by Edward Klein
My first round of interviews was with members of the White House press corps. It will come as no surprise to readers that there aren’t many avowed conservatives in this group. Nor will readers be shocked to learn that most of the men and women who cover Obama on a day-to-day basis are, to put it charitably, partial toward Obama and are inclined to believe that he has demonstrated a real ability to grow and adapt.
This may be a classic case of the wish being father to the thought. But there is no denying the fact that most members of the White House press corps agree with James Fallows, a liberal analyst of the presidency who writes for the Atlantic. “Not even FDR was FDR at the start,” Fallows wrote in a recent issue of the monthly magazine. “The evidence is that Obama is learning fast to use the tools of office.”
Mainstream journalists contend that in the wake of the shellacking the Democrats took in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama & Co. were forced to go back to the drawing board. According to this version of events, Obama and his political advisers concluded after the midterms that the president would lose in 2012 if the election were a referendum on the economy.6 The election had to be a “choice election” between Obama and a “worse” Republican alternative in order for Obama to win, and he had to start beating up on his potential Republican opponent right away.
At this point, I can hear some readers interrupting. “We know where the liberal mainstream media stand,” they might say. “Why should we care what they think?”
The answer is quite simple: the presidential nominee of the Republican Party will not only have to run against Barack Obama in 2012; he will also have to run against the full force and power of the liberal mainstream media and the cultural establishment. For all their carping about Obama’s coldness, detachment, isolation, and grandiosity, and for all their disappointment over his failure to become a “transformative” president, mainstream journalists and their allies in the liberal establishment have never fallen out of love with Obama. They want to see Obama win in 2012. And their newest mantra is “Obama has grown in office.”
Listen to what they have to say:
From the Washington bureau chief of a major city newspaper, who asked to remain anonymous: “Obama and his staff have learned a lot. They never saw the Tea Party thing coming. They were not nimble. They thought that Hillary Clinton had made a terrible mistake on the healthcare bill by sending a White House-created bill to Congress with a thousand-plus pages. So the Obama people decided not to send up a bill of their own. What’s more, Obama was in favor of the public option. They knew it wasn’t going to pass. The thought was he should have tried anyway. It would demonstrate to his base that he tried and that the votes weren’t there. And the same people who didn’t see the Tea Party coming, didn’t see that a very complex proposal like ObamaCare needed to be explained in simple terms.
“Now, with a Republican-dominated House of Representatives, Obama and his staff have changed both strategy and tactics,” this journalist continued. “They have a plan to put the onus on the Republicans. Rather than compromising from the start, as they did before, the president comes out and says, ‘You want a definite deficit plan? Well, I’ve got one. And what are you going to do about it?’ That is a big difference from the way they acted early on. They had to go through all of this to understand that the strategy of compromise wouldn’t work.”
And this from a White House correspondent: “There is plenty of evidence that Obama has grown in the job. The sharper the political knocks have become, the more he seems aware of his opponents. He’s tried to be a nice guy. Now, he’s picking a fight because the situation demands it and he has no choice. It’s a Harry Truman strategy. His strategy is that he’s the last sane man in Washington.”
The notion that Obama has changed his stripes, that through trial and error he has become a better president, is now accepted as conventional wisdom inside the Washington Beltway. Indeed, Obama himself subscribes to this view; he even admits he’s seen the error of his ways.
“While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong—and what he needs to do to change course ...,” Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times.
He has spent what one aide called “a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0,” with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise. Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington.
All this talk about a “New Obama” reminds me of the effort on the part of Richard Nixon’s PR people in the 1960s to repackage him as the “New Nixon.” During the presidential election of 1968, voters were treated to TV commercials and carefully planted stories claiming that the old, mean-spirited Nixon had matured, and that a more tolerant, magnanimous “New Nixon” had taken his place. It was a brilliantly orchestrated campaign, but as we learned during Watergate and the subsequent release of Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, there never was a “New Nixon.”
