day one" while staffing his administration with inexperienced unknowns, or to immediately light into his opponents after preaching "conciliation" for two years straight. The fact is, we have elected a goal-oriented strategic thinker who will probably be three steps ahead of us much of the time, so let's see how things play out before we get too hyper. Brushing away gnats shouldn't be part of our President-elect's transition agenda.

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Our new president is a brilliant man with a spectacular education who is clearly able to see what he is up against. I don't believe he has jettisoned his core beliefs. Rather, it seems he realizes that without stabilizing the foundations of our society, there will be nothing he can do to achieve them....Barack Obama deserves out trust and patience. His moves toward the political center are meant to recruit as much consensus as possible for the tasks immediately at hand. Once accomplished, his progressive agenda will move forward.

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Obama seems to be choosing people that are competent and get things done.

Ideologically-driven leadership, left or right, sucks. Ideology is important, but it belongs on the side, influencing thought and debate, not running the show.

Etc etc etc.

Now, I can accept a number of points here: Obama's not even in office yet, so we're seriously jumping the gun by pre-emptively proclaiming him an abysmal failure and sellout already. We have to see what kind of policies he actually pursues when he is President. Fair enough. Criticism of key appointments, however, is not automatically the same thing as premature doomsaying. Unless appointments to key administration positions are utterly meaningless and inconsequential, then they do tell us something about the likely path of Obama's administration. It's strikingly undemocratic to advise critics to bite their tongues because Obama Is Really Smart.

But what's more striking still is the elevation of managerial competence to the highest possible qualification for political office. Obviously, after eight years of nepotistic croynism, competence does look like a breath of fresh air. And I can understand, as well, the automatic suspicion of "ideology" (a word that has a very precise meaning in much political theory, thus making it a bit difficult for me to use it the way it is used in ordinary political commentary....but I'll try...) after eight years of delusional neoconservative true believers. But politics cannot, finally, be reduced merely to technical management and administration. Means must be deployed in the service of particular ends, and the choice of those ends can never be specified purely by managerialism. In the midst of a serious crisis, some ends are beyond dispute: get the economy back on track. But what does that actually mean? What does a well-functioning economy look like? Only a political - only what mainstream commentators call an ideological - vision can actually answer that question. Is a healthy economy measured entirely by corporate profits? The people in charge of "righting" the economy must have answers to these questions before they can put their much-ballyhooed seriousness and competence to work - and our collective obsession with technocratic skill obscures the answers to these questions. Indeed, it prevents us from even asking these questions.

In the end, perhaps the most compelling response to progressive criticism of Obama has been this one: why are you even surprised?? Obama was certainly pleased to have progressives working hard on his behalf during the campaign, but he never remotely suggested that he intended to do anything but govern from the "center" - and all the talk of unity and post-partisanship was a clear signal in that direction. As Greenwald makes clear, progressives projected a lot of their own fantasies onto Obama, whose compelling personal story and inspiring oratory provided a foundation for the construction of an illusion. Even during the primaries, when he frequently cited his own early opposition to the Iraq War as a distinguishing mark of his candidacy, he couched this opposition in terms of the need to concentrate greater resources on the War in Afghanistan, to say nothing of his alarmingly hawkish posture toward Pakistan. Thus even on the issue that initially made him a darling of the left wing of the Democratic Party, Obama never really presented himself as a true ideological ally.

Sadly, I am not quite sure what the moral of the story is. I don't mean to peddle exclusively in gloom and pessimism. I still think Obama's election is an inspiring rebuke to eight years of real darkness, and I still think it has enormous symbolic significance that this country of slavery and Jim Crow has elected a black man as President. I will not soon forget the countless images of elderly blacks weeping in disbelief that this country could possibly have made that choice. And I think we will see a decisive rollback of the most egregious policies of the Bush Administration, to say nothing of some welcome judicial appointments. But I do wonder, if this is the very best we can do at a time when the Republican Party is in a state of complete disarray and the outgoing President is the most unpopular President in modern histroy, then what exactly can the American left hope for in this country? Must we always and endlessly defer a truly progressive vision for the piecemeal and dubious accomplishments of technocratic competence?