The example of Richard Nixon’s non-makeover makeover should tell us something about the efforts of the Obama political team to reframe his image and resell him to voters. The comparison between Nixon, the saturnine gutter fighter, and the No-Drama-Obama may strike some people as a stretch, but consider the following:• Like Nixon, Obama is an introvert who prefers his own company to that of others
• Like Nixon, Obama has a frosty relationship with the press
• Like Nixon, Obama is thin-skinned and self-pitying
• Like Nixon, Obama relies on a tight inner circle of dedicated loyalists
• Like Nixon, Obama is a divisive political figure
• Like Nixon, Obama thinks anyone who disagrees with him is his sworn enemy and is out to destroy him
“Obama is among the most thin-skinned presidents we have had, and we see evidence of it in every possible venue imaginable, from one-on-one interviews to press conferences, from extemporaneous remarks to set speeches,” says Politics Daily columnist Peter Wehner. “The president is constantly complaining about what others are saying about him. He is upset at Fox News, and conservative talk radio, and Republicans, and people carrying unflattering posters of him. He gets upset when his avalanche of faulty facts are challenged.... In Obama’s eyes, he is always the aggrieved, always the violated, always the victim of some injustice. He is America’s virtuous and valorous hero, a man of unusually pure motives and uncommon wisdom, under assault by the forces of darkness.”
The comparison between Nixon and Obama is even more revealing when we consider how each of these presidents chose to sustain his political popularity. “Both men deployed populist-tinged, us-versus-them appeals,” writes David O. Stewart, a constitutional lawyer and author of American Emperor: Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson’s America. “Nixon pronounced himself the choice of the ‘silent majority’ that supposedly supported the Vietnam War and disdained the era’s counterculture. Expressing sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street movement, Obama has tried to identify himself as battling, on behalf of the nation, against the richest elites.”
Those who claim there is a “New Obama” have invented a man who doesn’t exist. Intentionally or not, they have conflated the president with the campaigner. The former has not changed: as president, Obama’s ends and means remain the same; he is still governing from the Left. However, Obama-the-campaigner has adjusted his tactics, because his record in office will not carry him to victory in 2012.
If the notion of a “New Obama” turns out to b
e as fallacious as the notion of a “New Nixon” was more than forty years ago, that raises another question: What happened to the old Obama who was once hailed by liberals as their knight in shining armor and the country’s savior? As I shall argue in the following chapter, that Obama was a total invention, too.
CHAPTER 21
IN SEARCH OF THE REAL OBAMA
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.
—Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke
If Karl Rove was George W. Bush’s architect, David Axelrod is Barack Obama’s Homer.
A former newspaperman and Chicago-based political consultant, Axelrod is unmatched in his ability to help liberal candidates connect with voters through their personal stories. In the argot of Washington, Axelrod creates “narratives.” Candidate Obama presented Axelrod with a unique challenge. Not only was Obama a black man in a country that had never sent an African-American to the White House, he also had the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate. Axelrod feared that Obama would come across as a threatening figure to white, mainstream voters.
To sell Obama to these voters, Axelrod performed a brilliant piece of political legerdemain. He turned Obama’s negatives into positives. He devised a narrative for Obama in which the candidate was presented as a black man who would heal America, not divide it, a moderate nonpartisan who would rescue America, not threaten it. Axelrod sold Obama to a significant swath of the electorate as an American Messiah.
In Axelrod’s narrative, Obama was a conciliator who had tried to bring together his white mother and black father, who strove to integrate the racial and cultural conflicts in his own life, who promised to heal the blue-state-red-state breach in America, and who vowed to rescue the world from all its ills.
“I am absolutely certain that generations from now,” Obama declared during the 2008 campaign, sounding like King Canute holding back the tides of the sea, “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”
That Obama failed to deliver on such unrealistic promises did not come as a surprise to conservatives, who never bought into David Axelrod’s fantasy that Obama was here to rescue us from our sins. But many influential people in the country’s liberal establishment—people who run the media, publishing, Hollywood, the music industry, fashion, certain mainstream Protestant denominations, and academia—swallowed the rescue fantasy hook, line, and sinker. It was David Axelrod’s brilliant idea to market Obama to these “Influencers,” who controlled the cultural megaphone and were in a position to spread the Gospel of Obama.
It is worth pointing out that when these members of the liberal establishment hailed Obama as the country’s savior, they were indulging, as is their frequent habit, in a nasty form of reverse discrimination. In effect, they were saying that only a “super black”—a species of near-perfect humanity who was above reproach—was acceptable to white Americans, and that benighted African-Americans required a messiah to lead them out of the racial wasteland.
“The very idea that Obama should transform African Americans into the black Waltons is flawed,” wrote Time magazine contributor Ta-Nehisi Coates.
It rests on the notion that the black community, more than other communities, is characterized by a bunch of hapless layabouts who spend their days ticking off reparations demands and shaking their fist at the white man. The truth is that the dominant conversation in the black community today is not about racism or victimization but about self-improvement.... When Jesse Jackson claimed that Obama was “talking down to black people,” there was no real rush among blacks to defend Jackson. That’s because in terms of their outlook, their belief in hard work and family, African Americans aren’t any different from white Americans.
In any case, the media elevated Obama above the common herd and never properly vetted him. His record as a leftwing redistributionist was ignored. He got a free ride all the way to the White House. And a basic truth about Obama was largely underplayed and overlooked—namely, that Obama was the first Democratic presidential nominee to come from the left wing of his party since George McGovern ran against Richard Nixon in 1972.
In the thirty-six years since McGovern’s doomed candidacy, the Democratic Party had fallen under the control of so-called centrist New Democrats like Bill Clinton, who had declared, “The era of big government is over.” Obama was a throwback to New Deal big-government activism and federal intrusion into all aspects of American life. He represented a movement; he was the leader of a Leftwing Restoration.
If proof of this were needed, it came in January 2008 when Edward M. Kennedy endorsed Obama for president of the United States. As I wrote in my biography of Senator Kennedy, Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died:Ted Kennedy saw himself as the guardian of liberal orthodoxy, the tribune of leftist interest groups—trade unions, feminists, environmentalists, teachers’ unions, black activists—that defined the base of the Democratic Party. Ted believed that, after four decades of cautious-to-conservative administrations under both Republican and Democratic presidents—Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II—the political pendulum was finally swinging back in his direction, from Right to Left, and that Barack Obama represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore activist government as the country’s dominant public philosophy.
As his last act before he died of brain cancer, Ted Kennedy—the Liberal Lion of the Senate who spent forty years pushing universal healthcare—passed the torch to Barack Obama. It is no exaggeration to say that practically every major measure proposed during Obama’s four years in the White House flowed from that transaction, including ObamaCare, the preferential treatment of unions, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the veto of the Keystone XL Pipeline, to name just the most familiar. With Obama, America was in the hands of the most left-leaning president in its history.
All of which goes a long way toward explaining Barack Obama’s mishandling of the economy.
Obama likes to remind his critics that he inherited the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression from George W. Bush. True enough. But what he conveniently fails to mention is that his policies only made matters worse and prolonged America’s suffering. Many reasons have been given for this failure, including the fact that Obama picked the wrong economic team. By choosing Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers as director of the National Economic Council, Austan Goolsbee as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Melody Barnes as his chief domestic policy adviser, Obama stacked the deck with liberal neo-Keynesians who favored government activism over the private sector.
But there was a more basic reason for Obama’s failure. He and his economic advisers ignored the lessons of history and were doomed to repeat the mistakes made by Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers in the 1930s.
As syndicated columnist Amity Shlaes points out in The Forgotten Man, her brilliant account of the Great Depression, liberals have embraced a flawed myth about Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. They believe that “the economy of 1930 or 1931 could not revive without extensive intervention by Washington.... The same history teaches that the New Deal was the period in which Americans learned that government spending was important to recoveries; and that the consumer alone can solve the problem of ‘excess capacity’ on the producer’s side.”
Shlaes throws cold water on this liberal interpretation of the Great Depression. “The problem [with Roosevelt and his New Dealers],” she writes,was their naiveté about the economic value of Soviet-style or European-style collectivism—and the fact that they forced such collectivism upon their own country.... The New Yorker magazine’s cartoons of the plump, terrified Wall Streeter were accurate; business was terrified
of the president. But the cartoons did not depict the consequences of that intimidation: that business decided to wait Roosevelt out, hold on to their cash, and invest in future years. Roosevelt retaliated by introducing a tax—the undistributed profits tax—to press the money out of them. Such forays prevented recovery and took the country into the depression within the Depression of 1937 and 1938.
Tax increases ... intimidation of businessmen ... massive new burdens on the economy—all of that happened eighty years ago. But there are eerie similarities between the New Deal, which failed to dig America out of the Great Depression, and the Obama administration’s self-defeating efforts to stimulate the economy and end the Great Recession. Indeed, Obama’s $800 billion neo-Keynesian stimulus package actually impeded economic recovery. According to John B. Taylor, a Stanford University economist who carried out an in-depth study of the stimulus, the government’s spending did not result in growth and jobs.
“Individuals and families largely saved the transfers and tax rebates,” Taylor wrote. “The federal government increased purchases, but by only an immaterial amount. State and local governments used the stimulus grants to reduce their net borrowing... rather than to increase expenditures, and they shifted expenditures away from purchases toward transfers. Some argue that the economy would have been worse off without these stimulus packages, but the results do not support that view.”